• Question: why cant you breath in space?

    Asked by 989urak29 to Sajid, Katherine, Jayne, Duncan, anuantony on 3 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Jayne Ede

      Jayne Ede answered on 3 Nov 2017:

      Space is completely empty. If you had a box on earth with nothing in it, it would still have gases in it – nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide (and a few others) which make up our atmosphere, and clearly we need oxygen to breathe. In space, even the gases don’t exist! We call this a vacuum.

    • Photo: Duncan McNicholl

      Duncan McNicholl answered on 4 Nov 2017:

      So you know how you can pour water, and it always goes downwards, closer to the earth? You can also pour air, and it does the same thing. That means that the higher up you go, the less air there is, because it’s all been poured downwards, towards the earth. Eventually, if you get high enough up, there’s no air at all, and that’s when we say we’re in space. Since space is the place with no air, there’s nothing for you to breathe: if there was air, you wouldn’t be in space.

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