What If You Got Colder 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 cooling down, and it never stops. Hypothermia, then colder than anyone has ever survived. The sweat on your skin turns to ice, frost spreads across the sand around you, and the sea freezes where it touches you. After that, dry-ice snow over Santa Monica, liquid air raining on a frozen Pacific, a white Earth, a black sky at noon, and you, colder than space itself. The readout in the corner is your temperature the whole way. The line under it says what you're now colder than. The numbers are real: • The lowest body temperature anyone has survived is 56.7 °F (13.7 °C, Anna Bågenholm, Norway, 1999). • The coldest temperature ever measured on Earth is −128.6 °F (Vostok Station, Antarctica, 1983). • Dry ice is −109.3 °F. At night near the poles of Mars it gets down to about −225 °F. • Oxygen turns to liquid at −297 °F and nitrogen at −320 °F; Pluto averages about −387 °F. • Hydrogen turns to liquid at −423 °F and helium at −452 °F. • Empty space is 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, warmed by the leftover heat of the Big Bang. The Boomerang Nebula, about 1 degree above it, is the coldest place known in nature. • The coldest anything has ever been made is 38 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero (Bremen, Germany, 2021). • Absolute zero, −459.67 °F, can never be reached. Some of it is not real. Nothing can cool down like this on its own: the heat has to go somewhere. How fast the cold spreads and what happens to the planet are a guess, and the very last moment is made up. Chapters 0:00 Santa Monica, 98.6 °F 1:03 Frost spreads across the beach 1:57 The sea freezes 2:51 Dry ice falls on Santa Monica 3:40 Honolulu: it rains liquid air 4:29 From space: Earth turns white 5:13 A black sky at noon 6:02 Colder than anything ever made 6:47 Is any of this real? You started at 98.6 °F. #whatif #science #absolutezero #space