I later learned that the reason the sparks didn’t hurt him was that they were tiny; the heat they carried could be absorbed into the body without warming anything more than a tiny patch of skin. The hot molecules in space are like the sparks in my dad’s machine shop; they might be hot or cold, but they’re so small that touching them doesn’t change your temperature much.1 Instead, your heating and cooling is dominated by how much heat you produce and how quickly it pours out of you into the void.
