Imagine you’ve just moved into your brand new apartment.
Yeah, it’s pretty nice - and the rents super cheap.
The lighting is pretty dim though - and the whole thing is kind of damp.
The walls are kind of leaking a little bit - and there’s this strange, perplexing smell
that you just can’t quite put a name to.
Oh - yeah, of course.
It’s fish.
Well - that would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?
But as we know questioneers - comfort is a luxury, existence is futile - so let’s figure
out together the economic risks of investing in Orca property.
What’s going on guys - and welcome back to the most inquisitive channel on YouTube,
Life’s Biggest Questions.
As per usual, I’ll be your disembodied floating voice Jack Finch - as we curiously ask the
question, Can You Live Inside A Whale?
Roll the clip.
Now, let’s put our serious hat on folks.
Of course you couldn’t downgrade to a whale’s stomach and live frugally while travelling
across the ocean at high speeds - but hold on, because there may be something more to
it.
You’d think that getting swallowed by a whale would be a death sentence, surely - getting
swallowed by anything would be Goodnight Vienna, that’s all she wrote - so long and thanks
for all the fish, right?
But - surprisingly, our civilization has been rife with sea shanties about hardy fisherman
and peg-legged sailors getting swallowed by Moby Dick and living to tell the tale.
But - really?
Do we really believe that?
Well - I guess we better find out.
Before we do that though folks - here at Life’s Biggest Questions we’re open to all things
hypothetical, whether it’s the ancient investigation of lost civilizations - or how long you could
go without taking a shower - so if you’ve got a burning idea for a question, we want
to know - and we love nothing more than scrolling through your comments and chuckling to ourselves
at how bizarre the human mind is.
Also - make sure you stick around all the way to the end, where I’ll be reading out
some of your most creative comments from the past few days.
On with the show.
Alright - so the first question would be - which of these great beasts could actually swallow
a human being whole?
Whales are a majestic and varied species - and you might instantly make the connection as
- bigger whale, equals bigger mouth, bigger stomach - and a greater likelihood that a
human could unassumingly slip through their jaws.
But, you’d be very, very wrong.
Your first thought might be the blue whale - the largest whale on the planet, measuring
in at nearly 100 feet and weighing a colossal 180 tonnes.
Surely those guys could swallow a human whole, right?
Nope.
You see - blue whales are baleen - a classification of whales that covers over fifteen variations
of this massive mammal, and they all have one thing in common.
Their namesake physical feature - baleen plates.
Essentially, a filter-feeding system that encompasses their mouth, allowing them to
travel through the vast ocean with their jaws wide, constantly snacking on fish and plankton
along the way.
This means that a baleen whale has an incredibly thin and tiny oesophagus, and the blue whales
throat measures about only 10 inches across.
It’s pretty safe to say that you’re not cramming any humans down there any time soon.
Maybe a small child - or a large cat, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
That means that the only other option leaves the grouping of toothed whales - which encompasses
the vast majority of the species, including killer whales and sperm whales - which is
the largest of the subspecies.
These guys have got massive jaws - and they don’t need baleen plates.
They’ve been known to swallow large seals with ease - and have even been witnessed swallowing
giant squids whole.
So in that case - we’ve got our suspect.
The Sperm Whale COULD definitely swallow a human being.
Whether that human would survive though, is a completely different story.
Theoretically, once you’re in, you’re in - and a person could survive in a whale’s
stomach as long as there was air and they hadn’t yet been corroded by its stomachs
digestive enzymes.
And therein lies the rub - because we don’t really know whether or not there’s any oxygen
inside a whale.
Which if there isn’t, you’d quickly suffocate and die - unless you had some scuba-diving
gear, in which case - it would just take longer for you to suffocate and die.
The most likely case is that a whales stomach is made up of methane.
Ever heard those stories about dead beached whales exploding?
Yeah, not a pretty sight.
No oxygen in a whale equals no air to breathe and a pretty slow and painful way to stop
living.
But - you may ask, what about all of those stories about people surviving inside a whale?
Uh - well, in that case, some things are better left at sea.
One of the most famous accounts is that of James Bartley, the central figure in a late-nineteenth
century sea yarn - that details the events of him being swallowed whole by a sperm whale,
and was then found still living days later after his crew caught the whale and began
skinning it.
According to the tale, he’d survived over 36 hours inside the whale’s stomach, and
as a result, he was blinded and his skin bleached white by its gastric juices.
His gravestone reads “James Bartley - A Modern Day Jonah.”
Yet again though, this story has been widely discredited as a lofty tale from the sea - even
being publically discredited by the captain of the ship's wife.
Then there’s the story of Luigi Marquez - allegedly a Spanish fisherman that was swallowed
whole by a whale, chilled in its belly for three days before proudly being flushed out
and safely returning to work like nothing had happened.
The article, first banded around by a clickbait site selling so-called natural health remedies,
featured a believable image of a shirtless bald-man that claimed it to be Luigi himself
- but err - turned out, that guys name was Mike, who had developed a way to turn his
swim-trunks into a flotation device and in actual fact, had never been swallowed whole
by a whale.
Here’s the thing - biology tells us that we can’t survive in a whale's stomach.
The most obvious scenario is that we’d quickly suffocate or be corroded by it’s stomach
juices.
But - people want to believe that it’s possible - people want to advocate the mysterious majesty
of the seven seas.
We know next to nothing about our own oceans - and who knows what bizarre and incredible
creatures are lurking down there in the deep depths.
Maybe, just maybe - there’s a gigantic whale down there with a habitable stomach - and
they’re just waiting for us to move in.
Well - there we have it folks, the short and long answer to Can You Live Inside A Whale?
No.
Before we depart though, let’s take a look at some of the wittiest things you’ve had
to say over the past few days.
Mrbendy The hedgehog says - What if ants were size of cars.
Well, my good buddy - here’s one better for you.
What if ants ARE size of cars - and we’re just really, really big?
Kill zone4987 says - Get these boys to 1 million.
Well buddy, boys and girls - but we love the sentiment.
Well, you heard kill zone 4987 - if you were a fan of this video, hit that thumbs up button
and subscribe bell and maybe, just maybe - we’ll get that a milly.
Cheers for sticking around all the way to the end - as always, I’ve been your host
Jack Finch - you’ve been watching Life’s Biggest Questions - and until next time, you
take it easy.