Remember a vacuum does not have suction it’s the air that presses things under vacuum together. One atm is actually quite a lot but we can withstand that as it’s pressing at us from all sides including inside.
The atmosphere is big and heavy. Small pressure changes on order 1% means hurricane. 50% of an atmosphere pushing on something is a lot.
Note, this is all Earth’s atmosphere.
Titan’s atmosphere is energy-denser than ours at 1.5 atm. Titan is Saturn’s largest moon.
Venus has 96 atm. Absolutely crushing and hard to visit at all.
Mars varies from like 0.3-0.6% seasonally as significant portions of its CO2 atmosphere deposit onto the poles as dry ice glaciers in a runaway greenhouse style. CO2 snows out, temps drop, more snows. Keeps going till the sun comes back. Sunlight sublimates the ice back into the atmosphere in a similar runaway fashion. Like a deep breath in and out with the seasons. The weight of all that ice falling and leaving keeps that red lump beating every year. Don’t believe those who say Mars is dead. We don’t know yet. Don’t count out anything with a breath and a beat. What is life on a planetary scale, anyhow?
The gas giants have atmospheric pressures so high it kind of stops making sense to use these as comparisons, and instead we have to look to geology for analogues as deep within the earth we also approach these energy densities.
This is very interesting. I like unit conversions.
What I did was just take 21-14 psi, and then converted that to bar or atm. I got a number close to ½.
I was like, half an atm? Can’t be that bad? I can handle 1 full mf atm literally all mf day mf.
But I guess that’s different somehow? I just don’t understand how yet. If anyone would care to go into it with me… 🙏
Remember a vacuum does not have suction it’s the air that presses things under vacuum together. One atm is actually quite a lot but we can withstand that as it’s pressing at us from all sides including inside.
See this example of how strong 1 atm can be
The atmosphere is big and heavy. Small pressure changes on order 1% means hurricane. 50% of an atmosphere pushing on something is a lot.
Note, this is all Earth’s atmosphere.
Titan’s atmosphere is energy-denser than ours at 1.5 atm. Titan is Saturn’s largest moon.
Venus has 96 atm. Absolutely crushing and hard to visit at all.
Mars varies from like 0.3-0.6% seasonally as significant portions of its CO2 atmosphere deposit onto the poles as dry ice glaciers in a runaway greenhouse style. CO2 snows out, temps drop, more snows. Keeps going till the sun comes back. Sunlight sublimates the ice back into the atmosphere in a similar runaway fashion. Like a deep breath in and out with the seasons. The weight of all that ice falling and leaving keeps that red lump beating every year. Don’t believe those who say Mars is dead. We don’t know yet. Don’t count out anything with a breath and a beat. What is life on a planetary scale, anyhow?
The gas giants have atmospheric pressures so high it kind of stops making sense to use these as comparisons, and instead we have to look to geology for analogues as deep within the earth we also approach these energy densities.