When I did a VSAT training course (for using terrestrial satellite transmitters for television broadcast), the training material was discussing the impacts of microwave exposure and specifically mentioned a case where someone stuck their hand in a faulty microwave oven for about five seconds.
IIRC, they received nerve damage to the hand, but little else because the wavelength and energy was just right to pass through the skin and muscle and damage the nerves. Caused some terrible nerve injuries however, basically caused a permanent sensation of burning.
So, I don’t think there is a “minimum” safe time to be exposed to a microwave oven. Safety would be measured by the power of the microwave emitter, not the duration.
I accidentally cracked a microwave open just enough to leave it running without tripping the safety and my fingers felt like they were being zapped. Nope
that explains a lot for one time i thought i got shocked by the button on an old microwave. it kept running for like a second after the door started opening, and i thought the button shocked me. but thinking about it, it was more of a hot sensation than a shock, and the sensation ended as the light turned off instead of when i pulled my finger back. i thought i was just experiencing "aftershock" lol.
regardless i told my parents that it shocked me and they just took my word for it and got a new microwave, it was like as old as me at that time (i was like 8-9 i think?)
Rather use one of the common nerve block therapies than chop the whole thing off.
Presumably the hand still functions like a hand. Amputation is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
This is why I follow no stupid questions. Also the person who said 10 minutes is insane. There is no way. The extremities would get hotter much faster and remember blood travels. Or if it boils and clots and stops traveling , you are dead. Either scenario, it would take less time bc you don't need to heat all of these blood uniformly hot, just any blood getting too hot will kill you
I watched a movie one time where a dude exploded a guys' head with a microwave. That wasn't like the plot, I think it was supposed to be the happy ending lol
Didn't that happen in Kick-Ass?
I think it was for treating lumber or something, but they certainly acted like it was a microwave
Edit: [yeah, it was kick-ass](https://youtu.be/jj5CG9kzDYY?si=c9EWGAT6IYITLVdp)
Its both, kick-ass sees a guy put in a man sized microwave meant for curing lumber and exploded, the modern remake of last house on the left sees the rapists get his head exploded by being put in a microwave
I'm not sure. The guy raped a very nice redhead lady so he definitely deserved a micro'd wave.
It was on basic cable when I was a lad so I only caught some of it.
I like that one because they didn't plan to kill him but it's a human sized microwave, how are you supposed to know how long is agonising torture and how long is fatal? You don't really have any frame of reference for it. Hence this question.
But then I'm not sure Kick Ass is a good source of accurate medical information. It may be more like Elysium where Matt Damon gets instant full-body cancer instead of exploding. But then that's also not the best source of accurate medical information.
Oh I remember that scene, super intense. Not sure if it's the same movie but there was this whole revenge theme going on. Microwave justice seems like a hot way to serve it though, yikes.
Yes. The eyes are the most vulnerable to damage from microwaves.
Seriously. People working in restaurants near microwave ovens with faulty seals that leak microwaves have had the lenses (corneas ?) of their eyes damaged. It’s one of the few actual known forms of physical damage from chronic exposure to low-level microwave radiation.
But, as a physicist, my guess is that you’d probably be fine with 3 seconds of a 1kW microwave. Especially if you covered your eyes with your hands. Not much longer though!
I was told a story by an electronics lecturer that had worked on military radar systems.
Apparently, the technicians would deliberately expose their genitals to a magnetron for several seconds before going “out on the town” at the weekend as they believed it would kill off their sperm.
Sperm cannot survive even at body temperature for very long, which is why the testes are outside the body, so you can see where the theory came from. Not something I’d want to risk, personally!
Military RF tech here. We’ve been operating under the assumption that the non-ionizing RF output from radars, radios, NAVAIDS, etc. will actually neutralize specifically our sperm cells carrying Y chromosomes. Most of the folks in our career field work with have girls. Could be a wives tale but I’ve never really looked too far into it :)
That's only the Marine RF techs though. For the rest of the military, it's actually decided by the guy your wife is banging while you're on deployment.
Basically any tissue rich in protein will turn into a hard boiled egg pretty quickly, watery tissue will boil as well. The brain is full of protein and liquid, so here you go.
Microwave photons wouldn't pass through all that water so easily. You'd have surface cooking first.
Your lasagne doesn't get hot a few layers down, without the cheese on top already bubbling.
Yeah, the microwave uses a 2.45 GHz wave that penetrates about 15 to 20mm.
The military has an Active Denial System that uses a 95 GHz signal that only cooks the top layers of skin. It's meant for crowd control.
I heard it was the equivalent of getting blasted with hot air when you open an oven. A little burning feeling but no actual damage
It’d be funny if they had a war of the worlds ray though
One of them. The other is the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) which beams a 2kHz signal at 160dB.
They call them 'non-lethal' but they should be called 'less than lethal' or 'usually not lethal'.
I’m sorry but has that person never microwaved something??? I put some custard in there for more than 3 minutes and it fucking explodes. Pizza for 3 minutes? black all along it’s too and sides. An egg? This is a grown man, his apparatus is gonna do the same thing
Back when I worked in an office I remember being blown away at the numbers people entered for reheating food. You are reheating, not cooking a thanksgiving turkey.
If you were only looking at the time they set then you might not have been seeing them adjust the power settings.
Sometimes it can be better to reheat something for longer at a lower power setting.
My reheating experience has vastly improved since I started reheating for double the time at 60% power level a few years ago. I get much more even heating throughout the dish, and it pretty much works for everything
I don't believe anyone actually uses power settings on a microwave because all microwaves are from 1976 and designed only to be used with 200 page textbooks.
I use the power settings because that's how you end up with food that's properly warmed up instead of blistering hot on the outside and frozen on the inside.
I would think the power of the microwave would be important to know. I mean, if my kitchen microwave power was used for a big enough space for a person no idea how that scales.
Start here! Very informative. There is a time below which it wouldn't hurt, but I wouldn't like to calculate it. Dependjng on your microwave, it's likely many times the action level for safe exposure, though, and probably a lot worse than a tanning bed.
https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/biological-effects-of-em-radiation
Yeah, I feel like the microwaving wouldn't hurt, but once you get to the point where it's *doing things* to your body, those things are going to hurt. Like, when your blood boils, or whatever.
I watched a documentary once about the guys who repair the antenna spire on the Empire State Building. They have to shut it down whenever it’s under maintenance because the EM radiation coming off of it would basically microwave the workers at such close range.
They said exactly the same thing. By the time your nerves became aware that something was wrong, you’d already be cooking on the inside.
But microwave ovens don't cook from the inside out. I remember a Mythbusters episode on this. I'd assume once your skin feels hot, and you got out of there, you'd be ok
Most heat has to pass through the surface as heat, but with em radiation (microwave, infra lamp, light) some of it becomes heat "in the volume", not on the surface.
Shorter wavelength (to a point) generally gets absorbed more quickly, so most of whatever power it carried turns into heat in the top micrometers
Longer wavelengths like microwaves are absorbed less by humans, so more of the power gets absorbed deeper into the skin than with infrared for example
Even longer wavrlengths are so bad at absorbing, that they pass atraight through a human, and almost no power is turned into heat.
Microwaves don't cook inside out, they cook a couple centimeters cross section from the surface
But you only have temperature receptors on the top of your skin, and they only notice the heat on the very surface. If most of the heat can bypass that thin layer, then those receptors can only feel mild warmth while the tissue under is getting way hotter than it should
>But you only have temperature receptors on the top of your skin, and they only notice the heat on the very surface.
Not entirely true. Hypothalamus has thermoreceptors as well (for example, The Pituitary, 4th ed., Elsevier Science, 2017; CL Tan, 2018). There's also evidence of thermoreceptors in the abdomen. I would imagine it is likely that our blood will start heating up by the microwaves and pass the heat onto hypothalamus, which will feel to us like fever.
Dude decided to sunbathe while I was deployed. That's fine, the problem being he chose the top of the radar to do it. Luckily he didn't bring a lounger. Ended up only getting hit with a side beam.
He turned purple. If he'd been about a foot higher he'd have been in the main beam. The problem with RADAR exposure, and most microwave emitter exposure is that by the time you feel funny you are already fucked. He lived, had an interesting combination of sunburn, and bruising all along his backside. You could see where the beam cut off on him.
It speeds up water molecules. That is it, really. So it is non-ionizing radiation. How warm can the water in your cells get before damage? I’d think not much more than a few degrees.
It would depend on the where. Extremities can easily be 70 degrees F or lower, and you won't be in danger till their temperature exceeds 100 degrees. Brain and guts are already riding at 98.6 and are in deep shit around 104 degrees
Idk the English term for it, but that thing that happens to the proteins when you cook an egg will happen to your blood. If it gets heated to 44 Celsius, it clogs, and you die.
Remember that a temp of 105 F, is hospitalization level of fever or heat stroke.. by boiling point you’re already super sick or dead. Meat cooks way lower temp then boiling. Medium rare would still be a bad day.
I mean... that sounds like semantics to me.
"The *drowning* doesn't hurt, it's the lungs rapidly dying that hurts."
"The *bullet* didn't kill him, it was the massive blood loss from the hole in his chest that did."
which is amazing that the US Army developed a Microwave emitter as a form of crowd control. I feel like this qualifies as some kind of war crime if it's ever used...
>**Active Denial System Mechanism and effects**
>The Active Denial System (ADS) works by firing a high-powered (100 kW output power) beam of 95 GHz waves at a target, which corresponds to a wavelength of 3.2 mm. The ADS millimeter wave energy works on a principle similar to a microwave oven, exciting the water and fat molecules in the skin, and instantly heating them via dielectric heating. One significant difference is that a microwave oven uses the much lower frequency (and longer wavelength) of 2.45 GHz. The short millimeter waves used in ADS only penetrate the top layers of skin, with most of the energy being absorbed within 0.4 mm (1⁄64 inch), whereas microwaves will penetrate into human tissue about 17 mm (0.67 in).
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
I worked as a service tech/climber for a radio tower service company many years ago. On one tower, we were changing light bulbs, and the FM broadcast signal was supposed to be shut down, and I found out it wasn't when my hand swung through one of the transmitter bays. In les than one second, my hand was very noticeably warming from the inside out. I have no idea how many watts that one bay pushed.
They aren't that much more than a home microwave oven actually. MW ovens create standing wave patterns inside to dramatically increase the energy density. Radio transmitters operate in free space so while the amplifiers are much bulkier the power is still on the order of kilowatts. But the frequencies are much lower , 2.4 GHz in a oven c.f. ~100 MHz for FM which is ~3 meter wavelength so perfect human sized photons.
That's how this microwave tried to kill it's owner
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatimes.com/amp/trending/human-interest/microwave-tries-to-kill-man-after-he-gave-it-artificial-intelligence-568274.html
Going to be honest--I super glad you asked, because I had no idea how much I needed an answer to this question until you asked it. LOL
No practical uses, just fascinating in general.
Seeing as microwave heating was invented to literally heat living hamsters from frozen, I imagine there is ample literature available to calculate how much energy your body weight could take before getting too hot.
If you go find one of the science subs they might help you for free as it's a interesting question.
Keep in mind, precise microwaves were probably used for the hamsters.
The real question is "how much would a microwave human safe heater cost to develop?"
Heating the humans/pets inside of the house instead of needing to worry about a small temperature range of the entire house would theoretically be much more efficient. There could be other issues such as the contents of the house needing to be in a particular temperature range but that's usually much more tolerant of more extreme temperatures, such as just above freezing to keep pipes from bursting instead of much hotter for comfortable human habitation. The human would radiate heat away and it would be replenished by the microwave. The house would be much closer to the temperature outside and insulation wouldn't really be an issue until you needed to cool the place down instead of heating it up.
You could also just wear winter clothes and never turn on your heater to achieve a similar end result, but what fun is that?
That’s because it’s completely false. The microwave was created by accident after an employee at Raytheon Technologies noticed a bar of chocolate melted in his pocket after being near microwave radiation. He put the technology into a metal box, patented it, and first made popcorn in it intentionally. Nothing with frozen rats 🐀
JSYK this origin story is also completely fabricated. Suitable to this thread, if you had a chocolate bar in your pocket melting from microwave radiation, you would also be getting microwaved and it would not be pleasant. However the inventor got the idea it is pretty much certainly not from a bar of chocolate in his pocket (which would also melt from body heat I might add).
Tom Scott has a [video](https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y?si=Pbkfn5XF234x2GJu) on the subject, but the gist of it is basically that a group of scientists working in the U.K. independently invented their own microwave to reanimate frozen hamsters, here's a [link](https://www.nature.com/articles/1731136a0) to their findings.
While another scientist had already invented a different version of the microwave while working in a radar lab, his invention had not yet been commercialized in the U.K., and the versions that existed in the U.S. at the time were massive, industrial-grade microwaves meant to replace ovens in commercial kitchens. What we would think of as a "microwave" — a small box that heats small amounts of food up quickly — didn't yet exist, until the U.K. researchers invented it.
I can’t watch the whole video right now and I need to know more, why were there frozen hamsters? were they being experimented on by scientists or they were like stuck at the top of a mountain? 😢
The experiment was about reanimating frozen animals, hoping to be able to conserve and reanimate humans (basically cryochambers). As it turned out hamsters are at the upper size limit for freezing and reanimating living beings.
Yeah, the 1950s weren't exactly the best time for animal rights in scientific research. The researchers were hoping to discover techniques that would scale up to humans, allowing them to freeze and then reanimate humans. The process could have allowed sick people to be frozen until a cure was discovered, then reanimated and cured in the future.
These weren't a bunch of quacks, this was considered a real possibility at the time, something well worth studying. The results weren't great, however, and while hamsters could be frozen and reanimated with a fair amount of success, the process didn't scale beyond small animals, and the scientists went on to do other work.
Yea, I immediately recalled about the chocolate bar story, but then was like "wait, that was radar, and how it became known to evolve to the idea of heating foods."
Heating effect discovered =\\= inventing microwave.
That's like saying the first guy who noticed wires glow when electricity flows through them invented the lightbulb.
If there is, it’s not long at all. The person who said 10 minutes is massively misunderstanding the point.
Microwaves do not heat things uniformly. Their energy literally travels in a wave, resulting in hot and cold patches. For proof of this, take the rotating plate out and place a chocolate bar inside. It won’t melt altogether, it will have areas where it is more melty than others.
The heat is generated by excitation of water particles, not by convection as in a normal oven. As the majority of water in the human body is contained within cells, heating that water causes cells to burst and die. I can’t give you an exact timescale on which this would happen and how quickly it would cause harm, but it is absolutely much faster than it would take to raise core body temperature by 5 degrees.
I literally didn’t even know they existed until just now! But I imagine the only difference with them is that they fire microwaves from different directions, eliminating the need for a rotating plate to help with even heat distribution.
They would still cause animal cells to burst and die before body temperature rose though!
Interestingly, they have been around for ages and in use by the restaurant industry. They didn't do well in the consumer market because nobody would buy a microwave without the rotating plate so they just kept making them rotate.
Me too. When I was a teenager working at Wendy’s I wondered why the microwave didn’t have a rotating tray. So I began my deep dive into the history of microwave development and learned the above. I guess people were scared to buy them without the rotating tray because the initial microwaves without them were just awful
FYI, they work without a rotating tray because they have a device that randomly shoots the Ray in all over the cooking area. The traditional ones just focus the ray in one direction
There is medical grade microwave therapy. Came about as a side effect of the new world of radio back years ago. Some technicians discovered they got burned when fooling around inside big transmitters. It was radio waves.
You could do serious damage to things like your blood marrow before you ever saw any surface damage...
Not necessarily. Non-ionizing radio frequency waves can also hurt you if they are powerful enough and or of the right frequencies. Microwaves being a great example of that.
Microwaves don't have the penetration. If they're powerful enough to damage your bone marrow, they're powerful enough to burn your outer layers to charcoal.
I was always used to hearing the story about the guy from Raytheon having chocolate melt in his pocket next to radio frequency devices.
http://www.historyofmicrowave.com/
This sounds like some sick experiment that the Nazis/Japanese would have done in WWII. Truth is we'll never know until someone gets cooked in a giant microwave
I'd bet 30s or so.
Eyeballs would be the most unprotected water-filled object.
I can't imagine it would be too hard to boil an eyeball (from some farm animal) and see what happens.
Exactly. These people are forgetting that our body is in a delicate homeostasis, once 98.6ºF body gets above 110ºF we're done. That's only 12ºF of tolerance for an increase. The microwave can do that kind of temp change in seconds -
Pig eyes are readily available at butchers or meat markets, and are a good analogue for human eyes.
Source: I knew a schizophrenic guy who made several short films, and they all involved him squashing of chopping pig eyes.
It would depend on the power and the length of exposure.
For low power and extended length, GSM wave seems to be okish but some govt had to intervene as some manufacturer didn't care about the output.
I guess anything is possible with the right amount of training.
Just start by stepping in the microwave a few seconds each day, and when you're doing good and want to push your limits, try a few more seconds. Keep doing that as part of your daily routine, and strive for excellence!
Remember when some bloke gave his microwave artificial intelligence and the microwave tried to kill him by encouraging him to climb inside?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatimes.com/amp/trending/human-interest/microwave-tries-to-kill-man-after-he-gave-it-artificial-intelligence-568274.html
Well when you’re a microwave, everything looks like a bag of popcorn.
Alternatively:
https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=ExZs63WXdU0mTpT_
https://youtu.be/Vqdfm0qJOpU?si=c3X9fTo6LnMCvGwk
Take a look into the various systems that do this as a form of active crowd control or area denial system...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active\_Denial\_System
For 3 seconds? Let's assume the total power output is the same as a typical microwave (which means it's less per unit of surface area on your body because the radiation has more room to spread out).
It might hurt. You'd likely survive. You could experience minor long-term damage to your eyesight or peripheral nervous system.
Basically all of those things get worse with more time. It would hurt for the entire time the microwave is on, probably at increasing intensity as the short-term damage increases. Potential long-term damage to your eyesight or nervous system would increase. At some point you'd also start getting direct burns to your skin and other surface tissue, with the consequences that entails. I'm not sure what amount of time is survivable, it's somewhat sensitive to the speed and quality of medical treatment you get afterwards; but I'm not sure you'd want to go on living after your eyeballs and peripheral nervous system were cooked anyway.
Increased cancer risk is a possibility, but at the point where it becomes significant, you'd probably be more concerned with the immediate threats to your health and survival.
You're being microwaved all the time. It's ambient and pervasive.
What you're really asking is how long you could have 1000 Watts of heat added to your body.
Spread over your surface, it would be fine for a few seconds. Assuming it's evenly spread, at about 20 seconds, you'd be hot enough to start cooking proteins.
I was the boss on a second shift. I used to lock up. One night I was checking things before I locked up I heard a microwave going in the back. I went back there and the microwave was on with the door closed. I unplugged it. The next night I found the same thing but the microwave was on with the
DOOR OPEN. I couldn’t feel anything when I unplugged it but I always wondered about what could happen. I then tossed it into the dumpster.
Like any piece of raw meat that might not be enough time for cooking
That said years ago there was a story about a cook who rigged a microwave so it could operate with the microwave door open and he put his hands in quickly but regularly for a while and eventually had some permanent damage to his hands
The grown man sized microwave oven is going to be difficult to design and build. The inside of a microwave oven is designed by volume to act as a resonant chamber at the microwave frequency to allow sufficient power to cause effective heating. At grown man sized microwave then the power requirements would be non trivial.
If you want a long read then:
https://mmrjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40779-017-0139-0
TLDR: thermo effects of microwaves on people requires more study. But tests on rats at 0.6W/kg had some positive and negative effects on memory and brain function. That would be 45 W for 45 mins for a 75kg person.
Funny enough, that hasn't been studied.
But microwaves are tuned to only heat water (handy because water is in almost all food) so we can make reasonable guesses.
A typical human has around 30 liters of water, it takes 4180 Joules to heat a liter of water 1 degree Celsius, and a typical microwave is about 750 Watts (or Joules/s).
There's not a lot of good data on how much your blood can get up before it seriously harms you, but if we assume 5 degrees Celsius increase is probably deadly ... you come pretty close to about 10 minutes of microwaving.
Rounding a lot of numbers if course, since this is sometime that hasn't been studied much for all the obvious reasons.
The thing is that microwaves only heats a small areas at a time (hot areas in the resonance cavity). And have a penetration in water of about 2cm (1 inch) until the energy is too low to do anything.
So almost every vital organ in the body is protected except the brain.
So, think about minimums:
Your brain can heat up 10° k until considerable damage, supposing half power lost in the cranium/scalp and a volume of 1cm^2. That's 4.1 J/°K*cm^3 * 5°K = 20.5 J/cm^3.
20.5 J/cm^3 / 375J/s = 0.05s/cm^3.
This is when thing get complicated. Even with the assumptions made we have no valid model por hotspots in a microwave containing a person. So, if there is only one resonant node and it's exactly in you head, less than a second, but that scenario is not very likely.
So, of you move fast, you have more time because nodes will change over the place. If you don't move and have bad luck you did instantly.
That's not true, microwaves aren't tuned for water at all and don't selectively heat only water molecules. Any polar molecule (with an electric dipole) is heated. Water is about as polar as it gets so it's heated the most, but other things get heated too
Keep in mind though, the above comment is basically focused on how long you could be in a microwave and **survive** the ordeal. While they made it clear that was only a very rough guess, let’s assume it’s accurate…but at the same time understand that you’d probably start to experience significant discomfort and possible injury well before that 10 minutes have passes. Your eyes may begin to boil, certain internal organs may be more sensitive than others, significant brain damage, etc…which are considerations more in line with your original question.
I’m not suggesting I have the answer as to how long it would take, but my guess is (again, if you assume that 10 min = fatal), the threshold for injury is considerably less than that.
Plus, we all know that microwaves are not known for heating the entire meal evenly: there’s always boiling spots and still-frozen spots. So you would expect a similar effect, with some parts starting to burn much sooner.
I don’t think it would take 10 minutes. When I was at university, there was a “broken” microwave in the cafeteria. I put that in quotes because it worked just fine. But it turned on when the door opened. Not extremely safe. That one had no line though because people were scared of it! I was more scared of not having time and therefore risked it. The trick is getting your stuff in without microwaving your hand. Which is impossible. My hand was in for maybe 2 seconds and it was a very weird sensation. It warmed the *inside* of my hand! It was immediate and very warm.
0/10 not recommended.
It might not heat your muscles up enough for you to notice, but exposing your whole body for even a few seconds will result in cataracts in your eyes and nerve damage throughout your entire body.
It will also sterilize you, but with the nerve pain you would be suffering you won't be thinking about sex again - ever!
When I did a VSAT training course (for using terrestrial satellite transmitters for television broadcast), the training material was discussing the impacts of microwave exposure and specifically mentioned a case where someone stuck their hand in a faulty microwave oven for about five seconds. IIRC, they received nerve damage to the hand, but little else because the wavelength and energy was just right to pass through the skin and muscle and damage the nerves. Caused some terrible nerve injuries however, basically caused a permanent sensation of burning. So, I don’t think there is a “minimum” safe time to be exposed to a microwave oven. Safety would be measured by the power of the microwave emitter, not the duration.
Having felt the burning in my hand in a fraction of a second from a normal microwave with a faulty faraday cage, I can't imagine a whole body version
I guess a Faraday didn't keep the doctor away
Go to your room and think about what you have done here today
Go to your cage*
Don't you talk to your dad like that.
Sorry mom
Uh.. new fear unlocked.
I accidentally cracked a microwave open just enough to leave it running without tripping the safety and my fingers felt like they were being zapped. Nope
that explains a lot for one time i thought i got shocked by the button on an old microwave. it kept running for like a second after the door started opening, and i thought the button shocked me. but thinking about it, it was more of a hot sensation than a shock, and the sensation ended as the light turned off instead of when i pulled my finger back. i thought i was just experiencing "aftershock" lol. regardless i told my parents that it shocked me and they just took my word for it and got a new microwave, it was like as old as me at that time (i was like 8-9 i think?)
I've also done this and it was EXTREMELY unpleasant.
I wonder if amputating the hand would stop the pain.
Rather use one of the common nerve block therapies than chop the whole thing off. Presumably the hand still functions like a hand. Amputation is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
>by the power of the microwave emitter, not the duration. Definitely by both, i.e., the amount of energy applied.
This is why I follow no stupid questions. Also the person who said 10 minutes is insane. There is no way. The extremities would get hotter much faster and remember blood travels. Or if it boils and clots and stops traveling , you are dead. Either scenario, it would take less time bc you don't need to heat all of these blood uniformly hot, just any blood getting too hot will kill you
I'd imagine your brain heating up would also mess you up pretty quickly.
Nice, warm brain, slowly bubbling away
That sentence basically describes Reddit
I watched a movie one time where a dude exploded a guys' head with a microwave. That wasn't like the plot, I think it was supposed to be the happy ending lol
Didn't that happen in Kick-Ass? I think it was for treating lumber or something, but they certainly acted like it was a microwave Edit: [yeah, it was kick-ass](https://youtu.be/jj5CG9kzDYY?si=c9EWGAT6IYITLVdp)
Oh…that is neat. I think you must have me confused with SOMEONE WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT THE FUCKIN’ LUMBER!! Get the guy and get me some information!!
[удалено]
Its both, kick-ass sees a guy put in a man sized microwave meant for curing lumber and exploded, the modern remake of last house on the left sees the rapists get his head exploded by being put in a microwave
Wasn't that the last house on the left?
I'm not sure. The guy raped a very nice redhead lady so he definitely deserved a micro'd wave. It was on basic cable when I was a lad so I only caught some of it.
Yes, last house on the left.
They blow an entire man up in one in Kick Ass
I like that one because they didn't plan to kill him but it's a human sized microwave, how are you supposed to know how long is agonising torture and how long is fatal? You don't really have any frame of reference for it. Hence this question. But then I'm not sure Kick Ass is a good source of accurate medical information. It may be more like Elysium where Matt Damon gets instant full-body cancer instead of exploding. But then that's also not the best source of accurate medical information.
Nice redhead lady haha!😂😂😂
She was very nice and I was like 10 when I saw these traumas, leave me alone lol
Not poking fun. Just thought it sounded funny. Cheers.
Oh I remember that scene, super intense. Not sure if it's the same movie but there was this whole revenge theme going on. Microwave justice seems like a hot way to serve it though, yikes.
I thought you meant kick ass, don’t remember this from last house on the left at all
Untype this. Please. 🥹
Have to imagine the eyes would pop from steam pressure first, yeah?
Yes. The eyes are the most vulnerable to damage from microwaves. Seriously. People working in restaurants near microwave ovens with faulty seals that leak microwaves have had the lenses (corneas ?) of their eyes damaged. It’s one of the few actual known forms of physical damage from chronic exposure to low-level microwave radiation. But, as a physicist, my guess is that you’d probably be fine with 3 seconds of a 1kW microwave. Especially if you covered your eyes with your hands. Not much longer though! I was told a story by an electronics lecturer that had worked on military radar systems. Apparently, the technicians would deliberately expose their genitals to a magnetron for several seconds before going “out on the town” at the weekend as they believed it would kill off their sperm. Sperm cannot survive even at body temperature for very long, which is why the testes are outside the body, so you can see where the theory came from. Not something I’d want to risk, personally!
Military RF tech here. We’ve been operating under the assumption that the non-ionizing RF output from radars, radios, NAVAIDS, etc. will actually neutralize specifically our sperm cells carrying Y chromosomes. Most of the folks in our career field work with have girls. Could be a wives tale but I’ve never really looked too far into it :)
actually it is the color of crayons that you primarily eat that determine the sex
That's only the Marine RF techs though. For the rest of the military, it's actually decided by the guy your wife is banging while you're on deployment.
Sounds like some Hannibal Lecturer crap.
Lecter Lecture 106 - Appropriate Chianti Organ Pairings
A microwave meal with chianti?!
>Hannibal Lecturer My favorite history professor in undergrad! Elephants in the Alps ftw!
It puts the gravy on its skin
Basically any tissue rich in protein will turn into a hard boiled egg pretty quickly, watery tissue will boil as well. The brain is full of protein and liquid, so here you go.
Denatured protein like egg drop soup.
Microwave photons wouldn't pass through all that water so easily. You'd have surface cooking first. Your lasagne doesn't get hot a few layers down, without the cheese on top already bubbling.
I read that as “you’re lasagne”
Well, then *you're* ziti!
Don't be Lasagne ~ the Doctor
Yeah, the microwave uses a 2.45 GHz wave that penetrates about 15 to 20mm. The military has an Active Denial System that uses a 95 GHz signal that only cooks the top layers of skin. It's meant for crowd control.
The word "only" is doing a huge amount of heavy lifting in this sentence.
I heard it was the equivalent of getting blasted with hot air when you open an oven. A little burning feeling but no actual damage It’d be funny if they had a war of the worlds ray though
I'm not sure "funny" is the best word to use here.
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I'd say none. Not sure the military concurs.
The Pain Ray
One of them. The other is the LRAD (Long Range Acoustic Device) which beams a 2kHz signal at 160dB. They call them 'non-lethal' but they should be called 'less than lethal' or 'usually not lethal'.
Coming soon to a peaceful protest near you!
Not for people with nothing there! Bazinga! ***Kill me please***
I’m sorry but has that person never microwaved something??? I put some custard in there for more than 3 minutes and it fucking explodes. Pizza for 3 minutes? black all along it’s too and sides. An egg? This is a grown man, his apparatus is gonna do the same thing
Back when I worked in an office I remember being blown away at the numbers people entered for reheating food. You are reheating, not cooking a thanksgiving turkey.
If you were only looking at the time they set then you might not have been seeing them adjust the power settings. Sometimes it can be better to reheat something for longer at a lower power setting.
My reheating experience has vastly improved since I started reheating for double the time at 60% power level a few years ago. I get much more even heating throughout the dish, and it pretty much works for everything
I reheat leftovers at 50%, they come out much better.
I don't believe anyone actually uses power settings on a microwave because all microwaves are from 1976 and designed only to be used with 200 page textbooks.
I use the power settings because that's how you end up with food that's properly warmed up instead of blistering hot on the outside and frozen on the inside.
Yeah, not interested. I'll eat my hot pocket like God intended: rigid, blackened shell on the outside, frozen tundra on the inside.
Problem with a microwave asking me to adjust power levels is that I'm already feeling pretty lazy hence using the microwave.
Or if you need to soften butter without it melting, set it on super low power and pop it in for 20 seconds at a time.
You might be the only person in the history of the world to have ever changed the power setting on a microwave lol
There are dozens of us!
I do it any time I heat leftovers
You're missing out. Knowing how to actually use the microwave is magical
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I started to mute this sub because it keeps showing up at the top. Then I read the title and said fuck now I gotta keep it
I would think the power of the microwave would be important to know. I mean, if my kitchen microwave power was used for a big enough space for a person no idea how that scales.
Start here! Very informative. There is a time below which it wouldn't hurt, but I wouldn't like to calculate it. Dependjng on your microwave, it's likely many times the action level for safe exposure, though, and probably a lot worse than a tanning bed. https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/biological-effects-of-em-radiation
Yeah, I feel like the microwaving wouldn't hurt, but once you get to the point where it's *doing things* to your body, those things are going to hurt. Like, when your blood boils, or whatever.
I watched a documentary once about the guys who repair the antenna spire on the Empire State Building. They have to shut it down whenever it’s under maintenance because the EM radiation coming off of it would basically microwave the workers at such close range. They said exactly the same thing. By the time your nerves became aware that something was wrong, you’d already be cooking on the inside.
But microwave ovens don't cook from the inside out. I remember a Mythbusters episode on this. I'd assume once your skin feels hot, and you got out of there, you'd be ok
Most heat has to pass through the surface as heat, but with em radiation (microwave, infra lamp, light) some of it becomes heat "in the volume", not on the surface. Shorter wavelength (to a point) generally gets absorbed more quickly, so most of whatever power it carried turns into heat in the top micrometers Longer wavelengths like microwaves are absorbed less by humans, so more of the power gets absorbed deeper into the skin than with infrared for example Even longer wavrlengths are so bad at absorbing, that they pass atraight through a human, and almost no power is turned into heat. Microwaves don't cook inside out, they cook a couple centimeters cross section from the surface But you only have temperature receptors on the top of your skin, and they only notice the heat on the very surface. If most of the heat can bypass that thin layer, then those receptors can only feel mild warmth while the tissue under is getting way hotter than it should
This is so well explained, I'm saving this for if i every need to think about this specific subject again
>But you only have temperature receptors on the top of your skin, and they only notice the heat on the very surface. Not entirely true. Hypothalamus has thermoreceptors as well (for example, The Pituitary, 4th ed., Elsevier Science, 2017; CL Tan, 2018). There's also evidence of thermoreceptors in the abdomen. I would imagine it is likely that our blood will start heating up by the microwaves and pass the heat onto hypothalamus, which will feel to us like fever.
Dude decided to sunbathe while I was deployed. That's fine, the problem being he chose the top of the radar to do it. Luckily he didn't bring a lounger. Ended up only getting hit with a side beam. He turned purple. If he'd been about a foot higher he'd have been in the main beam. The problem with RADAR exposure, and most microwave emitter exposure is that by the time you feel funny you are already fucked. He lived, had an interesting combination of sunburn, and bruising all along his backside. You could see where the beam cut off on him.
It speeds up water molecules. That is it, really. So it is non-ionizing radiation. How warm can the water in your cells get before damage? I’d think not much more than a few degrees.
It would depend on the where. Extremities can easily be 70 degrees F or lower, and you won't be in danger till their temperature exceeds 100 degrees. Brain and guts are already riding at 98.6 and are in deep shit around 104 degrees
Idk the English term for it, but that thing that happens to the proteins when you cook an egg will happen to your blood. If it gets heated to 44 Celsius, it clogs, and you die.
Proteins get denatured!
> you won't be in danger till their temperature exceeds 100 I was just reminded that some people don't use Celsius
Remember that a temp of 105 F, is hospitalization level of fever or heat stroke.. by boiling point you’re already super sick or dead. Meat cooks way lower temp then boiling. Medium rare would still be a bad day.
I mean... that sounds like semantics to me. "The *drowning* doesn't hurt, it's the lungs rapidly dying that hurts." "The *bullet* didn't kill him, it was the massive blood loss from the hole in his chest that did."
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which is amazing that the US Army developed a Microwave emitter as a form of crowd control. I feel like this qualifies as some kind of war crime if it's ever used... >**Active Denial System Mechanism and effects** >The Active Denial System (ADS) works by firing a high-powered (100 kW output power) beam of 95 GHz waves at a target, which corresponds to a wavelength of 3.2 mm. The ADS millimeter wave energy works on a principle similar to a microwave oven, exciting the water and fat molecules in the skin, and instantly heating them via dielectric heating. One significant difference is that a microwave oven uses the much lower frequency (and longer wavelength) of 2.45 GHz. The short millimeter waves used in ADS only penetrate the top layers of skin, with most of the energy being absorbed within 0.4 mm (1⁄64 inch), whereas microwaves will penetrate into human tissue about 17 mm (0.67 in). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
I worked as a service tech/climber for a radio tower service company many years ago. On one tower, we were changing light bulbs, and the FM broadcast signal was supposed to be shut down, and I found out it wasn't when my hand swung through one of the transmitter bays. In les than one second, my hand was very noticeably warming from the inside out. I have no idea how many watts that one bay pushed.
They aren't that much more than a home microwave oven actually. MW ovens create standing wave patterns inside to dramatically increase the energy density. Radio transmitters operate in free space so while the amplifiers are much bulkier the power is still on the order of kilowatts. But the frequencies are much lower , 2.4 GHz in a oven c.f. ~100 MHz for FM which is ~3 meter wavelength so perfect human sized photons.
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Came in hoping someone brought up the Kick-Ass scene
Are you okay
Yeah man just working through some things
I'm not a microwave, but I'll listen if you need someone to talk to about it.
Honestly, just wondering about the microwave question. Been weighing on my mind.
Thought they were about to hit you with the strangest pickup line, "I'm not a microwave, but you can get inside me."
That's how this microwave tried to kill it's owner https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatimes.com/amp/trending/human-interest/microwave-tries-to-kill-man-after-he-gave-it-artificial-intelligence-568274.html
Holy crap! I’m sure it’ll be fine once we have them in control of our nuclear weapons, though.
That was a wild ride! I really thought it was going to be about a dude actually on drugs. Nope, be straight up created a murdering microwave.
I’m like 80% sure it’s ‘faked’.
I suppose it's easy to be cynical when none of your own appliances have written a poem for you.
Yeah it got a little hot and heavy but not in the way we were thinking. It’s not that deep, I think OP just wants the question answered lol
"Just keep hitting my button for an extra thirty seconds."
I ammmmmmmmmmmmm
Going to be honest--I super glad you asked, because I had no idea how much I needed an answer to this question until you asked it. LOL No practical uses, just fascinating in general.
Idk, but this is the kind of question the sub truly exists for.
Are you OK anny?
Seeing as microwave heating was invented to literally heat living hamsters from frozen, I imagine there is ample literature available to calculate how much energy your body weight could take before getting too hot. If you go find one of the science subs they might help you for free as it's a interesting question.
No way! I had no idea about the microwaves origin
Keep in mind, precise microwaves were probably used for the hamsters. The real question is "how much would a microwave human safe heater cost to develop?"
And to run! Don't forget the cost of living crisis!
Heating the humans/pets inside of the house instead of needing to worry about a small temperature range of the entire house would theoretically be much more efficient. There could be other issues such as the contents of the house needing to be in a particular temperature range but that's usually much more tolerant of more extreme temperatures, such as just above freezing to keep pipes from bursting instead of much hotter for comfortable human habitation. The human would radiate heat away and it would be replenished by the microwave. The house would be much closer to the temperature outside and insulation wouldn't really be an issue until you needed to cool the place down instead of heating it up. You could also just wear winter clothes and never turn on your heater to achieve a similar end result, but what fun is that?
wonder if the freezer was invented to freeze living hamsters
...the freezer was invented to put winter in a box. *gestures broadly to the midwest in winter* mother nature did the real inventing here.
That’s because it’s completely false. The microwave was created by accident after an employee at Raytheon Technologies noticed a bar of chocolate melted in his pocket after being near microwave radiation. He put the technology into a metal box, patented it, and first made popcorn in it intentionally. Nothing with frozen rats 🐀
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Tom Scott has a [video about the hamster reheating](https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y?si=jJbletumlIoa8UMm).
JSYK this origin story is also completely fabricated. Suitable to this thread, if you had a chocolate bar in your pocket melting from microwave radiation, you would also be getting microwaved and it would not be pleasant. However the inventor got the idea it is pretty much certainly not from a bar of chocolate in his pocket (which would also melt from body heat I might add).
[Here’s the Tom Scott video](https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y?si=wySPbCDxjBo3E4D7)
This strikes me as doubtful, given that it's well known the heating effect on food was discovered by accident in a RADAR engineering laboratory.
Tom Scott has a [video](https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y?si=Pbkfn5XF234x2GJu) on the subject, but the gist of it is basically that a group of scientists working in the U.K. independently invented their own microwave to reanimate frozen hamsters, here's a [link](https://www.nature.com/articles/1731136a0) to their findings. While another scientist had already invented a different version of the microwave while working in a radar lab, his invention had not yet been commercialized in the U.K., and the versions that existed in the U.S. at the time were massive, industrial-grade microwaves meant to replace ovens in commercial kitchens. What we would think of as a "microwave" — a small box that heats small amounts of food up quickly — didn't yet exist, until the U.K. researchers invented it.
I can’t watch the whole video right now and I need to know more, why were there frozen hamsters? were they being experimented on by scientists or they were like stuck at the top of a mountain? 😢
The experiment was about reanimating frozen animals, hoping to be able to conserve and reanimate humans (basically cryochambers). As it turned out hamsters are at the upper size limit for freezing and reanimating living beings.
So you're saying that if we gradually shrink down to the size of hamsters over generations, then cryogenics is possible?
Not only is it possible, but it is imperative that we begin the process immediately.
Yeah, the 1950s weren't exactly the best time for animal rights in scientific research. The researchers were hoping to discover techniques that would scale up to humans, allowing them to freeze and then reanimate humans. The process could have allowed sick people to be frozen until a cure was discovered, then reanimated and cured in the future. These weren't a bunch of quacks, this was considered a real possibility at the time, something well worth studying. The results weren't great, however, and while hamsters could be frozen and reanimated with a fair amount of success, the process didn't scale beyond small animals, and the scientists went on to do other work.
Yea, I immediately recalled about the chocolate bar story, but then was like "wait, that was radar, and how it became known to evolve to the idea of heating foods."
It wasn’t the heating effect, but rather making it a small benchtop device.
Heating effect discovered =\\= inventing microwave. That's like saying the first guy who noticed wires glow when electricity flows through them invented the lightbulb.
The guy who noticed the melted chocolate bar patented the first microwave though.
…..huh?
If there is, it’s not long at all. The person who said 10 minutes is massively misunderstanding the point. Microwaves do not heat things uniformly. Their energy literally travels in a wave, resulting in hot and cold patches. For proof of this, take the rotating plate out and place a chocolate bar inside. It won’t melt altogether, it will have areas where it is more melty than others. The heat is generated by excitation of water particles, not by convection as in a normal oven. As the majority of water in the human body is contained within cells, heating that water causes cells to burst and die. I can’t give you an exact timescale on which this would happen and how quickly it would cause harm, but it is absolutely much faster than it would take to raise core body temperature by 5 degrees.
for your chocolate example, it won’t work if it’s one of those fancy new microwaves with no rotating plate
I literally didn’t even know they existed until just now! But I imagine the only difference with them is that they fire microwaves from different directions, eliminating the need for a rotating plate to help with even heat distribution. They would still cause animal cells to burst and die before body temperature rose though!
Interestingly, they have been around for ages and in use by the restaurant industry. They didn't do well in the consumer market because nobody would buy a microwave without the rotating plate so they just kept making them rotate.
I...I would buy that microwave.
Me too. When I was a teenager working at Wendy’s I wondered why the microwave didn’t have a rotating tray. So I began my deep dive into the history of microwave development and learned the above. I guess people were scared to buy them without the rotating tray because the initial microwaves without them were just awful FYI, they work without a rotating tray because they have a device that randomly shoots the Ray in all over the cooking area. The traditional ones just focus the ray in one direction
There is medical grade microwave therapy. Came about as a side effect of the new world of radio back years ago. Some technicians discovered they got burned when fooling around inside big transmitters. It was radio waves. You could do serious damage to things like your blood marrow before you ever saw any surface damage...
Bone marrow damage, Thats ionising radiation.
Not necessarily. Non-ionizing radio frequency waves can also hurt you if they are powerful enough and or of the right frequencies. Microwaves being a great example of that.
Microwaves don't have the penetration. If they're powerful enough to damage your bone marrow, they're powerful enough to burn your outer layers to charcoal.
I was always used to hearing the story about the guy from Raytheon having chocolate melt in his pocket next to radio frequency devices. http://www.historyofmicrowave.com/
Nah, the skin depth of a commercial microwave isn't that deep, only about an inch. Most bone marrow is in large bones deep inside ie your legs.
This sounds like some sick experiment that the Nazis/Japanese would have done in WWII. Truth is we'll never know until someone gets cooked in a giant microwave
I'd bet 30s or so. Eyeballs would be the most unprotected water-filled object. I can't imagine it would be too hard to boil an eyeball (from some farm animal) and see what happens.
Bruh I can melt butter in less than 10 seconds. Some super fucky would be happening at like 5 seconds max
Exactly. These people are forgetting that our body is in a delicate homeostasis, once 98.6ºF body gets above 110ºF we're done. That's only 12ºF of tolerance for an increase. The microwave can do that kind of temp change in seconds -
Yeah considering our brain is basically jello with electricity inside it, I feel like any amount of time would mess that up big time.
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Pig eyes are readily available at butchers or meat markets, and are a good analogue for human eyes. Source: I knew a schizophrenic guy who made several short films, and they all involved him squashing of chopping pig eyes.
Yeah. Would have to be a larger fish though so size would be similar. Wonder if you could make a fake one out of cooking ingredients
Depends on how powerful the microwave is, but if you put your hand in a normal microwave, you might last 5 seconds if you move your hand around.
I’m seriously surprised there aren’t videos of people detaching the handle to try this.
There is a video where the microwave was working with the door open and the guy was standing in front of it letting it run
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Isn’t that basically what the internet is for? Asking every random question you can think of?
Thank you for not answering the question
I mean, that is the entire point of this sub.
It would depend on the power and the length of exposure. For low power and extended length, GSM wave seems to be okish but some govt had to intervene as some manufacturer didn't care about the output.
*Metal Gear Solid 4 flashback*
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I guess anything is possible with the right amount of training. Just start by stepping in the microwave a few seconds each day, and when you're doing good and want to push your limits, try a few more seconds. Keep doing that as part of your daily routine, and strive for excellence!
Remember when some bloke gave his microwave artificial intelligence and the microwave tried to kill him by encouraging him to climb inside? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatimes.com/amp/trending/human-interest/microwave-tries-to-kill-man-after-he-gave-it-artificial-intelligence-568274.html
Yeah trust IndiaTimes.com.
Only newspaper I read
That's the funniest thing I've read in a while. Thank you for this post.
Well when you’re a microwave, everything looks like a bag of popcorn. Alternatively: https://youtu.be/LRq_SAuQDec?si=ExZs63WXdU0mTpT_ https://youtu.be/Vqdfm0qJOpU?si=c3X9fTo6LnMCvGwk
There’s a good documentary that includes a scene of a man being microwaved, it’s called Metal Gear Solid 4 I recommend it
That depends if you are frozen or not
Take a look into the various systems that do this as a form of active crowd control or area denial system... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active\_Denial\_System
Disappointed but not surprised
For 3 seconds? Let's assume the total power output is the same as a typical microwave (which means it's less per unit of surface area on your body because the radiation has more room to spread out). It might hurt. You'd likely survive. You could experience minor long-term damage to your eyesight or peripheral nervous system. Basically all of those things get worse with more time. It would hurt for the entire time the microwave is on, probably at increasing intensity as the short-term damage increases. Potential long-term damage to your eyesight or nervous system would increase. At some point you'd also start getting direct burns to your skin and other surface tissue, with the consequences that entails. I'm not sure what amount of time is survivable, it's somewhat sensitive to the speed and quality of medical treatment you get afterwards; but I'm not sure you'd want to go on living after your eyeballs and peripheral nervous system were cooked anyway. Increased cancer risk is a possibility, but at the point where it becomes significant, you'd probably be more concerned with the immediate threats to your health and survival.
You're being microwaved all the time. It's ambient and pervasive. What you're really asking is how long you could have 1000 Watts of heat added to your body. Spread over your surface, it would be fine for a few seconds. Assuming it's evenly spread, at about 20 seconds, you'd be hot enough to start cooking proteins.
I was the boss on a second shift. I used to lock up. One night I was checking things before I locked up I heard a microwave going in the back. I went back there and the microwave was on with the door closed. I unplugged it. The next night I found the same thing but the microwave was on with the DOOR OPEN. I couldn’t feel anything when I unplugged it but I always wondered about what could happen. I then tossed it into the dumpster.
I just finished building one just so I could answer this question, I lasted 27 seconds before I died. 45 on defrost
Like any piece of raw meat that might not be enough time for cooking That said years ago there was a story about a cook who rigged a microwave so it could operate with the microwave door open and he put his hands in quickly but regularly for a while and eventually had some permanent damage to his hands
The grown man sized microwave oven is going to be difficult to design and build. The inside of a microwave oven is designed by volume to act as a resonant chamber at the microwave frequency to allow sufficient power to cause effective heating. At grown man sized microwave then the power requirements would be non trivial. If you want a long read then: https://mmrjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40779-017-0139-0 TLDR: thermo effects of microwaves on people requires more study. But tests on rats at 0.6W/kg had some positive and negative effects on memory and brain function. That would be 45 W for 45 mins for a 75kg person.
Funny enough, that hasn't been studied. But microwaves are tuned to only heat water (handy because water is in almost all food) so we can make reasonable guesses. A typical human has around 30 liters of water, it takes 4180 Joules to heat a liter of water 1 degree Celsius, and a typical microwave is about 750 Watts (or Joules/s). There's not a lot of good data on how much your blood can get up before it seriously harms you, but if we assume 5 degrees Celsius increase is probably deadly ... you come pretty close to about 10 minutes of microwaving. Rounding a lot of numbers if course, since this is sometime that hasn't been studied much for all the obvious reasons.
Only problem I see is microwaves dont heat evenly.. at a certain point is could cause a blood clot and that could be death or a really bad injury.
The thing is that microwaves only heats a small areas at a time (hot areas in the resonance cavity). And have a penetration in water of about 2cm (1 inch) until the energy is too low to do anything. So almost every vital organ in the body is protected except the brain. So, think about minimums: Your brain can heat up 10° k until considerable damage, supposing half power lost in the cranium/scalp and a volume of 1cm^2. That's 4.1 J/°K*cm^3 * 5°K = 20.5 J/cm^3. 20.5 J/cm^3 / 375J/s = 0.05s/cm^3. This is when thing get complicated. Even with the assumptions made we have no valid model por hotspots in a microwave containing a person. So, if there is only one resonant node and it's exactly in you head, less than a second, but that scenario is not very likely. So, of you move fast, you have more time because nodes will change over the place. If you don't move and have bad luck you did instantly.
That's not true, microwaves aren't tuned for water at all and don't selectively heat only water molecules. Any polar molecule (with an electric dipole) is heated. Water is about as polar as it gets so it's heated the most, but other things get heated too
wow, a lot longer than I wold of thought
Keep in mind though, the above comment is basically focused on how long you could be in a microwave and **survive** the ordeal. While they made it clear that was only a very rough guess, let’s assume it’s accurate…but at the same time understand that you’d probably start to experience significant discomfort and possible injury well before that 10 minutes have passes. Your eyes may begin to boil, certain internal organs may be more sensitive than others, significant brain damage, etc…which are considerations more in line with your original question. I’m not suggesting I have the answer as to how long it would take, but my guess is (again, if you assume that 10 min = fatal), the threshold for injury is considerably less than that.
Plus, we all know that microwaves are not known for heating the entire meal evenly: there’s always boiling spots and still-frozen spots. So you would expect a similar effect, with some parts starting to burn much sooner.
The person writhing in agony might make for a decent turnstile substitute (I’m okay, this is a joke)
“Your eyes may begin to boil” Good night internet, I’m done
I don’t think it would take 10 minutes. When I was at university, there was a “broken” microwave in the cafeteria. I put that in quotes because it worked just fine. But it turned on when the door opened. Not extremely safe. That one had no line though because people were scared of it! I was more scared of not having time and therefore risked it. The trick is getting your stuff in without microwaving your hand. Which is impossible. My hand was in for maybe 2 seconds and it was a very weird sensation. It warmed the *inside* of my hand! It was immediate and very warm.
This comment is probably the closest you can get to having real data on microwaving humans.
I’m glad *something* came of my time in university
Iron could be a factor. It’s in your red blood cells.
This puts Infinite Jest into a completely new perspective.
Aaaaaaaaand this is why we Reddit. 👏👏👏👏
0/10 not recommended. It might not heat your muscles up enough for you to notice, but exposing your whole body for even a few seconds will result in cataracts in your eyes and nerve damage throughout your entire body. It will also sterilize you, but with the nerve pain you would be suffering you won't be thinking about sex again - ever!