Rubycon
Madame President
- Aug 10, 2005
- 17,768
- 485
- 126
The sheetmetal of a car can act as a rudimentary faraday cage - sort of. Convertibles, GRP (Corvette), etc. are riskier.
One must remember that lightning is a spark - often with potentials of millions of volts and hundreds of thousands of amperes! A solid, direct hit will do catastrophic damage to anything that offers the slightest resistance.
At these potentials, garage floors are unsafe due to the reinforcement wires / bars in them. Standing quite far from a tree that gets skinned to the ground can result in a side effect where the victim survives but often appears to have been struck directly. Witnesses often speak of seeing coronas or streams of sparks coming from the hands and feet of the victim. The victim may also have burn marks on their skin in various places that resemble a forky pattern that discharges assume when traversing through the air.
While a car is considered a safe place to be in an electrical storm - much safer than being outside - the risk of injury due to the common atypical physiological effects of intense impulsive rush discharge are very real in the event a direct cloud to ground strike's path involves the car. Most people will definitely urinate themselves to say the least.
RE: Outer space - in the typical atmosphere of 10^-18 Torr, the dielectric strength (breakdown) of the "atmosphere" is so great that you would have other emissive worries from such a discharge it would not be funny.
One must remember that lightning is a spark - often with potentials of millions of volts and hundreds of thousands of amperes! A solid, direct hit will do catastrophic damage to anything that offers the slightest resistance.
At these potentials, garage floors are unsafe due to the reinforcement wires / bars in them. Standing quite far from a tree that gets skinned to the ground can result in a side effect where the victim survives but often appears to have been struck directly. Witnesses often speak of seeing coronas or streams of sparks coming from the hands and feet of the victim. The victim may also have burn marks on their skin in various places that resemble a forky pattern that discharges assume when traversing through the air.
While a car is considered a safe place to be in an electrical storm - much safer than being outside - the risk of injury due to the common atypical physiological effects of intense impulsive rush discharge are very real in the event a direct cloud to ground strike's path involves the car. Most people will definitely urinate themselves to say the least.
RE: Outer space - in the typical atmosphere of 10^-18 Torr, the dielectric strength (breakdown) of the "atmosphere" is so great that you would have other emissive worries from such a discharge it would not be funny.
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