Okay, I've got a question that i was just thinking about for some reason about falling and the speed of that..

Question

here's a word problem i need help with...

an unfortunate accident happens on a plane and a man/woman is falling from a heighth of say... 800 feet..... while falling with thier face toward the sun (as if your back would hit the ground first)... the man/woman is holding their child closely to their chest... approximately 10-20 feet before hitting the ground, the man/woman hurls their child upward into the air, thus resulting in slamming into the ground onto their back.... would the child be alive?? would they just suffer the damages of a 10- 20 foot fall??? or would it not even matter.... can anyone help??

Answer 1

That makes sense, since, upon being thrown, the babies speed would decrease, until it reached 0 mph, then the baby would fall beginning to accelerate down at that altitude, so, your theory makes sense.

Answer 2

Since everyone was discussing the child (which I'll admit seems to have been the focus), I want to discuss the parent.

What caught my attention was the phrase : "would they just suffer the damages of a 10- 20 foot fall???"

The answer is no... They will suffer damages of the entire 800 ft fall. The difference lies in the initial velocity. Suppose you jump off a 10-20 foot tall building - you're initial velocity is zero and you accelerate as you proceed downwards. However in this case, the parent has already been falling for quite some time have a MUCH larger velocity that by the time they reach the 10-20 feet mark they're already traveling at ~223ft/sec!

And as for the propeling the child is concerned, I didn't want to comment on that, but what I read from the question was that it was supposing thrusting the child just like a rocket thrusts out its gases in the atmosphere - so while there is no earth or physical objects to commit force upon, air/gas molecules still exist!

Answer 3

Well, since they would be traveling at 120 mph as they hit the ground, I would think that the ability to perform this act 10-20 feet before you hit the ground would be near impossible.

But assuming you could, just for arguement's sake, just how fast, if a person were standing, is the velocity of a child when thrown in the air? at best, probably a couple miles an hour? So what's 120 -2? 118. I think that would be fast enough to kill the child.

Plus, there's the question of having nothing you're pushing *against* when you thrown the child up. When you're standing, you're pushing against the ground, as it were. If you're in space, and you push something, you move away from the object, absorbing half the force. So since the adult is in the air, I would think that however fast you could theoretically thronw your child, half that speed would merely be added to your *own* speed, so you should halve whatever speed you think you're subtracting from the child's speed.

Anyway you slice it, they're all goners.

Answer 4

IF the parent were to push the child upward with enough force to give them a zero velocity, then basically it would just be a 10-20 foot fall for them. BEAR IN MIND: It is VERY unlikely that a human could exert enough force to overcome the velocities involved. Also the child will be decelerating from near terminal velocity to zero over a very short distance. This itself would exert a great external force on the child, not much less than hitting the ground.

Answer 5

if they are falling from 800 feet then they have reached (or are very close to) "terminal velocity" meaning they are travelling at ~120mph

if the parent wants to trow "up" the kid as to make the kid stop completly and then fall they (needless to say) they need to push their kid to 120mph...

there are a few problems with that: 120mph is very very fast for a human to trow, specially when they are not footed. (a fastball is roughly the same speed and the pitcher is well footed and a baseball is much lighter than a human baby)

even if the parent was some sort of trowing powerhouse... trowing a live person that fast would induce very high G on them which would be not healthy...

Answer 6

Depends on how hard the person threw the child up. But I still think that the speed they are falling will be much much faster than the speed the person threw the child up. Therefore, most probably the baby will still die.

Answer 7

you'd have to figure out how fast that person was going when he/she threw the baby... in order for the baby to experience the effects of only a 10-20 ft fall, the adult would have to negate the baby's downward momentum. that's accomplished by throwing the baby upwards. you'd have to find the baby's downward momentum and then figure out how fast the adult would have the throw the baby upwards. it'll be some incredibly large speed that the adult would have to throw the baby and it's likely impossible.

interesting thoughts for a friday night.

Answer 8

Throwing the child would slow him/her down slightly, but not enough to save his/her life.

Mythbusters did a test on a similar story about a person jumping at the last minute in a falling elevator to save his/her life. They found that jumping would slow your descent slightly, but not enough to save your life.

Answer 9

Best bet is to try it and see...