Now what?
I mean, the Earth is gone, and
not only are you stuck
on the space station above it,
there's not a single soul left with you.
You are all by yourself.
In space.
And you have nowhere to go.
The International Space Station,
the one and only research facility
orbiting the Earth every half hour.
And now, it's your forever home.
Unless you prefer living on Mars,
but more on that later.
The ISS is equipped with laboratories,
living areas, a gym,
an unimaginably expensive toilet,
and it has a supply of food.
Not the worst place to be stranded, but
you might change your mind about that.
Don't start to panic.
Just take a deep breath.
It's 7 a.m., and you wake up after your eight-hour sleep.
You make yourself a protein-filled breakfast
and get to work.
This space station isn't going to repair itself.
You carry on conducting repairs, and then
you might exercise for a couple of hours.
Everything seems normal
until you remember that
what you saw yesterday wasn't a dream.
You try to open a line of communication
with Earth to see if anyone's still down there.
No luck.
You're alone.
And you can't go back to what's left of Earth.
You can't talk to anyone, nothing.
And you need to start dealing with it.
The first thing you'd want to do is
see how much food is left.
A team of six people could last on the ISS
for about three months.
Since you were left all by yourself,
you could easily do fine for 18 months or more.
But you need to plan your rations.
Two meals a day is a good start.
And you could grow fresh veggies
right on the space station
to keep you going longer.
You'd keep recycling and reusing the water.
This water was always cleaner than the water on Earth anyway.
For the bathroom, you'd keep using a suction tube to pee into.
And this waste container is for number 2.
It's equipped with a small suction pump so that
everything goes in the right direction.
No autoflush, and no seat heater.
So much for the $19 million toilet.
While you're floating around,
with the sweat pooling around your body
instead of evaporating, think of this.
You'd never take a shower again.
I mean, a good, running-water shower.
Those would be gone together with the Earth.
You'd have to get by squirting a bit of water on your skin and
shampooing with no-rinse shampoo.
Whether your planet is destroyed or not,
your body is built for living on the ground, and
not in the microgravity environment.
On the ISS, your bones would keep losing calcium,
and your muscles would keep losing mass.
This is because, in the weightlessness,
your body doesn't need bones or muscles much.
If you want to keep those,
you'd need to hit the gym.
Astronauts work out as much as 4 hours
in every 16-hour period.
There's not much of a gym on the ISS, but
at least you can use the treadmill
and a sort of mechanical bicycle.
And after a long day of working,
exercising, peeing in a tube,
eating dehydrated food, and trying to stay sane,
you'd head back to your sleeping pod
and just try to sleep a little.
You could live your day-to-day space life
all by yourself for a year or two.
Your body would be getting weaker, and
the shock and grief of losing everyone you knew
would be overwhelming you.
The thought of never being able to go back to Earth
could cause anxiety, panic attacks and depression.
The total isolation would impact
your ability to survive on the ISS.
And without proper maintenance,
the space station would plunge uncontrollably
down to what's left of Earth,
and splash into the ocean.
But what if, instead of giving up and
slowly waiting for your end on this enormous craft,
you could make good use of it?
I'm talking about moving the entire station
away from Earth's leftovers.
The ISS was built for the lower Earth orbit.
But if you had enough fuel in the tank,
could you try to use it as a spaceship
and accelerate it all the way to Mars?
What have you got to lose anyway?
You know, I'd really like to give you some emotional support.
You are the last person in all of humanity, and
you're watching WHAT IF.
That's just... wow.
But the truth is,
you wouldn't make it to Mars.
The ISS is designed for lower Earth orbit.
It just wouldn't work for the red planet,
or for our Moon for that matter.
Plus, you wouldn't survive very long in the harsh space radiation.
And the ISS itself is getting too old to handle space travel.
It just wouldn't work.
Unless you happened to get stranded
on a next-generation space station
that required fewer repairs and spacewalks,
that would be fully self-sustaining and free-flying.
Then you'd call it an early retirement and
keep living on it till your life comes to an end.
Or, you could get out there
and explore space beyond the Solar System.
You might find an exoplanet you could live on.
Maybe even encounter alien life.
But that's a story for another WHAT IF.