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Comment by King-Aaron | Hacker News Reader

That introduction Haldane quote:

> 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, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

"A horse splashes". That's some mental imagery right there.

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Makes me wonder if a bunch of the world's smallest flightless mammal (a fraction of the house mouse's mass) were released at altitude, would they survive? (Not proposing that this be done but thought experiments and/or simulations):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_shrew

At altitude it's very cold, the shrews don't work well in the cold due to the same thing that makes them suitable for this experiment - they are very small, thus they lose heat to the environment easily. So, it's possible they freeze to death first. But yes, I imagine that if they survive the cold and aren't falling onto a hard surface (e.g. they land in grass, not a car park) they would survive.

For them other than the cold a drop from 1000 metres is the same as a drop from 10 metres.

Research is obviously warranted on the possibility of shrew blankets that can automatically detach when they touch down.

I think if we're going to give shrews blankets, we should just give the shrews blankets, not conditioned on volunteering for this potentially fatal research project.

Nah, do the same thing they did for one of the Venus landers--fasten them with something that melts. Once they have reached an altitude where the temperature won't kill them the tether melts and the blanket falls away. (On Venus they did it to cut a chute because it would have made the lander fall so slowly it would have died before landing.)

However, shrew blankets change the whole scenario to irrelevance--a shrew in a blanket sufficient to keep it safe has very different aerodynamic behavior than a naked shrew.

Isn't it proven that squirrels have a terminal velocity below what is harmful to them? [citation needed]

Shrews also starve to death if they go a few hours without food, which might complicate the logistics of the experiment a bit.

“As god is my witness I thought turkeys could fly”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg

Turkeys can fly, though. Just not the domestic ones :)

And soon Türkiye can even fly F-16s

Türkiye has had those for decades - I remember seeing one take off from Dalaman in the early 00's while I was waiting for a flight there.

Thanks for that. I was a bit too young to appreciate WKRP when I would see it in syndication. Great line.

This gives "The Taming of the Shrew" an entirely new meaning.

The J. B. S. Haldane essay he’s referring to is On Being the Right Size from 1926. It’s part of the anthology On Being the Right Size and Other Essays, which you can still find, and is still worth reading.

For science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4VmVDl8AkI

Then I wonder what would happen if a Roc fell asleep midflight…

It would fade

The Roc feel air :-) (if the plane is owned by some oil company)

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