How fast can we humans take up speed untill we get squashed like a pancake?

Answer 1

we can take an infinite amount of speed.

its the accelleration forces that do the damage.

another name for accelleration is g force, and the record for humans is either 42g (voluntarily) or 179g (involuntary).

Answer 2

Wouldn't bet my life savings but I think it goes like this: because of general relativity the take up of speed is the same thing as the losing of speed. If you do either with an acceleration (or deceleration) of around 9.8 metres per second squared then that equates to 1 gravity or 1G which the human body is quite accustomed to. Stunt display pilots and fighter pilots can stand up to about 8G I think but some of them use G suits to prevent blacking out. In some car accident situations people have apparantly survived forces of up to 50G but this is only for a very short period of time. I guess anything much more than this and you would be into human pancake territory.

Answer 3

LMAO at jimmy B

you can accelerate upto massive speeds without getting squashed. Especially if you are accelerating slowly

It all depends on what is resisting you.

The faster yu go in Air the more you will feel the air resisting your current speed.

But in a vaccum you wont see teh same effect as there is nothing to oppose you.

A different question is how fast can you accelerate before you get flattened.
No one has got there yet and so we can not ask it.

You black out at a small number of geeeeeeees

I would imagine a couple of hundred gees should flatten you.

Answer 4

The key idea about becoming a pancake involves acceleration, not speed. If one has a large acceleration or large deceleration then one becomes a pancake. For example, one can jump off the empire state building and attain a certain speed just before landing. If one hits the pavement, the change in speed (i.e. deceleration) is large and you become a pancake. However if one lands in an air cusion, the change in speed (i.e. deceleration) is small and you would not become a pancake.

Answer 5

if we go really fast on the motorway and come to sudden stop, then the pancake theorem applies. If however one boards a warp engined space craft and burns out the dilithium crystals one would be pancaked well before light speed.

Answer 6

It's not the speed that matters, it's the acceleration (or deceleration) that matters.
People in Earth orbit are moving at about 17,000 mph and they don't even feel it, but if you went from 0 to 17,000 mph in half a second, you would be friggin' dead meat!

Answer 7

We can only get squashed if there exists some substance of space to squash us. present belief of space is relative and they call it space time . so the only thing that would squash us would be rapid acceleration of space time. What ever space time is.

Answer 8

Right, here goes.
Firstly, as many others have correctly noted, it is the acceleration acting on a body which makes it experience force, not the speed at which it as travelling. Falling doesn't kill you, it's hitting the ground that does it. If you have no wind shield you will feel the force of the wind, but let's assume that you are protected or travelling in a vacuum.

Fortunately the phrase you use: "how fast..take up speed" can be construed to mean acceleration, so although not specific enough, it is not totally irrelevant.

Because of the work done to work out how we can cope with acceleration (ejector seats, pilots turning etc) and deceleration (impact, seat belts, air bags etc) there is a lot of data on what accelerations are harmful and fatal. The force of gravity acts upon us with 1g of force and this is a useful unit of acceleration. It is equal to accelerating by 9.81m/s every second.

The following pages indicate work done with dead bodies and live animals:
http://ttb.eng.wayne.edu/~cavanau/cdc99out.html
http://www.rte.ie/tv/scope/SCOPE3_show08_g_force.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/7g_pr.html

Interestingly, pilots can pull 10g for a few seconds and even 50g for a few milliseconds, but none of this work has crushed anyone flat!

To be as flat as a pancake, one's bones would have to flattened. The body is full of soft tissue which can be deformed simply under acceleration, lots of little bone which will snap, but we will assume that the skull and all othe bones would have to be flattened out to a depth of a few millimeteres!

The only source I found suggested that it takes 1400lbs (636 kg)of force to crush a human skull, 1700 (772kg) to break a femur
http://www.fightingarts.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/15756092/an/0/page/2
800 kg (1760 lbs) is required to crush a whole vertebra from the front:
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/casi4.htm

The average weight of the human head is 4.5 to 5.0 kg:
http://danny.oz.au/anthropology/notes/human-head-weight.html
To subect this to 640 kg of force would require 128 to 142g of acceleration (640kg divided by 5kg and then 4.5kg)

Assuming that a vertebra is about 6 square cm in frontal area, this would need pressure of around 1.3 million kg per square meter. The surface area of the front of my body is around 0.5 of a square metre (I'm skinny!) so this implies that I would have to weigh 600,000 kilos instead of 85 kilos for my vertebra to be crushed flat, implying acceleration of 7,000g!

Of course you might just bust like a bag of jello before your vertebrae felt the full impact, leaving your skeleton sitting there. So let's assume that my vertebrae might weigh each on average something like 30-40grammes?
So we can assume that the acceleration required to flatten one under its own weight might be someting like 20-27,000g (800kg divided by 0.04 and 0.03kg respectively)

The 2005 Renault R25 Formula one car was capable of accelerating at 1.4g, taking it to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, so you'd be safe. If you accelerated at 130g you would cover 638 meters in the first second, 2,300 kilometres in the first minute!

So there we have it, a range from 130 to 26,000g! Isn't science fun! Let me know if it ever happens to you.

Answer 9

Take one of your ex boyfriends and stick on the top of your car and drive as fast as you can... record your speed when he splatters... hey its for science we all need to know for progress sake.

Answer 10

Why thinking of getting some seriously HOT Wheels?