Photo: Skyler Ewing

Is it safer to fall on land or water?

aviation.stackexchange.com - If my parachute fails to open, why should I aim for land rather than ...

Who escaped death most?

None of Selak's near death experiences have ever been independently verified, and at times some of his accounts of his near death experiences were...

Last updated Feb 12, 2022

Why is the bathroom safe during a hurricane?

Bathrooms are usually rooted and the plumbing within the walls is considered to add some structural strength, therefore the bathroom may be the...

Last updated Nov 22, 2021

Promotion

$egingroup$

An impact on land has a small chance of survival, an impact on unbroken water has none. Falling from thousands of feet without a parachute is very likely a death sentence, but there are a handful of cases in which people have survived. In nearly all of them, it is because the person landed in particularly hospitable terrain, like hitting a number of branches on the way down to slow their fall, or rolling down a steep hill. All of these stories have one thing in common: slowly breaking your fall What kills you isn't really the impact, it's the deceleration of the impact. You could be slowly lowered from 10,000 feet by a crane and you'd be just fine. But when you fall from great height, you build up a lot of speed as energy that has to be dissipated upon impact, and if it can't be dissipated into your environment it gets dissipated into you. Your body can absorb reasonable impacts from reasonable heights, but it has limits. When you slowly break your fall, you're essentially splitting one unsurvivable impact into many smaller survivable ones.

What does this all have to do with land versus water?

Land has terrain. Water doesn't. If you hit the side of a grassy hill and roll down hundreds of feet before finally stopping, you've dissipated all this energy into the hill, while splitting up all the impact on your body. If you hit the water, it really doesn't matter whether it's hot water, cold water, saltwater, freshwater, mineral water, branded water. It's going to be a very, very hard impact, and it's going to be head-on, because water is always level to gravity, so no hills or angles to dissipate energy. Water's very high surface tension means that at speed, the surface of water behaves much like the surface of a brick.

In Short:

Avoid water if you're falling without a parachute. Aim for trees. Or hills. Or peat bogs. Or giant trampolines. Or something that isn't flat and uniform like water.

What is the most famous bag in the world?

Hermès Birkin. Maybe one of the most iconic handbags ever is the Hermès Birkin Bag – named after the British-born, Paris-based actress Jane Birkin....

Last updated Aug 18, 2018

How long should a 15 year old play video games per day?

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than two hours per day of screen-based entertainment. Parents should create a “media plan”...

Last updated Feb 27, 2020

Promotion

What is Earth running out of?

Topsoil and phosphorus: Both neccessary for the growing of food. While our global supply of soil isn't going to wander off-world, we have mismanaged it to the point of concern. Topsoil is the outermost layer of soil, from which plants obtain most of their vital nutrients.

bbc.co.uk - Stillicide - Six things you didn't know we're running out of - BBC

As of 2019, there are around 500,000 objects orbiting the Earth. Only about 2,000 of them are actually functional – satellites that we use daily for communications, GPS and watching our favourite shows. The rest are debris from rocket launches and previous collisions of orbital objects. Objects colliding in orbit risk damaging the networks we need for our phones to connect. The problem? That 500,000 figure covers only the objects that are actively being tracked, and new ones are being launched every day. As technology improves, it’s becoming easier and easier to introduce something into orbit. While that’s generally good news for us as a species, there’s no air traffic control for all of these objects hurtling around above the planet, and as yet no system to clear up the useless and left-over items – the ones cluttering up near-Earth orbit. As things get busier, the risk of these objects colliding and causing very real damage to the networks we need for our maps to work, our phones to connect and our weather tracking systems to function becomes higher. While the race is on to find a solution to this problem, we don’t currently have one.