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Snopes.com gives a discussion of possible issues with the original experiment. Evaporation or bowel or body movements for instance. I think the biggest complaint about the experiment is that it has not been reproducible and that the original experiment was flawed. MacDougall only took six measurements and he threw two of them out in his original work. ...

Nope, you wouldn't die instantly. While explosive decompression has never been tested on humans (for obvious reasons), the dangers of a vacuum have mostly to do with the pressure differential between your body and the now pressure-less void around you. The most fragile parts of the biological system would be the lungs and ears, and the instantaneous ...

About 52 to 74 days according to hunger strike wiki page. This wiki page bases its data on 8 persons who died due to hunger strike: Days survived by each person: 66, 59, 61, 61, 61, 46, 71, 73, 62, 60.

This would vary a LOT depending on the amount of stored fat, previous diet, the weather and even the water drunk. Weeks though there is a good chance that a loss of electrolytes can cause health problems. (that's why I mention the water you drink, because many bottled water brands and wells have a bit of salt in them.) Its hard to say from anecdotal ...

This is very dependent on the organism within each of the groups you mention. While for the most part, archea are the extremophiles and have the ability to withstand many extreme conditions, nutrient limitation survival greatly varies. I think you could easily find organisms in each group that could withstand nutrient limitation well. A good example would ...

Less then a minute breathing in the atmosphere (and a very painful death). Mars' atmosphere is >95% CO2 with only trivial O2. These are atmospheric conditions similar to those used to euthanize laboratory animals. He probably wouldn't even make it 200 meters before suffocating.

Coming up with the exact number is likely to be very difficult but i would put it in the range of 1-2 minutes to impossible. Let's ignore the lack of oxygen and assume you could hold your breath long enough to reach the safe haven. The extreme cold would easily drop your core temperature to the realm of severe hypothermia within minutes. If that doesn't ...

My answer isn't researched; it is speculative. I interpret metabolic processes as anabolic or catabolic processes. I assert that only anaerobic processes can continue for a long time after vegetative death (the epithelia could house a counter-example of a post-mortem process, but I can't think of one), and I speculate that only catabolic processes are ...