Ahh, the ocean.
The sun, the sand, and of course, the surf.
There really is nothing more relaxing than floating in the ocean.
It’s so relaxing, in fact, that it’s tempting to want to stay floating there forever.
But is that possible?
What would happen to your body if you lived in the ocean?
First of all, it’s unlikely you’d survive even a few hours before hypothermia kicked
in.
Very few parts of the ocean maintain surface temperatures in excess of eighty degrees fahrenheit
- anything less and you’re at risk for hypothermia.
Hypothermia happens when your core body temperature drops below ninety-five degrees fahrenheit,
and cold water accelerates heat loss by up to twenty-five percent.
Within a few minutes you’d begin to experience symptoms like shivering, numbness in your
limbs and pain from the cold.
You’ll know that you're really in trouble, though, when the shivering stops.
This means that you’re in the next, more severe stage of hypothermia.
You’d begin to feel confused, your muscles would become rigid, and you’d begin to slip
into unconsciousness.
But, before you pass out you might actually experience a sudden rush of warmth as the
muscles constricting your blood vessels give out and the last warm blood in your body rushes
from your core to your extremities.
Assuming you could find a pocket of tropical paradise warm enough to ward off hypothermia,
you’d have plenty of other issues to worry about.
Your immediate problem would be sun and heat exposure.
In extremely hot environments, heatstroke can set in within hours, and the sun reflecting
off of the water all around you can make things even more unbearable.
The first signs of heat stroke are excessive thirst, sweating, nausea and muscle cramps.
Once you actually stop sweating and stop feeling thirsty, you’ll know you’re in real trouble.
Unless you can stay hydrated, you’re doomed - and don’t even think about drinking the
salty ocean water!
We’ll tell you all the grisly reasons why you don’t want to do that in a minute.
But first, let’s talk about another danger of living in the ocean.
If you aren’t lucky enough to have a life jacket or be standing in chin-dip water, exhaustion
will get you long before the elements become a problem.
Experts all agree that treading water is the best way to conserve energy and stay afloat,
but even the strongest swimmers can only sustain continuous treading water for a matter of
hours.
Even if you can stand on the bottom, a lack of sleep, not to mention the stress of your
situation, can lead to delirium, panic and even death.
Even if you’re able to float or stand, continuous submersion in water would cause your muscles
to break down within a few days and Rhabdomyolysis, called Rhabdo for short, would set it.
Rhabdo is usually caused by excessive exercise, but long periods of immobility can also cause
it.
After a few days of floating, your muscles would become weak and painfully sore, and
you’d have trouble walking if you were to make it to dry land.
As your muscles break down they release proteins and electrolytes into your bloodstream, leading
to kidney failure and, if left untreated, death.
With all of these brutal effects of living in the ocean, it’s no wonder that the Chinese
are rumoured to have used water-immersion as a form of torture!
Both heat and hypothermia could have contributed to the nineteen ninety-eight deaths of Tom
and Eileen Lonergan - two scuba divers who were left behind by their diving party off
the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
Officials believed they survived their first night stranded in the open ocean before succumbing
to exhaustion or the elements.
Rescuers found a message from them scrawled on an underwater diving slate a hundred miles
from where they were last known to be.
On top of exposure to the elements, the Lonergans also might have had to contend with these
other horrific results of long-term submersion in the ocean.
Anyone who’s stayed in the bath for a little too long is familiar with the icky, pruny
feeling of wrinkly skin.
Believe it or not, this wrinkling is our skin’s attempt to adapt to life underwater.
Constricting blood vessels in our skin create a pattern of wrinkles that actually improves
our ability to grip wet objects underwater.
After a few days, though, continuous submersion in water will start to break down your skin.
Your skin would swell and soften and open sores would begin to form all over your body.
Even if the water you were in was perfectly sterile - which the ocean most definitely
is NOT - the pores on your own skin are enough to cause infection.
As your sores are exposed to debris and pathogens in the water, they would continue to ooze
and fester, and begin to attract predators.
Sharks are a very real danger to your festering body in the ocean.
In nineteen forty-five, more than nine-hundred American sailors found themselves adrift in
the ocean after their ship was hit by a Japanese torpedo and sank.
Drawn by the sound of the explosion, the thrashing of bodies and the blood in the water, the
survivors were soon set upon a school of aggressive oceanic whitetip sharks.
After four days of battling exposure, hunger and thirst while being preyed upon by sharks,
the remaining three-hundred survivors were rescued.
Of the nearly six-hundred who died, at least one-hundred and fifty of them were thought
to be victims of shark attacks.
Sharks aside, there’s plenty of other, smaller creatures to worry about.
From crabs to turtles, to even flesh-eating sea lice, there are plenty of sea creatures
that would consider your decomposing body to be a tasty treat.
The good news is, you probably wouldn’t live long enough to have to worry about most
of these hazards.
In all likelihood, you wouldn’t survive more than three to five days in the ocean
before dehydration got the better you.
While you can survive weeks without food, you’ll only last a few days at most without
water.
Your body loses water in many ways - by sweating, through your urine and feces, even through
breathing.
And don’t forget through your tears - you’ll definitely be shedding a few of those by this
point.
As your body temperature rises and your organs begin to shut down, you’ll experience a
dry mouth, hallucinations and a lack of urine.
The final stage of dehydration is shock - your skin would turn blue-grey in colour and feel
cold to the touch due to a severe drop in blood pressure, before your organs finally
shut down and you die.
You may be thinking - “What’s the problem?
I’m surrounded by water!”
Salty ocean water may help us stay afloat, but it does nothing for our thirst.
In fact, it can be deadly.
While your body does need some salt to function - hello, electrolytes - sea water is way too
salty, and actually speeds up dehydration.
To rid your body of the excess salt, your kidneys will produce more urine than you drank,
quickly depleting your body of what little water it has and hastening your death by dehydration.
However, just knowing that salt water is deadly might not be enough to save you.
Many a person stranded at sea had become delirious with thirst and couldn’t stop themselves
from drinking the salty water, causing their tongue to swell and their mouth foam as they
succumbed to salt poisoning.
In the age of rising sea levels due to global warming, our bodies’ ability - or lack thereof
- to live in the ocean is not very comforting.
So what would it take for you to be able to survive in the ocean?
What evolutions would humans need to undergo to adapt to aquatic life?
And, how close are we to making that a reality?
If future humans need to learn to adapt to aquatic life, they can take inspiration from
aquatic tribes living around the world today.
Take, for example, the Bajau peoples of Indonesia.
Nicknamed “sea gypsies” because of their nomadic, seafaring lifestyle, the Bajau are
renowned for their impressive freediving skills which allow them to catch fish in waters up
to two-hundred feet deep.
Their underwater prowess is possible due to their ability to hold their breath for long
periods of time - up to thirteen minutes for some of the best divers.
Scientists have recently discovered that the Bajau people have actually evolved to have
larger than average spleens, which lets them use oxygen more efficiently and stay underwater
for longer periods.
For most of us with normal sized spleens, scuba diving is the closest we can get to
being Aquaman or -Woman.
In July twenty-sixteen, Turkish scuba diver Cem Karabay set the world record for the longest
time spent underwater in open water when he spent almost six days underwater in the ocean
near Cyprus.
He lived on a specially-built underwater platform, and passed the time underwater by playing
chess and football with his support team, or watching TV on his underwater screen.
Water pressure is another huge problem for our fragile human bodies.
Even the minimal pressures at surface levels would cause circulation and breathing problems
after prolonged submersion in water.
Water pressure can cause our eardrums to burst, and at only thirty meters deep, the pressure
will compress your lungs to half their normal volume.
Even with proper training and equipment, we are still vulnerable to rapid changes in water
pressure.
One of the most well-known consequences of exposure to high pressure is decompression
sickness, or “the bends” - every scuba diver’s nemesis.
When you scuba dive with compressed air, your tank is filled with a mixture of oxygen and
nitrogen.
Your body uses up the oxygen, but the nitrogen remains in your bloodstream.
If a diver returns to shallower, lower pressure water too quickly, the nitrogen can’t clear
from their bloodstream and instead forms bubbles inside their veins.
Think of a can of soda when you open it - as you decrease pressure inside the can, gasses
are released as bubbles.
This is exactly what happens to the nitrogen in your bloodstream during decompression sickness,
leading to symptoms like dizziness, headache, numbness or weakness in arms or legs, and
joint pain.
Of course the most important part of your scuba gear is your oxygen tank and breathing
apparatus.
This is because, unfortunately, humans can’t breath underwater.
While some exceptional humans have trained themselves for years to be able to hold their
breath for impressive lengths of time, even they are unable to truly breathe underwater.
In July twenty-eighteen, Russian freediver Alexey Molchanov beat his own record and completed
the deepest self-propelled dive in history when he swam to a depth of four-hundred and
twenty-six feet - all while holding his breath for more than two-and-a-half minutes.
Holding our breath for even a few minutes is simply out of reach for most of us.
But just because our bodies are not designed to breathe underwater doesn’t mean science
isn’t trying to solve that problem.
Humans may not be able to sprout gills, but scientists in Japan are working on an artificial
gill system that will allow humans to survive underwater for extended periods.
The Amphibio system was inspired by a type of diving spider that has a hydrophobic skin
that acts like gills by creating a bubble of air around the spider’s body.
The Amphibio system is made from a hydrophobic 3D printable material, and the system includes
a vest covered with air bladders that extracts oxygen from the water and feeds it into the
attached face mask.
It’s still in the concept stage, but early tests are definitely impressive!
Liquid breathing is another potential avenue that scientists are exploring for giving humans
the ability to live underwater.
The idea of humans getting oxygen directly from the water may seem far fetched, but it’s
actually already a proven medical treatment for severe pulmonary trauma and even premature
babies.
In these cases, the patient’s lungs are filled with a perfluorocarbon, an oxygen-enriched
fluid that their lungs are able to draw oxygen from.
This one may sound like something right out of a science fiction novel or a wellness fair,
but scientists in Denmark have recently developed a crystal-like substance that can aid humans
in breathing underwater.
The substance, which includes Cobalt crystal, can bind with and absorb oxygen from the air
or water, and that oxygen can be released by applying a little heat.
Who knows, someday soon divers may be trading in their air tanks for a mouthful of crystals!
There’s plenty to worry about when it comes to living in the water, and that includes
routine business like, well, doing our business.
When Tim Yarrow set the world record for the longest time spent underwater in two-thousand
and two, he had to find a way to eat and, yes, eliminate, in his aquatic environment.
Yarrow spent a week and a half submerged in a tank of water in a mall in South Africa,
and for those ten days he ate all of his meals through a tube.
His waste was taken care of by a catheter.
If the idea of a catheter makes you uncomfortable, don’t worry - if humans truly lived in the
ocean, we would just do as the fish do, and go on the go.
But, we would need to evolve to separate our respiratory system from our digestive system,
so that we could eat in the ocean without inhaling water.
Some scientists believe that humans are uniquely suited to adapt to an aquatic lifestyle because
we evolved from “aquatic apes”, although this theory has largely been dismissed by
the scientific community.
It would take at least a thousand years of evolution for human bodies to adapt to living
in the ocean, and if we did, the likely results would more likely resemble seals than mermaids.
Future aquatic humans might have extra body fat and body hair to help insulate them in
cold ocean waters, and they may have longer limbs and webbed hands and feet to make swimming
easier.
To adapt to life under water, humans would need to develop gills or some other method
of breathing underwater, and they may develop cat-like eyes to help them see better in the
darkness of the ocean.
That’s not exactly the Aqua-man physique we had in mind...
So, what are your thoughts on what would happen to your body if you lived in the ocean?
Do you think future humans will have to evolve for life in the ocean?
What do you think that would be like?
Be sure and let us know your thoughts in the comments!