It’s more like getting punched. Really hard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)
Also wanted to share this table since energy expressed in eV sounds like big numbers but it’s nice to understand that the definition of the eV is small in our usual definition of energy.
I'm guessing I would probably survive, but certainly wouldn't volunteer to get hit with such a particle, and I'm guess that if it went through my brain stem or maybe my heart, there's a good chance it would kill me.
For comparison a typical professional baseball pitch is around 90mph. At 63mph I guess it might not break your face, but it would certainly leave a bruise (if it was actually a baseball -- who knows what the actual particle would do to flesh and bone). I know people are pretty derisive about using swimming pools or whatever for measurement, but I think this one is pretty good for bringing incomprehensible numbers into the realm of lay-understanding.
[1] Extreme example from memory... meh google, In 1978 Soviet physics student Anatoli Bugorski got zapped by a proton beam which burned a track through his head. Recovered with damage, completed his PhD and is still alive.
> Reportedly, he saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but did not feel any pain.
He was hit with a 76GeV beam; this was a single particle with 320 billion GeV. I do wonder how many particles at 76GeV he was hit with.
And yeah... damage.
> The left half of Bugorski's face swelled up beyond recognition and, over the next several days, the skin started to peel, revealing the path that the proton beam had burned through parts of his face, his bone, and the brain tissue underneath. As it was believed that he had received far in excess of a fatal dose of radiation, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow where the doctors could observe his expected demise. However, Bugorski survived, completed his PhD, and continued working as a particle physicist. There was virtually no damage to his intellectual capacity, but the fatigue of mental work increased markedly. Bugorski completely lost hearing in the left ear, replaced by a form of tinnitus. The left half of his face was paralysed due to the destruction of nerves. He was able to function well, except for occasional complex partial seizures and rare tonic-clonic seizures.
Yikes.
As others have noted, the total energy equivalent is that of a moderately-fast baseball throw, which, in the case of a baseball is perceptible but generally not harmful.
The transmission mechanism for the baseball is the electromagnetic force, where the individual molecules of the baseball are interacting with the individual molecules of your body, and the imposed and reactive forces are roughly equivalent.
In the case of the OMG particle, as a proton it would exert a positive charge, and might steal an electron (becoming a hydrogen atom in the process), or interact directly with a nucleus, though likely splitting that. The atoms of your body are principally carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, atomic numbers 1, 12, 14, and 16, respectively. The result of such an interaction might be isotopes of: H, He, Li, Be, or B, numbers 1--5 inclusive. There would likely be a chain of such interactions depending on the effective cross-section of the incident particle, atoms in your body, and any collision particles, though this is pretty much where my physics knowledge abandons me.
Online sources suggest that this is pretty accurate: the particle would pass straight through you:
<https://www.technology.org/how-and-why/if-proton-nearly-at-l...>
Presuming there is a collision within your body, at this point you have a particle stream, interacting with other material through electromagnetic and nuclear (strong and weak) forces. Again, you're dealing with exceedingly high energies, and it seems likely to me that those particles would tend to exit your body and have further interactions with the surrounding region (air and solid matter), which would result in some local ionisation and light heating. The question is the interaction cross-section of the incident particle, atoms within your body, and any collision and decay products.
Point being that you don't want to necessarily direct the maximum energy at a target, but the energy that will disrupt or interact with that target in the manner in which you intend.
Cosmic rays are striking your body all the time, though at lower energies. The effects tend to be local ionisation and, most critically, damage to genetic material. The latter is the most significant from a biological perspective.