Though there are many gruesome deaths in Alien: Resurrection, the final one is by far the worst. Trapped in a spacecraft with a horrible hybrid, Ripley uses her acidic blood to breach a window, and the resulting hole sucks a giant half-Xenomorph, half-human abomination across the room to plug it. Soon enough, the monster is violently forced through the hole until it is nothing but death butter floating through space. Gross.

But given what we know about the vacuum space and the physics of pressure, could a death like that ever happen? Should astronauts be worried?

In my latest Because Science, we go through what it really means to suck. In truth, there is no such thing as “sucking” in science! Instead, fluids move from areas of high pressure to areas of low pressure, and push anything along that is caught up in that flow. Unless a spacecraft were to become pressurized like the bottom of the ocean, astronauts shouldn’t have to worry about suffering the fate seen in the movie.

However, that doesn’t mean an Alien: Resurrection-like death couldn’t happen. A good plenty poor crabs suffered the exact same fate. More horrifyingly, history recalls deep sea divers of old having their whole bodies forced up into their helmets. Yeah, pretty rough.

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