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Asked by ava and hibba!! on 22 Jan 2025.
Question: if you fell off the statue of liberty, but landed on a massive cushion, would you break any bones?
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Kirsty Lindsay answered on 22 Jan 2025:
You probably would yes- even if you landed in a giant pile of feathers!
When we fall we gain a lot of energy, and when we land on the floor all that energy goes through our body, and if there is more energy than our bones can cope with they will break.
You would be better to use a parachute so you fall more slowly and have less energy to deal with when you hit the floor.
Comments
Andrew M commented on :
As they say, it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing. All that energy you’ve gained has to go somewhere and if what you land on is particularly hard and immovable then it’s all going somewhere all at once and that’s very, very bad.
Impact is governed by Newton’s laws of motion, it’s the change in speed over time. Reduce the speed of collision or increase the time of collision and the force of collision will be lower, eventually to the point at which in becomes survivable. It’s the same principle that means you bend your knees when landing a jump or why cars have crumple zones and airbags.
Kinetic energy is kinetic energy whichever direction you’re moving in. The maximumum speed a person falls at is around 120 miles per hour. If you’ve flown or travelled on a high speed train then you’ve already been faster than that, but in those cases the “Impact” is low because the time taken to slow you from 120mph to zero is very long, so the force is very low and you’re not turned into strawberry jam every time you fly. The same would be true if jumping from a great height. If you could control the force of impact by decreasing the speed, yes, for example using a parachute, and / or by increasing the time of collision using a giant airbag then you could reduce the force of impact to the point you’d walk away unharmed. Well, so long as your maths is right.