- I don't know if you remember or not,
but we made a video together called
Four Worst Ways to Die.
In the comment section you left
a bunch of ideas for other worst ways to die
so we stole some of them.
Actually that's not true.
We took your ideas and paired it
with our research, and came up with
Five More Worst Ways to Die.
So prepare yourself.
(slow, ominous music)
Starvation would be a pretty
horrible way to die.
One of the biggest reasons is
because it would take so long.
Humans have been known to last
as long as 70 days without food
as long as they were properly hydrated.
It's gonna be a really long 70 days, though.
Within about the first three or so days,
your body's going to eat up most of its fat reserves,
then for food it's going to turn to protein.
Which doesn't sound so bad
until you realize that the protein it's consuming
is your very muscles and organs.
Your whole body's metabolic demands
would shut down tremendously,
especially with your brain,
which would decrease it's demand
for glucose by three quarters.
Sounds like a lot, and it is.
Which means you won't be
doing any math problems toward
the end of your starvation death.
In the end, your immune system
will likely go on the fritz, and you'll die
of one of two wasting diseases:
Marasmus or Kwashiorkor.
- I'm gone enjoy this all the more.
Awwwwh!
(screams)
- A lot of you said that burning to death
would be a pretty bad way to go,
and you're right.
Burning to death would melt your flesh
and your organs, sear and cauterize
your blood vessels, and plunge you into
unimaginable pain.
Luckily, most people who die from
exposure to fire die from smoke inhalation,
which is pretty bad in and of itself.
Not only are you inhaling carbon monoxide,
which replaces the oxygen in your bloodstream
and suffocates you, it can also seep in
through your skin and poison you.
Plus, breathing in all those super-heated gases
can sear your lungs shut, which, in and of itself
would be a pretty horrible way to die.
- Another popular suggestion was beheading.
And not just beheading,
beheading with a dull knife.
You sickos.
The thing is, if your cut someone's head off
with a dull knife, they would die of blood loss
long before they died from, well, decapitation.
That's because that knife would cut into
your closed circulatory system,
allowing the blood pressure to drop massively,
meaning that blood couldn't pump any longer
and profuse your brain.
You would lose consciousness
and eventually die from that,
long before your head came off your body.
But, what about a guillotine?
That actually goes in a different direction.
The guillotine, which was invented
to more humanely execute people,
is so good at chopping off heads
that recent research has found, in rodents,
thankfully, that a decapitated head
taken off by a guillotine still shows signs
of consciousness between four and 29 seconds
after it's chopped off.
And this is backed up by history.
Anne Boleyn and King Charles the first
were both reported to have tried to speak
after their head was removed.
Neither of those two were killed by guillotine,
of course, but a really sharp sword
would do the same trick.
This next one was suggested by
Dark Forest Inc. in our comments
on our last video, and it's called
the bamboo torture.
We couldn't find out for certain
that it happened, but if it did,
it's a pretty awful way to go.
Supposedly, back in World War II,
the Japanese treated some of their POW's
to this method of death by torture
where they would suspend the POW
over a patch of fast growing bamboo,
and sharpen the end of the bamboo
so that when it grew up it would
puncture the person's abdomen
and grow through their body
and out the other side, leaving the person
to linger before dying for several days.
In agony.
Again, we haven't verified specifically
that this did happen and isn't just an urban legend,
but it's a pretty bad way to go, either way.
Now we reach the inevitable
physics portion of the episode.
While no one's ever actually directly
measured or detected a black hole,
most physicists agree that it does exist
and that it represents matter
compressed into such an infinite density
that even light can't escape from it.
If you were somehow to approach a black hole,
say feet first, you would find that
the force of gravity pulled on your feet
and other parts of your body
that were further away, like your head, differently.
This would stretch you out in a process
that Stephen Hawking calls spaghettification.
Eventually, the differences in these pulls
would stretch you apart at your weakest point,
say probably above your hips,
and the process would begin again.
You, newly torn in half, would be
spaghettified again, and then again,
and again, and again, until you were
sucked into the black hole as a bunch
of discombobulated atoms.
That was it.
Nine horrible ways to die.
Let's do one more.
What should be our tenth?
Let us know in the comment section below.
And for more on this, go to
How Stuff Works and check out the article
Ten Worst Ways to Die.