What is the maximum speed humans can survive with?

Question

i.e a maximum speed a man can attain while still alive.

It is learnt that mass increase with speed. That means an a million time increase in speed will increase the mass of a person and I am sure whether the body is in a position to generate as much energy as to keep a mass of,say, 1000 tonnes, alive. The body, no doubt, donot disintegrate if it keep moving at a uniform velocity. But can it still continue to enjoy a beating heart at "c"?

It seems to that if mass were to increase with increase in speed than gravitational force exerted by an object will also increase. The EM force will keep the object's part together and it will not disintegrate unless the opposte force is greater than the EM force of an object. But I am not sure if there is any effect of speed on EM force. Pl. correct me if I am not on right track.

Answer 1

Your question is meaningless. There is no maximum speed.


You are currently travelling faster than the speed of light relative to the most distant parts of the universe, and much faster than the speed of sound even relative to the centre of the solar system.

Yet you don't even fel like you are moving at all. Right?

Humans can survive any speed at all. Speed isn't even noticable. It is acceleration that kills. Provided the acceleration is slow enough humans can survive any speed.

Answer 2

It's not the speed that kills a person. It's the acceleration in a given direction. Also known as the G-Force.

Blackout usually occurs around 8 or 9 g's. However:

Strongest g-forces survived by humans

Voluntarily: Colonel John Stapp in 1954 sustained 46.2 g in a rocket sled, while conducting research on the effects of human deceleration. See Martin Voshell (2004), 'High Acceleration and the Human Body'.

Involuntarily: Formula One race car driver David Purley survived an estimated 179.8 g in 1977 when he decelerated from 172 km·h−1 (107 mph) to 0 in a distance of 66 cm (26 inches) after his throttle got stuck wide open and he hit a wall.[1]

Answer 3

Big aeroplanes have emergency slides to evacuate passengers in emergency cases. These are always very hard calculated, to get the passengers out at maximum speed without actually killing them. At rescue trainings they always get a fair few broken bones and other minor injuries, and those trainings are mostly with trained aircraft staff... A typical speed to rush down such a rescue slide is 7 meters per second, that is only about 25 km/h! We survive car crashes at much higher speeds only because we don't crash into the obstacle with the same speed as our car. Every crash at higher speed than about 50 km/h is lethal to any human, so it's quite good, that they test all these things that are designed to slow passengers down to make them not hit anything as fast as the car at speeds about and slightly above that limit - surviving a highway-speed accident is sheer luck anyway...

Answer 4

Well... you have to ask yourself "Where is the relative speed being measured from?"

And that is where i get confused. Currently we are moving very quickly, around the earth's axis, around the sun, and out from the center of the universe.

SO... my question would be, would the infinite mass be important, or not important. I know the heart muscles could not push 10,000 PSI of blood. But the blood is standing relatively still compared to the heart, it is only moving very quickly away from some other point in space.

So, we have found that time can be lost by high rates of speed (shuttle, orbit, going to the moon, etc) but i'm not sure we have seen evidence of increased mass yet.

I am certainly not saying that increased mass is not an issue, i just don't understand it and think that relating it to the movement, and defining the relative speed is where your questions is pointing.

Answer 5

Any speed, short of the speed of light. One could undergo a 1-G acceleration indefinitely (as all of us living on this globe already do), which after a year or two would get pretty close to light speed. Of course, there is no known way of creating such an acceleration for a prolonged time.

Answer 6

We don't know. The earth is moving fast relative to the center of the universe but no where close to the speed of light. No living object under our observation has gone much faster then the earth. Not to worry; it won't happen in your life time anyway.

Answer 7

A hair less than c. In the case of the man getting heavier and heavier as his speed approaches c, his apparent mass does not change. He sees himself as the same weight as he has always seen himself as. The rest of the universe sees him and thinks he needs to go on a diet, because he is ballooning up to infinite mass. Remember, relativity applys to observers. Someone observing himself, sees himself at rest, therefore no relativistic effects.

Answer 8

any speed. It's the acceleration that kills you, (something around 10G I guess)

Example - you get into a car do 0 to 60 in 4 secons, and you're fine.
You get hit by a bus and do 0 to 60 in 0.1 second, and you're dead.

Answer 9

If u run around a tree at the speed of light, u can f*** ur own as*

Answer 10

any speed acceleration does it 85 G's is the upper limit