What If You Got Hotter and Couldn't Stop?

It's a normal afternoon on the beach in Santa Monica, and your body is 98.6 °F. Then something goes wrong and you start heating up, and it never stops. A fever, then hotter than anyone has ever survived. The towel at your feet bursts into flames, your hands start to glow red, then white, the sea boils where it touches you, and you end up hotter than the surface of the Sun. After that, a fireball on the beach, the heat crossing the Pacific, Earth melting and evaporating around you, and a flare brighter than a whole galaxy. The readout in the corner is your temperature the whole way. The line under it says what you're now hotter than. The numbers are real: • The highest fever anyone has survived was 115.7 °F (Willie Jones, 1980). • Paper ignites near 451 °F and wood near 572 °F; iron starts to glow red at 977 °F. • The Sun's surface is about 9,900 °F; lightning about 54,000 °F; the Sun's core about 27 million °F. • At a million degrees, a body your size would give off as much energy as a large nuclear bomb every second. • A supernova can outshine its entire galaxy. • The hottest temperature humans have made is about 9.9 trillion °F (5.5 trillion °C), in a quark-gluon plasma at CERN. • The Planck temperature, about 2.55 × 10³² °F, is the hottest temperature physics can describe. Some of it is not real. Nothing can heat up like this on its own: the energy has to come from somewhere. How fast the heat spreads and what happens to the planet are a guess, and the last moment is made up. Chapters 0:00 Santa Monica, 98.6 °F 1:03 Everything catches fire 2:02 The sea boils 2:56 A fireball on the beach 3:50 Honolulu 4:39 From space 5:28 Earth evaporates 6:17 Hotter than a supernova 7:17 Is any of this real? You started at 98.6 °F. #whatif #science #space #physics