What if you teleport inside a hermetically sealed closet — no vents, no gaps. You’ve become a piston, and the air gets crushed into whatever gap is left over.
Here’s the fun part: what matters is not how big the closet is, but the ratio of the original air volume to the leftover gap. Squeeze air into a smaller space fast and it heats up (this is the same physics that makes a bike pump warm and a diesel engine fire). Compress it by a ratio r and, for air, the pressure climbs as r^1.4 and the temperature as r^0.4.
I ran the ladder for a real, 0.07 m³ person, shrinking the closet toward body-size:
| Closet size | Compression ratio | Pressure | Air temperature | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small wardrobe (~0.7 m³) | ~1.1 | ~1.2 atm | +13 °C | Ears pop, warm puff. You’re fine. |
| Large cooler (~0.14 m³) | 2 | ~2.6 atm | ~114 °C | A scalding pulse. Cheap walls strain. |
| ~10% bigger than you (~0.077 m³) | ~11 | ~29 atm | ~490 °C | Bursts the box, cooks the occupant. |
| ~1% gap (~0.0707 m³) | ~100 | ~640 atm | ~1,580 °C | The air glows orange-white. |
| Sub-percent sliver | 1,000+ | 16,000+ atm | 4,600 °C and climbing | Hotter than a welding arc. Plasma starts here. |
Read that bottom row again. As the closet closes in on the exact volume of your body, the trapped air has almost nowhere to go, the compression ratio runs away toward infinity, and the temperature marches right past the “glowing” stage into honest-to-goodness ionization. Yes, you can make plasma — but only in the razor-thin margin where the closet barely, barely exceeds you.