Cat jumps from fifth floor of burning building, bounces and strolls away (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Cat jumps from fifth floor of burning building, bounces and strolls away (2021)

cnn.com

28 pointscs7025 comments

“You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the eleventh story of a building, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”

J.B.S. Haldane, in “On Being the Right Size”, 1926, a book (PDF at https://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/spring10/HaldaneRig...) about scaling laws in biology (https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.1809090)

> the exact mechanics of the animal’s righting reflex are still not completely understood.

I don't think this is true anymore. They move their head and tail to rotate themselves upright, and due to their low weight their terminal velocity is not fatal. This video has a good explanation of the process, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtWbpyjJqrU Squirrels use a similar technique, Mark Rober has made some good videos explaining that.

Terminal velocities[1] for a horizontal human at the surface of some round rocks:

  Earth 120mph
  Venus 15mph
  Mars  928mph
  Titan 21mph

Presumably you could do a little better spread-eagled with baggy clothes.

Titan has the advantage that humans and pigs could fly without motorized assistance. It's like paradise.

But I suspect cats and squirrels (and dandelions?) are gonna have some hard falls on Mars.

1 Terminal velocities from https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4wkd99/what_is_...

A friend had a cat that survived a fall from similar height. Cats are incredible.

The cat jumps from the fifth floor of a burning building and survived and it's on camera. Not a single other cat in the whole world knows about it. Not one cat.

Now, people, what if...?

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