this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Hmm, is it because vacuum acts essentially like an insulator? I'm thinking this because, from what I remember about high-school thermodynamics, heat needs to "jump" from matter to matter, and there's not a relevant quantity of matter in a vacuum to act as a heat absorber, like air does over here, right?:-?
I'm genuinely asking, I'm sure I have brain rot from watching too many sci-fi movies...
It's exactly what the other commenter said, to transfer heat efficiently you need something else to transfer it to. In a vacuum, you only lose energy by radiation. Therefore on a spaceship you're actually in greater danger of overheating than freezing to death.
Another counterintuitive thing that stems from this is that space vacuum isn't even, strictly speaking, cold. The few and far between particles of space dust and gas can have very high energy flying by, at least until they hit something. It's only cold when you average out over all the empty space.
Huh, that's really interesting! Yeah, given all of these factors, I would imagine that absolute vacuum would be... well, nothing in terms of cold or hot:-? Wow, that's a huge paradigm shift, I shoud dare to be stupid online more often, I'm learning more from this thread than I would have expected!
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