Glurge much?
I wasn’t there but a college roommates father got blown out of a copter in 'Nam, fell 800 feet and survived. Broke around 80% of the bones in his body. Lou “crunch monster” Scripa. Guy was a stud and a half. I did watch with my own eyes when he set the world record for stomach crunches in 1982 (IIRC around 18,000 crunches).
Loaded Weapon I, IIRC. Emilio Estevez tells Jon Lovitz he’s going to be all right; Lovitz gives him a thumbs-up and is then zipped into a body bag.
“Bring out 'cha dead!”
“I’m not dead!”
“Yes you are. Be quiet.”
“I’m getting better!”
Eh? 10 story building. About 100 feet. Plug in x = 1/2at2 and you get
200/32 = 6.25 = t2. Or 2.5 seconds. But feel free to show me your math.
Finagle, that’s the same answer I got when I used 0 = -16T^2 + V (T) +I
0 = -16T^2 +100
-100 = -16T^2
6.25 = T^2
2.5 = T
where 0 is where you would hit the ground, -16 will take care of the acceleration due to gravity, V(T) would cancel out assuming you had an initial velocity of 0, and I would be your initial height of 100.
But I haven’t taken physics yet either so I could be wrong as well.
doh!, my mistake. For some reason I thought we were talking about the world trade or empire state. Thats what I get when I read the posts from the bottom up.
Sorry, continue…
Keep in mind that such an extreme impact would disrupt the nervous system as well as the rest of the body. It’s an intact nervous system which transmits its messages at that speed, and even impacting the feet first will send a hydrostatic shock wave disrupting all neurons in under a second. Would pain fibers fire? Possibly. Would the brain be able to interpret the message as pain prior to being disrupted all to hell? I doubt it very, very much.
I’ve treated survivors of massive trauma who said that nothing really hurt too much, or even at all, for the first 15-30 seconds or so. I myself survived a plane crash, and did not feel any pain until I tried to move to get out of the wreckage. Only then did I notice the fractured humerus and the partially detached tongue, along with the spike sticking in my abdomen.
QtM, MD
Having been seriously injured on more than one occasion, I can tell you that your brain just shuts down the pain. You feel impact, but not pain. I took a tumble on a bike once which sent my head into the pavement, and I got up saying, “I’m OK.” Only the steady stream of blood finally convinced me I wasn’t. (My knee actually hit the pavement first, just like the OP. No pain there either, initially.)
Pain didn’t start up until several minutes later.
Hence you get accounts of shark-attack victims having their legs bitten off, but feeling no initial pain – just impact. Or stories of soldiers in combat not realizing they’ve just had an arm blown off.
So assuming you didn’t survive the impact, you wouldn’t feel pain before death, IMHO.
I agree with the folks who say you prolly wouldn’t feel anything. There does seem to be a noticeable delay between when you first feel an impact and when the pain starts.
You can really see this with toddlers – after they bump into something, they often look perfectly happy for a good second or two.
So yeah, I think that in the situation where you fall from a great height, your brain would be pretty much shot before you had a chance to figure out you were in a lot of pain. Just MHO of course.
A cut n paste from one of my better posts, made back in March 2002…
“Dangling from the Golden Gate Bridge and Other Narrow Escapes” by John Anthony Adams, Library of Congress catalog card number 88-91962.
An amazing collection of stories of survival from almost certain death, falls without parachutes, riding a huge air bubble up from a sunken submarine, earthquakes, fires, tornados…
“I thought a great deal about my mother and I was the apple of her eye…She was the only person I thought about as I came down, and I thought about very little else.”
Results published in 1892 by a University professor after 25 years and hundreds of interviews with fall survivors: “No grief was felt nor was there paralyzing fright…There was no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain, but rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and sense of surety. Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundredfold velocity or intensity…No confusion entered at all…Then consciousness was painlessly extinguished, usually at the moment of impact, and the impact was, at the most, heard but never painfully felt.”
“After the horror and scorching heat of the fire, he relished the cool gentle breeze that blew past him…he felt calm and unafraid. He attributed this to the enormous sense of relief that he felt after escaping the fire. He much preferred to die by falling…his feelings of deliverance overshadowed any feelings about the new form of death he faced.”
I remember I once fell off a tree and hit my head pretty hard (it actually started bleeding afterwards, however no concussion) and after the whole ordeal, I couldn’t remember falling at all. I only remember waking up after. I think that after such a impact, any way that you fall, the force of you hitting the ground will knock you out instantly.
Also, this post is SUPER old it’s nearly as old as me 
Happy 13th birthday thread!
Does a zombie falling 10 stories feel any pain?
I’ve always wondered.
If you landed in such a way that the ‘surface area’ of impact on your body was absolutely maximised (except perhaps for one hand cradling the head area that would otherwise directly impact), a horizontal-type body posture that would also ‘slow’ the falling speed as much as practical, is there any chance at all one could survive a fall?
Jumping from a high place is a surprisingly ineffective way to commit suicide, yes even from more than 10 stories. The book “Suicide and Attempted Suicide” by Geo Stone has statistics on fatality rates for various suicide methods and in a surprisingly high percentage of cases the victim dies on the way to hospital rather than instantly. In which case I suspect you would definitely feel something.
Would you say the same thing if it were a torture victim accidentally slipping over the Rumsfeld Line (organ failure) after a week or so?
I recently read Alison Weir’s book on Anne Boleyn. Weir wrote of the witnesses who claimed Anne’s eyes & lips continued to move as her decapitated head was held up and shown to the crowd. Weir cited a case in which a witness saw a decapitated head immediately after an automobile accident. The witness claimed the face on the decapitated head showed signs of shock, panic then grief before losing consciousness and any sign of life.
I have to admit reading Weir’s account of the auto accident & decapitated head showing signs of life gave me the chills.
edit: im assuming the same sort of end of life process occurs when falling from a great height. It’s probably best to obliterate your brain and land head first.
Maybe she jumped from the 3rd floor. :rolleyes:
I rather doubt chastising a 13-year old threadshit by a guest who hasn’t logged on in three years will accomplish anything. :rolleyes: