I was going to suggest several sheets of suspended glass in the air to slow you down as you crash through it, or snow, or bushes, but I see I was beaten to the punch. 
Yes and no. If it was deep enough, it’d be fine, but the necessary depth would be much greater than the necessary depth of snow. Take the same depth as the survivable depth of snow, and you’d still have most of your speed when you bottomed out and hit the hard ground underneath the cotton candy.
Beaten to it.
Whenever I read about folks falling from airplanes and such I imagine falling precisely into the top part of this imaginary huge slide, with the curve of the slide gently increasing until all of your energy has been converted to horizontal movement.
And as long as the “slide” were slightly rough, but not too much so, you would roll to a stop at the base with serious road rash, but possibly still alive.
So, a mountain side with a steep cliff covered in icy stuff, gently decreasing in slope.
But if the cotton candy was deep enough, I think it would be preferable to snow for two reasons- 1) less chance of frostbite, and 2) you could eat your way out. Although you would probably be pretty sticky when it was all over.
Or better yet, how about a deep layer of cotton candy on top of deep snow?
Jell-O.
I can’t find a link but didn’t Red Bull sponsor something like this? IIRC the event was to take place in Vegas.
A Jackie Chan did it in Rush Hour.
What is the shortest distance that a human going 120mph could decelerate to 0 without injury?
I’ll take a shot at it.
Fighter pilots in a seated position can cope with a sustained acceleration of 9 or 10 g’s, oriented head-to-seat. Car crash survivors walk away from substantially larger decelerations, in part because they are transient events. Colonel John Stapp survived deceleration events as high as 46 g’s, although he did suffer some permanent aftereffects.
What can be done without injury? Check out the stunt-fall industry to see what they think a person can take for deceleration. These guys make stunt-fall airbags. Their “High Fall Air Bag Model 50” is 5 feet tall and can safely decelerate a stuntman falling from 50 feet.
How fast will a stunt dude be falling if he jumps from 50 feet?
V[sub]max[/sub] = (2gh)[sup]0.5[/sup]
So for a 50 foot fall, with gravity providing g = 32.2 ft/s[sup]2[/sup], V[sub]max[/sub]= 56.75 ft/s (38.7 MPH).
The average speed during linear deceleration to zero is 1/2 of the maximum: V[sub]avg[/sub] = 28.38 ft/s.
Assume a stunt dude uses four feet of the bag’s thickness for deceleration. At an average speed during the deceleration event of 28.38 ft/s, he will cover that four-foot distance in 0.141 seconds. Decelerating from 56.75 ft/s to zero in 0.141 seconds means a deceleration of 402.5 ft/s[sup]2[/sup]. 1 g is 32.2 ft/s[sup]2[/sup], so this mean the stunt industry is OK with decelerating a human being regularly/repeatedly at 12 g’s.
Presumably that’s a pretty good safety margin and takes into account the possibility that the stunt dude may hit the bag at suboptimal orientations. For the sake of calculation, let us speculate that a human being falling back-first can actually be decelerated at 20 g’s without injury by an evenly applied force. 1 g is 32.2 f/s[sup]2[/sup]. In more familiar units, 1 g is 21.95 MPH per second, so 20 g’s is a deceleration of 439 MPH per second.
If falling at a terminal velocity of 120 MPH, this means they will come to rest in just 0.273 seconds. This is steady deceleration, so their average speed during decel is 1/2 of the starting speed: their average speed is 60 MPH, for 0.273 seconds, which means that during the decel event they will have covered a distance of 24 feet before coming to a complete stop.
Their High-Fall 250 airbag is only 22 feet thick, and is designed to accomodate a fall from 250 feet. Neglecting air drag, that means an impact velocity of 86.6 MPH (probably more like 80, since air drag does start to matter at those speeds). So even this airbag is inadequate for a terminal-velocity fall. You need 24 feet of decel space, PLUS an adequate margin of safety so you don’t thump the ground under the airbag. Plus you’d want it to be wide/long enough to ensure that it didn’t buckle when you hit, and also wide/long enough to ensure you’re going to be able to hit it from wherever you are; you’ll want to land back first, which makes aim difficult.
It seems like it could be done with a damn big airbag, maybe something 40+ feet thick, and 100 feet wide/long.
If you want 12 g’s, then you need proportionately more stop distance than our hypothetical 20-g bag; you’d need 40 feet of stop distance (plus safety margin). Now your bag probably wants to be 55-60 feet thick.
Great answer Machine Elf
One thing that I think limits using a Really Big Air Bag* is the inertia of the surface of the bad starts to be a problem. If the canvas or whatever cannot deform quickly enough, then it will feel like you are hitting something more solid.
It’s the deformation of the surface that is key to how these work. There are loosely sealed openings on the side. When you hit it, the pressure from the surface pushing down pops them open and the bag starts to deflate very quickly, taking away the energy of impact.
I wonder if one could do a bag where some mechanical assist is used in popping open the outlets at just the right time. Get the air starting to rush out even before you hit. Maybe even some fans to start things along. So you are hitting an already rapidly deflating surface. Some laser tracking, some duct tape and WD-40 and you’re gold.
- In addition to the targeting problem. And if you make the surface area bigger, that adds more mass to the surface you are hitting, etc.
An alternative to the airbag:
a large cargo net supported by an arresting mechanism similar to what is used on aircraft carriers for stopping airplanes when they land.
Not similar in magnitude, but similar in function, i.e. a mechanism that grudgingly pays out line to allow the net to deform, but doesn’t reel the line back in afterwards - in other words, the net sags when you land, but doesn’t rebound, so you don’t get flung back up in the air. You could customize the force/speed profile of the mechanisms.
The only challenge would be dealing with the inertia of the net itself. This might not be so bad: the material for an airbag has to hold in air AND be able to bear your impact, so the mass per unit area is dictated by those two requirements. It also brings into play the inertia of the air directly below the surface, probably an even bigger factor.
An open-mesh net doesn’t have to seal in air below it, and it also doesn’t bring the inertia of that air into play. This might work really well.
It seem to me the solution is an airbag without the bag. There are parachute trainers/carnival rides where you step out onta a grid with giant fans below it, and the fans actually lift you into the air. I can’t see any reason why the process couldn’t be adapted to catch a falling body, though there would obviously have to be a lot more airflow. Also a bigger target area, unless the person drops into something like a vertical tunnel connected to an array of the fans.
Hmmmm. I wonder what would happen if you could lift this theoretical tunnel up 20 or 30 thousand feet. I would think that, assuming the walls are strong enough that the pressure differential between the outside and the inside doesn’t burst them, you could use the thing as an (inefficient) elevator. Am I mising something in this idea?
A baby fell out of the window
We thought that her head would be split
But good luck was with her that morning
She fell in a barrel of sh…aving cream
Be nice and clean
Shave everyday and you’ll always look keen.
Skydiving speed record is about 330 MPH or 531 kmh. Link to the site
How far do you have to fall to hit TV?
A skydiver in the traditional belly-to-earth position will usually reach terminal velocity after falling 1200-1500 feet.
What about a massive vat of styrofoam packing peanuts?