how many g's can a human body take without damage?

Question

anything about g forces would be helpful

Answer 1

There's perhaps a lot bigger variation in this than you think. When you're talking about what people can withstand, there are a number of variables you need to take into consideration - duration of gee-force, bodily position, clothing, environment, and so on. Let me give you a few examples:

Old rockets used to lauch VERY fast. A typical launch was a ten gees. At ten gees, a normal person standing up would lose consciousness in about a second, and then probably fall to the ground and become severly injured (remember, the fall is ten times as hard too!). On the other hand, when lying down and in a pressure suit, astronauts in good health could endure it for a minute or two... long enough to get into orbit while remaining conscious at the controls. (These days, the Shuttle only launches at 3 gees, which is why astronauts don't have to be in top-notch health any more.)

Many roller-coasters subject riders to as much as 3 gees, though there have been a few exceptions which go a little above five. These high gee forces, however, are usually for less than a second on seated people. So loss of consciousness even is unusual. A formula-1 race car can usually accelerate no more than about 1.7 gees, and brake no faster than 2 gees. (Funny how piffling that is compared to even a roller coaster.)

Fighter pilots frequently experience more than 6 gees and up to 8 gees in certain maneuvers. Again, they are seated and wearing pressurized suits to help them endure these forces, and even so effects such as tunnel vision, colourblindness, and an inability to understand speech is common during those periods of acceleration. The next step beyond that is usually a loss of consciousness, which at eight gees generally occurs in 4-6 seconds.

In training, some pilots and astronauts have been subjected to up to 15 gees, but only for a few seconds at a time. Though it's not fun, there haven't been any long-term effects from brief periods of even these really high accelerations.

If you want to talk about injury - crash test dummies are equipped to sense gee forces when they're used. So we actually know a fair amount about the threshold for very short-term but very high accelerations. A seat belt, for example, will reduce the gees you experience in a crash to a 'mere' 30-35 gees. That's enough to break your ribs, but again not cause any long-term damage. 70-100 gees is enough to cause massive internal damage such as tearing arteries from their place and so on.

Below is a pretty good link that discusses acceleration at length. The second link is a video of fighter pilots in a gee-simulator, with a readout on the top showing how many gees they're experiencing if you want to SEE some of this. Hope this all helps! Have fun!

Answer 2

The human body can only withstand about positive 8 g's. negative g's are much less,somewhere around 3-4 before losing consciousness.

Answer 3

The acceleration due to gravity on the Earth's surface at sea level is equivalent to 1 g (pronounced gee) which is a non-SI unit of acceleration defined as exactly 9.80665 m/s2 (approx. 32.174 ft/s2); g-force or g-load is a force-equivalent, equal to 9.80665 N/kg.

The symbol g is properly written in lowercase and italic, to distinguish it from the symbol G, the gravitational constant, which is always written in uppercase; and from g, the abbreviation for gram, which is not italicized. The conventional value was established by the 3rd CGPM (1901, CR 70).

Answer 4

Up to 9g. Like the pilots before they blackout.