Don’t know why I thought of this today, but here is the scenario:
You are skydiving and are currently falling at terminal velocity. You need to urinate and you want to minimize the amount of urine that ends up in contact with you after it exits your pee hole. You also need to urinate before you activate your parachute. What is your strategy? I’m looking for answers for both men and women.
For those of you who require a contrived hypothetical, a super villain has pushed you out of a plane with nothing but a special suit (to be explained) and a parachute that is designed to monitor your weight after activation. It has an accelerometer and a special processor to cancel out the effect of deceleration on your weight. If it finds that your weight settles on a value that is higher than 80kg, it will cut the cords. The super villain weighed you on the plane and your weight is currently 80.1kg. Luckily you have been holding in a massive piss which upon expulsion would bring you under the threshold. However the suit you are wearing has many special sensors to detect moisture and if too many are activated, the cords will be cut. So your task is to have a piss and minimize the amount of splash back before you hit the ground. What’s your strategy?
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Won’t help - the diaper will contain the urine, but it will still be attached to your body, so the total weight (and therefore the acceleration and velocity) of the system won’t change.
Invert, so I’m peeing ‘up’ including whatever manipulation I have to do to the suit and or penis to get the pee going up. Also position my body so I have some velocity in the x direction because I’m assuming that after the initial expulsion, the urine will have a terminal velocity faster than my terminal velocity and will start catching up to me again.
Hopefully this isn’t my first time skydiving so I might know how to do some of the above.
I just kick my shoes off, bringing my weight under the limit. Also, those moisture sensors are diabolical. At cruising altitude, you have several miles where there is the possibility of passing through a cloud, likely tripping them no matter how carefully you pee.
The OP doesn’t specify but I’m assuming our intrepid hero exited the aircraft high enough to allow full bladder evacuation and still have time to deploy his* parachute. I don’t know how long it takes for a normal piss (I never timed myself) but at 120 mph you fall about 500 ft. every 3 seconds and it would suck pretty bad for you to finish up & be shaking out the last few drops just as the Earth rises up to smite thee. I’m also assuming our hero is an experienced skydiver and able to get his body into the various positions necessary to pull it off.
I’m going to say the best position is standing up, just like a normal piss**. You don’t want to try it in the standard belly-to-earth skydiving position, the urine is certain to soak your jumpsuit. You could roll over on your back but the burble*** above you means at least some of the urine would go everywhere and probably end up on you. But if you’re standing up the urine won’t be released into the burble, it will go into the airstream beside you. Admittedly, for a normal person it’ll be pretty close and some could still get on them. But for me, since I have a foot-long hot dog :rolleyes: it will all go away from my body and into the smooth flow of air.
*My answer applies to men since I am one.
**Imagine that, standing there peeing except you’re not standing on anything. You look down and the ground is 2 miles below.
***The pocket of dead air above an object falling at a high rate of speed.
The solution is correct for my stated initial assumptions.
Ok, ok. Fair enough. I think you still want to get some horizontal distance away before opening up that canopy though.
I’m curious, personally, as to why the OP went through the trouble of coming up with the ‘contrived hypothetical’, but didn’t suggest a reason for the skydiver to just wait the 5 minutes before getting to land…or for that matter, if you’re really in a ‘pee or die’ situation, then the hell with it, if it gets on me, I can (literally) live with that.
Reading it I couldn’t help but think, what about if you had to do No. 2? Take a shit?
And assuming you were able to back one out while in mid air, and avoid having it hit you when you pull the rip cord, how much of a mess would it make when it hit?
Imagine driving town the road and a turd laid from 10,000 feet hits your windscreen:eek:
If it didn’t break up (I’m gonna puke just thinking about this), it would probably go through your windshield. I think your thought process would go from ‘what is…’ to ‘oh god’ to ‘how’.
I’ll leave it up to someone else to calculate the terminal velocity of that and if it could break a windshield. Also keep in mind that if it’s faster than the skydiver (same goes for the urine example, it’s…never mind, you get it, right?
The skydiver couldn’t wait to land because then he would be over 80kg and the cord would be cut, leading to his death. Similarly, he couldn’t get too much pee on him because then the sensor would detect moisture and cut the cord.
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I guess I would try to get some horizontal velocity going with my back facing the ground and my knees close to my chest. The horizontal velocity should be in the direction my head is pointed.
I figure that as I release the stream I will be moving away from it and that the droplets will fall slower than me so from my perspective will appear to travel diagonally up away from me. I think this would work for both genders.
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Assuming a face to sky position with your legs extended and your hands on your fly will cause you to move laterally in the direction of your head, there won’t be any dead space above you and you’ll leave the urine behind. You’ll need plenty of altitude, probably more than can be jumped without O2, and good luck getting the stream started.
