You would quite simply be squashed.
The squishiness is what’s important here, but you don’t need a supercomputer to figure this one out. (Well, you need a supercomputer and a couple of engineering courses if you want actual numbers.)
Force = (change in momentum)/(time of collision)
The change in momentum is the v_f - v_o that amanatee27 talked about: punkin starts at whatever punkin terminal velocity is, and ends up with zero velocity. This will be true for whatever object you drop (okay, okay, as long as it has the same terminal velocity of the punkin).
What’s important here is the time of the collision–and that’s the squishiness that everyone keeps talking about. It’s also why you really would rather get hit by a water balloon than a baseball. Yes, water is an incompressible fluid, but a water balloon is pretty darned compressible! Especially compared to a baseball. This is why we have airbags. Consider two identical collisions: two cars, each going at 65 mph, then crashing and coming to a complete stop. The drivers of each car will experience the same change in momentum (for you purists, yes, the drivers have identical mass. Okay?). Now give driver #1 an airbag. Driver #1 will have a lot fewer injuries from crashing into an airbag (squishy) than driver #2, who slams into the steering column (not squishy).
Not that I’ve actually answered the question about whether or not a punkin will kill you when dropped from 50 stories. Anybody got a supercomputer? Or even better: a 50 story building, an endless supply of punkins, and a force meter of some kind?
No. You don’t need a supercomputer. A modern PC will work just fine. FEA programs are complicated, but they don’t need a special computer to run on.
Not squished, squashed.
Real men squared.
As god…
Incase nobody else has posted it:
Which is harder your head or a waterbed?
here in the city we had a kid throw a pumpkin off an overpass (quite a bit less tall than 5o stories) and it went threw a bus windshield and killed the driver. So we know the outcome at least once…
In that case, the velocity of the bus is the major factor give a typical ~20-foot overpass clearance. You could just as easily hang the pumpkin from the overpass and let the bus run into it with much the same effect.
OTOH, the terminal velocity of a falling pumpkin should easily be equal to that of a bus moving in traffic, so we can safely assume that given enough height the falling pumpkin would kill someone without any additional factors included.
Just wanted to say, a long time ago (around 10-12 years back), I was flipping through the channels and came across a guy getting pumpkins thrown on him from the roof of a building. I think it was Gallagher, but I’m not sure. I seem to recall he was wearing a dinosaur suit and holding an umbrella. There was a slo-mo shot of one of the pumpkins glancing off his head, and he went down. He was lying there on the ground, motionless, as pumpkins smashed all around him. I think only a few of them actually hit him though. I laughed for about a half hour straight.
Unfortunately, all my googling turns up is a bunch of Smashing Pumpkins and Oasis links, and I don’t have the patience right now to do further searching. I do remember the building was nowhere near 50 stories, it was probably 5 to 7 stories tall at most. I would imagine they used pumpkins that were over-ripe and soft, but not rotten (the slow-mo showed the pumpkin shattering on impact with the head). Even so, the man was knocked unconscious. I only happened across this right before impact, and afterwards was laughing too hard to pay attention, so I don’t have any further details. But if you can be knocked cold from less than 10 stories, I’d imagine a pumpkin from 50 stories would have the potential to kill you.