As I was watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi at the scene where Leia uses the force to pull herself out of space and into a ship, I thought to myself, “Could she have actually survived that?” I decided to find out.
When Leia gets flown into space and seems dead, just at the most suspenseful moment she uses the force to pull herself to safety of the resistance ship. First off, space has no pressure, and is also very cold (unless you’re near a star, in which the scene wasn’t). You don’t go unconscious immediately, but rather takes about 15 seconds. Your body uses up the last remaining bits of oxygen from your bloodstream to try to sustain your brain functions. If you held your breath, the lack of atmospheric pressure would result in the air in your lungs to expand, and your lungs would burst. Your skin tissue would swell as the water in it would vaporize. This could be reversed if you made it back into a pressurized environment, however. Your blood would continue to circulate your body, and would not be affected, and you won’t freeze immediately because your body can maintain its heat fairly well.
Now after looking at all this information, I think that Leia wouldn’t have been able to survive this scene in real life. She was in space for probably two minutes, so that makes me even more sure that this wouldn’t work in a real scenario. Mind you, this is fiction, and Leia could have also used some kind of invisible-force-oxygen-shield to protect herself. I just hope someone doesn’t get any crazy ideas from this movie and try it in real life.
What’s that mom? The news says that some guy tried to recreate the Leia space scene from Star Wars?
Oh no…
Leave a Reply