THE ULTIMATE PUSH NOTIFICATION
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This is What Would Happen If, a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if you chucked your phone into space?

It's hard to overstate just how incredible our phones are. They grant us a near-constant connection to the infinite knowledge of the internet. After a decade under the influence of the smartphone, it's hard to say whether or not this has been a boon to humanity or not.

There you are, minding your own dang business and you feel that familiar buzz. A few short years ago, this was a happy moment, heralding the arrival of a good text, a like on your status update of "eating nachos" or an email from a close friend inviting you to dinner. Now, that buzz feels like someone ripping of a scab from a wound that will never heal. What fresh hell awaits you should you decide to look at your phone's screen?

You could look at it. Or you could not. In fact, you could take your phone, cock your arm back and just chuck that stupid piece of metal and glass. The way this ends, for even the strongest among us, is your phone hitting the ground and breaking in some way. But what would happen if you were able to wing that dang thing past them mountains, and all the way into space?

Maybe you would be sad, now that you can't immediately pull up who won best supporting actress in 1993 (it was Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny). Maybe you would be happy, now freed from a constant stream of headlines and push notifications. Maybe that sadness would give way to happiness or vice versa. It's really hard to say how you, personally, would react to such a thing. That said, most of us would likely be OK with violently ditching our most prized piece of consumer technology. A recent study did find that the youngs are using smartphones less and less, and based on interviews the Guardian conducted, we all pretty much view our phones as a necessary evil. (Thank god.)

What we do know is that your phone will definitely die.

First, we need to deal with two frustrating caveats. In our fun hypothetical situation where it's possible to throw your phone into outer space we run up against two problematic constants: the Earth's gravity and atmosphere. In order to launch your phone into the infinite, you would need to huck that thing at some 25,000 MPH through some 300 miles of atmosphere. As the online pedants have most likely already pointed out by now, if you were to chuck your phone into space it would either just disintegrate from the force of the acceleration or the atmospheric drag. For the sake of this hypothetical, let's just assume that… doesn't happen.

With gravity and the atmosphere conveniently out of the way, let's bring our focus back to the real star here: the endless void of space. As recently as 2013, NASA has launched phones up into space with its PhoneSat program — but these are phones at the heart of satellites, protected from harsh extremes of space.

As your phone floats away in the shadow of Earth temperatures would drop to around -320 F. While not as cold as the ambient temperature of space — this is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background and it is very cool to read and think about — it is most definitely cold enough to kill your phone's battery in short order. Just a short drop to -4 F would cut the lithium-ion battery's life in half, and engineers have only managed to get lithium ion batteries to function in temperatures as low as -76 F. Your phone, naked and alone adrift in space, would not be long for this world in such extreme cold.

While space can be very cold, it can also get very warm. Our planet lies in orbit some 93 million miles from the sun. And yet, even here, without the protection of the atmosphere, our sun has the power to heat objects to a toasty 300 F. This, too, would mess with your battery. As anyone who had the misfortune of owning a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 can tell you, lithium-ion batteries do not like heat. If your phone managed to avoid the cold shadows our planet casts and instead drifted into direct sunlight, the battery would overheat to the point of explosion.

If the wild temperature swings aren't enough to kill your phone (spoiler: they definitely are) then the cosmic radiation will, eventually brick your phone. You see here on terra firma, Earth's magnetic field protects us from the wide spectrum of electromagnetic radiation coursing through the cosmos. Once your phone leaves that field, it'll be exposed to the entire spectrum of radiation. It's a problem satellite engineers still grapple with today. The radiation will mess with the phone's circuitry — causing errors in the software that could cause a crash, physically damaging the semiconductors or build up an electrical charge that will eventually discharge and destroy the phone. Heck, cosmic radiation is a major reason why NASA has been hesitant to send humans to Mars — it's a death sentence for both man and machine.

Don't get us wrong. The smartphone is an incredible feat of engineering, but it, surprisingly, is only designed to operate here on Earth. In the dark unending void of space the smartphone would fare no better than us — drifting lifelessly into the infinite. That is, of course, until eventually something finds it.

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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