According to ABC Science, it was popular with ordinary citizens in the late 1800s because it seemed like a less cruel alternative to hanging. In theory, electrocution should be a quick and painless form of execution. If you're trapped with other people in a burning building, inhaling carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, and other toxic components of smoke can be lethal to your tissues - or you could simply suffocate or lose consciousness due to lack of oxygen (via FlipScience). Damage to the nervous system, blood loss, dehydration, and even burn infections can all cause death (via Broken Map). Of course, the "fire" part of being set on fire isn't the only thing that can kill a burn victim. Hence, someone being burned to death would actually feel themself burning until they can't feel anything anymore. The human body is predominantly water-based and isn't easy to burn (which is why cremation can take up to three hours). Fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-degree burns cause serious damage to a victim's fat, muscle, and bone, respectively (via the National Institute of General Medical Sciences). Here's what many don't realize: That's only halfway through the scale of pyric peril. These three types affect the skin, with third-degree burns destroying even hair follicles and pain receptors. When people hear about burns, either first-, second-, or third-degree burns come to mind. And since they aren't very picky eaters, they probably wouldn't refuse some human hors d'oeuvres. Meet the Osedax worm, also called the "zombie worm." These mysterious, mouthless invertebrates secrete bone-dissolving acids from their skin, enabling the bacteria living in the worms to consume the nutrients inside the bones of whale carcasses and other corpses. Then again, what's waiting for the poor victim at the bottom wouldn't really care about that. If it's any comfort, though, they'd still be recognizably human since the body's water can't be compressed, as San Francisco Exploratorium physicist Paul Doherty explained in a Reddit AMA thread from 2017. Every single air-filled cavity in their body would be instantly crushed like paper by roughly 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure (via National Geographic), and they'll sink instead of floating to the surface.
Down there, an unprotected person wouldn't just drown. Remember, the deeper you dive into the ocean, the greater the pressure. No one in their right mind would dive into the Mariana Trench unprepared and unprotected. So yeah, no superpowers for you, only death. 10,000 millisieverts can wreck your intestines and end you in a week, and 20,000 could kill you in mere hours. A dose of 4,000 millisieverts can kill you in two months. Meanwhile, 1,000 millisieverts can cause hemorrhaging and diarrhea (via Reuters) while increasing your cancer risk. 500 millisieverts can make you nauseated, and 700 millisieverts can cause hair loss within half a month. The CDC's Radiation Thermometer provides some perspective: A chest X-ray emits about 0.1 millisievert (or 1/10,000th of a sievert), while a flight from New York to Los Angeles emits roughly a third of that.
We measure radiation exposure in sieverts. The type and degree of suffering you'll endure depends on how you got blasted - whether internally or externally - and how much radiation you got blasted with, among other factors (via the EPA). As Popular Science explains, this can seriously damage your DNA, rendering your cells incapable of replicating and triggering their deterioration. Ionizing radiation is powerful enough to charge your atoms by removing their electrons (via the WHO).
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