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It is 12:55am and this made me actually lol, a lot of

No gravity (from the earth), no magnetic fields, no tides. Suspect it would immediately go haywire even before freezing etc

To me the more interesting question is how the ocean is gotten into space. Maybe involve the Five Chinese Brothers—specifically the one who can swallow the sea. Timing has to be bang bang—he sucks it up from Cape Canaveral, then gets choppered to the rocket already in countdown on the launchpad...

It was a conundrum with which I wrestled.

Maybe some millions of small ice asteroids eventually reform. I don’t think they are gravitationally bound to each other in any meaningful way. Maybe some bacteria survive all of this and inhabit these asteroids.

Is this something @seanmcarroll.bsky.social could answer?

seems too cold

Pressure is important. The fish would get the bends.

"We can't be together because her family lives in the Neutral Zone."

""adventures""

This is hilarious

I can safely say, teleporting the fish has not been solved yet by science. They could not remember any jokes the where told about the orange rapist before teleporting.

Holy shit a typing fish

I think you’re a fraud. The internet I know disagrees with EVERYTHING.

That sounds like a question for Randall Munroe.

What is this teleport technology you speak of?

The water is not moving at orbital velocity so it immediately begins falling back to earth resulting in global catastrophe and the fish are not gonna have a good time hitting the ocean floor with a billion tons of water falling on them

How old is your son?

@dearhankandjohn.bsky.social

It would freeze instantly though. So they'd all perish ultimately.

Yes, I thought the question sounded familiar, thanks for digging it up

Agreed, it depends on what you mean by “space”

This is correct answer (the others assume 100% liquid or solid in the ocean). It would be like instantly opening a huge bottle of soda. There would be a few blobs of water with life in them left over, but not for long. bsky.app/profile/simo...

With no gravity and no atmosphere, there’s nothing to give the water any pressure. When water has little to no pressure, it quickly turns to vapor. It would explode outwards and the fish would not have long to live, I’m afraid.

I feel like they would pretty instantly disperse all the water through their own movement. Dead in a few minutes. Tell your son

The ocean does not simply explode or instantly boil away; exposed surfaces are destroyed thermodynamically, while a sufficiently massive self-gravitating interior may remain liquid and temporarily habitable. Fish survival is conditional and short-lived for most fish, but not impossible for all fish.

(sotto voce) Could we not give the ocean dwellers any ideas, please?

This ocean in space discussion is my happy thing today.

But given the huge area vs. the relatively tiny depth, what impact is the gravity going to have? Whether it forms a big sphere or not, I'm guessing no place would be liveable because of either pressure or temperature in short order.

That’s an interesting point.

It will instatly evaporate. The ocean is liquid under 1 bar pressure. You remove 1 bar, it turns gas

Boil then freeze leaving an ice cloud with fishy bits. www.forbes.com/sites/starts...

Especially considering that the right answer is too complex for - you and most of the commenters, let alone the child. Why is the sky blue? A1: the atmosphere diffracts the light. End of conversation. A2: thar's a great question. Why did you think it is blue?

But it's metastable. Nutrient cycling will be limited as some of the fish poop sinks and freezes into exotic ices on the planetoid's core. You'll need to add a lot of nutrient rich meteors to keep it viable. Milankovich cycles will eventually turn it into a snowball. Solar flares will ablate it.

yes

Lots of very physicsy answers here, but I'm pretty sure it will depend on the nature of the teleportation machinery.

that sounds like a NASA question I think have had fish in the space station . now if they have NOT fired anyone who would know

Find and kill God, per the sacred texts

Someone would immediately build condos on all the new shorelines.

Exactly. It’s probably less than that, relatively speaking. In cosmological terms it’s a ‘meh’.

also *ergo not ego, DYAC

My partner is a physicist

Like would it boil away or collapse into a sphere faster

This is a question for Randall Munroe @xkcd to answer. youtu.be/FkUNHhVbQ1Q?...

before freezing or boiling, they would immediately die and/or explode from the radical water pressure change

These answers are why I love Bluesky so much. 😂

...that's not the end of your problems! Soon after that humongous, super-thin shell of water appeared in space, it would start to collapse under its own gravity, falling very slowly at first, but steadily accelerating as it collapses inwards almost 4,000 miles toward its aggregate center of mass....

I’ve seen a chemistry experiment where a beaker of water was put inside a vacuum chamber and it boils at room temperature. The oceans would simply off into space.

i think working on such a transporter would be a fairly good life's work. "Elon?" "Buehler?"

As the water dissipates, the life in the water likely will feel a drop in pressure. This might cause the dissolved gasses in the water to start bubbling out, as in a bottle of soda when the cap is opened. That might result in the deoxination of the water. So the life might suffocate, ironically.

Thank you!

Tell him it would be safer to teleport to Waffle House.

Sorry, "still _would_" make it act like a spring.

This is the kind of theoretical that I can get behind.

If my child asked me such a deep question, I would ask back: “how would that affect Earth and everything on it?”

One for @chrislintott.bsky.social ?

This happens in the first few episodes of Robotech / Macross

Fun thread

wouldn't the sudden reduction in pressure cause the fishes blood to "boil" just like ours does? if they were in the center of the water ball, they'd still be under some pressure, i guess, but the pressure of water density kinda relies on earth gravity

Lots of great replies! I’m going to urge anyone reading this to buy Randal Monroe’s “What If?” books. Fantastic bedtime reading but your significant other may tire of you excitedly describing the latest cool thing you just read. 🙈

They would be alive until the water froze and boiled, about ten seconds.

Technically there are some "moss piglets" on the moon right now. Good chance they are dead dead at this point though - it's been years.

And a fish at the bottom of the ocean might suddenly be at the surface. Depending on how the water is teleported.

Yeah my money is on boil/explode way before freeze

I suspect that the depressurization wave would travel at he speed of sound, but of course that speed itself *varies with pressure .* Still, I would guess that the wave would move faster than a mile per minute. Definitely second tagging in @xkcd.com here.

Your son needs to read the XKCD comics

The lack of atmosphere would kill anything in baked space pretty quickly. And without gravity, the water would spread out fast.

Not certain — but I'm reminded of the question, "How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?", and the answer being, "A fish."

Is this from Star Trek IV: What About Those Whales?!?, where Scotty beams up two whales and a whole bunch of ocean to a relatively small Klingon warbird? Or are we sending an ocean into space itself, where it would lose all cohesion and spread out to infinity in the vast, frozen emptiness?

Seems like we'd have seen static pools of water in space then.

Without the earth’s gravity, how would the fish stay inside the water as it formed droplets and dispersed?

Yes, but not for long. The ocean would start "coming apart" quickly as strong expansion waves would travel from the outside vacuum inwards at the speed of sound in water, which is fast.

They would die, aka not survive. The question is how soon. How old is your son... sry I mean you.

This is just too much for a Saturday.

I feel like @philplait.bsky.social would have a good explainer on this

The water would instantly sublimate because there is no pressure in space.

Is the fish grilled or poached?

Very short (as will freeze) - if asking these questions @pbump.com you need to get the books by @xkcd.com xkcd.com/books/- really good

I think you take the win and move on to the next challenge (sounds as though there will be plenty more).

That's something to send to Randall Monroe of xkcd