Throwing Cats Out of Airplanes
Here’s a fun question! What will happen to a cat if you throw it out of an airplane?
Are you ready for the answer? …In fact, nothing will happen to the cat! Because if something WERE to happen to the cat, you would get killed by rain! (Wait, what?)
Okay, okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me backtrack a little bit…
Why rain doesn’t kill you
Rain clouds are anywhere from 2 kilometres up. If you still remember anything from high school classes, the acceleration under gravity is roughly 9.8 m/s^2, and the distance traveled 1/2at^2. Without bothering you with the calculation details, a raindrop from even your lowest 2 km cloud would be falling at 197 m/s by the time it hits your head, according to those equations. In other words, fast enough for the rain to knock you unconscious :p
And yet it doesn’t. In fact, raindrops hit you at just 2 to 9 m/s, depending on the size. Why? Because of air resistance!
The raindrop starts at rest. There’s no air resistance, so it starts falling. And as it falls faster and faster, the air resistance increases, until it exactly balances the acceleration due to gravity. At that point, the raindrop just continues falling at a constant speed, which we call the terminal velocity.
(image courtesy of Institute of Physics)
A human’s terminal velocity is around 200 km/h. That’s fast enough for you to make a nice wet splat noise when you hit the ground (or so I gather from Saturday morning cartoons). And even if you don’t make a splat noise, you still wouldn’t want to hit the ground at that speed. Which is why we use parachutes.
And now back to cats!
So what does all this have to do with throwing cats out of airplanes?
Cats have great skills at landing on all 4 feet. In fact, unless you drop them from 5 cm above the ground with a lead weight chained to their back, they WILL probably land on their feet. And they would have to hit the ground pretty damn hard to get hurt.
But here’s the catch! A cat’s terminal velocity is about 40 km/h. And at that speed, the cat won’t get hurt!
So no matter how high you throw your cat from, it won’t get hurt by hitting the ground. Unless you throw the cat from so high up it chokes or freezes, it will survive!
And that’s all folks! Just a quick disclaimer: I never actually tried throwing cats out of airplanes. I’m not even fully confident about the terminal velocity of a cat – I just read it online. So if you throw a cat out of an airplane and it gets hurt, you’re a dick!
Stay tuned for next week’s installment, where we’ll be shooting hedgehogs into space with a sling!
(no, not really :p)
Update: The next (and probably final) edition of throwing cats is up! You can now find out what happens when you throw a cat into water!
February 5th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Hey Vlad,
Have to say i’m pretty impressed by the whole blog thing. =] It’s a really good idea.
Anyway, will see you tomorrow,
Jo x x x
February 11th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
[...] week, I showed you what happens when you throw a cat out of an airplane. Today, you will find out what happens when you throw a cat into [...]
February 18th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
I cant find an internet reference to the incident I have in mind, but in the early to mid 1990′s a radio station in Las Vegas, NV did throw a cat out of a plane. The cat broke it’s legs but survived. (They suffered a large lawsuit due to animal cruelty. )
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