The other day a little ant was on my hand, and rather than shmush him I shook him off, and he landed I know not where.
I then wondered if I had killed the little bugger (residual guilt from childhood ant-massacres with magnifying glasses, surely). What’s the highest an ant can fall and walk away, even if slightly dazed? (I guess acceleration could be factored in for a really detailed analysis.) His little head isn’t even exoskeletoned…
IIRC, for a lot of insects, there is no maximum distance they can fall and survive: their terminal velocity is insufficient to injure them.
And that should be “and NOT survive”
Probably the edge of space…
Only because the ant might asphyxiate.
Heck, if I dropped a person from the edge of space (and gave them a parachute and a breathing mask), they’d likely survive. For instance, an Air Force officer did such a high-altitude jump in 1960 (though not from the edge of space). While his maximum free-fall velocity was over 600 mph, he slowed down to a much lower terminal velocity as the air density increased.
Anyway, don’t confuse “very high up” with “typical orbital or suborbital velocities.” The issue with orbital reentry is not the altitude; it’s bleeding off the orbital speed.
I cannot wait untill we get suits strong enough that we can “parachute” from space to the earth. We just gotta get by the whole reentry thing
I don’t think re-entry is that bad for a person, comparatively… I mean, space ships have high mass and high surface area, so they generate a lot of heat upon re-entry. I’m not saying it’s cake walk for a person to do it, but they won’t need super-awesome yet break at the drop of a hat ceramic plates.
Don’t forget the pressure suit. Kittinger suffered some injuries because his pressure suit failed around the glove area.
He also went into a flat spin at 120rpm that exposed his extremities to some very high G forces during an earlier jump that almost killed him.
For the OP, it’s worth noting that even your average cat is possibly safe* to drop from any height. Thanks to the square-cube law, as size diminishes, weight diminishes at an even greater rate. Air resistance for small animals becomes a significant factor.
“First, assume your cat is a square cube…” 
Incidentally, my wife knows from bitter childhood experience that a gerbil will not survive a fall from an 8-year-old’s shoulder onto a tiled kitchen floor.
Spaceships develop a lot of heat because they’re hauling ass during re-entry. Orbital velocity is around 17,500 MPH; at these speeds, Mach heating (compression of air as it strikes the leading edges of the aircraft) results in temperatures of several thousand degrees, regardless of whether you’re a space shuttle or a pressure-suited astronaut.
OTOH if you in your pressure suit a’re simply dropped from 400,000 feet with zero initial velocity, you’ll only achieve about 2500 MPH before aero drag will start to decelerate you. This is still a problem: the SR-71, when flying at over 2000 MPH, reportedly reached skin temperatures in excess of 1000F.
Which is likely to be part of the reason cats are the size they are.
But the SR-71
I don’t think our intrepid astrodiver would attain anywhere near that kind of external temperature.
Incidentally, I had a cat who fell from an 8th-storey balcony straight to the ground, and wasn’t even injured. A little sore, but checked out with the vet with no need for treatment.
Some ants that live in the canopy of rainforests will voluntarily jump out of the tree if in danger, and then are able to control their descent so they end up back on the trunk of the home tree even though they lack any gliding adaptations.
As has been said, ants can fall from any height without damage from the fall. However, cold temperatures at high altitudes might kill one if you dropped it out of a plane.
Keep in mind we’re not talking about viscous skin drag effects; rather, we’re dealing with adiabatic compression of the incoming air as it hits the object at high velocity. Altitude/ambient pressure doesn’t particularly factor into the phenomenon. To know final temperature, you need to know the initial air temperature and the speed of the object. A lower initial pressure just means you will achieve a lower final pressure (resulting in less drag than you would at lower altitudes), but you will still achieve the same final temperature.
The ambient temp at 400,000 feet (“initial air temperature” in the preceding paragraph) is approximately the same as at 100,000 feet (the realm of the blackbird), ergo 2500 MPH at 400K feet will net you the same skin temp you would achieve by traveling that speed at 100K feet.
A freefalling object’s terminal velocity is a function of the density of the air through which it’s falling. Dropping from a higher altitude means you have less aero drag for a longer time; you fall through more thin air before you actually begin to decelerate. For a previous thread, I made an Excel spreadsheet model of Kittinger’s freefall from 100,000 feet, accounting for his drag profile and the varying temperature/pressure/density of the atmosphere at any given altitude; the model correctly matched his reported peak freefall speed of ~600 MPH. If the initial conditions are changed to a 400K-foot drop, the model predicts a peak speed of 2500 MPH before reaching more dense air at lower altitudes and actually beginning to decelerate.
That has to do with the ‘Cat righting’ reflex - but then there is the buttered cat paradox to consider…
Myth busters time. I wanna drop an ant from the ISS. the only hard part is locating it after it lands…
Attach a GPS enabled cell phone to it. 
Doesn’t the thermal conductivity of the air, which depends on the ambient density (?), matter? From what I think you’re saying, at steady state, the skin temp would be identical in both situations; I’m just wondering whether there’d be enough time during the freefall for sufficient heat to flow to the diver to reach the steady state skin temp you mentioned.
Although, from this profile of atmospheric temperature v. height, it looks like it’s a lot warmer at 400K feet, than at 100K, so from your statement, the skydiver already starts out in a worse place than the Blackbird. Thanks for the graphs; as I recall the Kitteridge thread was a very interesting one.
