Death On Mercury Would Be Very Fast And Painful
As infinitely fascinating as the universe is, it's also inescapably terrifying. So much of the cosmos is unknown and mysterious, which makes it inherently frightening, and even those areas of space that are relatively close by can be scary in their own way.
Planets in our own solar system may have fascinated us for centuries, but actually standing on their surface would be a horrific experience without the proper precautions. For years, humankind has wondered what it might be like to traverse the surface of an alien planet, to the extent that companies such as Space X have made it their mission to establish a colony on Mars (it also has quite a lot to do with the fact climate change and the worst impacts of global warming may soon render our own planet inhospitable, but still). When we do finally establish ourselves on the red planet, we will have developed the technology to allow us to deal with the hostile surface conditions, which would otherwise kill us almost instantaneously due to the low atmospheric pressure and abundance of carbon dioxide in the air. For now, then, living on Mars remains a distant but achievable goal.
But what about other planets in our solar system? Well, as you might imagine, Mercury, being the closest planet to the Sun, remains an impossibility in terms of human colonization. Standing on this planet would be a hellish experience and the only saving grace would be that it wouldn't last very long at all.
Standing on Mercury would expose you to extreme heat
As morbid as it might seem to imagine what death would be like in various places in space, it actually reveals quite a lot of fascinating details about the cosmos and the strange worlds which populate it. Hypotheticals such as what would happen if the sun exploded, are, for instance, kind of fun to think about. Imagine solar winds capable of stripping our planet of its magnetic field. It's simultaneously awe-inspiring and nightmare-inducing to imagine, but you can't say it's not interesting.
Likewise, imagining what it might be like to stand on Mercury is both fascinating and terrifying. The closest planet to the sun is, as you might imagine, unfathomably hot, but there's a lot more to the question of what it might be like to stand on the planet's surface.
Interestingly enough, despite its close proximity to our central star, Mercury actually isn't the hottest planet in the solar system (it's Venus). That's due to the fact it doesn't have an atmosphere, and instead has a thin exosphere which can't retain the heat from the sun. That said, it's not as if the climate on Mercury is going to cool you off. If you were to stand on the side facing the sun, you would experience temperatures of up to 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I say "experience," it would barely qualify as such a thing. That's because you would burn to death in a matter of seconds, while all the water in your body was vaporized. Still, for a few milliseconds, it might be a strangely beautiful sight, as the sun would appear more than three times as large in the sky as it does on Earth — though, you might not be able to perceive its size, given that sunlight is as much as seven times brighter on Mercury.
You could also die of extreme cold (and lack of oxygen) on Mercury
Like all planets, Mercury rotates as it orbits the sun, completing a year in just 88 days while a day takes 59 days, which means there's always a much colder side of the planet than the one being blasted by solar rays. Due to that very thin exosphere, whatever side happens to be facing away from the sun, will actually be extremely cold, as all the heat escapes the planet and plunges it into extremely frigid conditions. On the dark side of Mercury, temperatures drop to as low as minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit, which means we wouldn't find any kind of respite here, either.
Speaking to Newsweek, Jennifer Glass, an associate professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences & Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, explained that dying on the cold side of Mercury would be very similar to dying in outer space and would take just a few short minutes. Of course, with no atmosphere and a lack of oxygen, we'd very quickly find ourselves unable to breathe anyway, so we'd likely die of lack of oxygen before the cold got us. Either way, Mercury is about as inhospitable to life as it gets.