Would the bernoulli principle be involved as well as I think the air will be moving faster the lower you go “down”?
I’m thinking of the scenes in The Martian aboard the spacecraft, where the astronauts are weightless in the center of their spinning habitat device. IIRC, they propelled themselves quickly along the axis of the center, and then direct their feet into a tube which leads “down” to the surface which has “gravity”. They seem to get sucked down the tube as soon as they make the turn; they don’t kick off to launch themselves down. This doesn’t seem accurate. ISTM they’d have to begin the descent by climbing or kicking off, not just drifting over the right hole.
Of course, I might be misremembering the scene. I still have it on AppleTV at home; I’ll have to rewatch tonight.
No, in the limiting case of no atmosphere, the person isn’t going to smack into the wall at all. And in the limiting case of very thick atmosphere, the person will very quickly reach the same angular speed as the station, and fall straight “down”, with terminal velocity.
But if you’re drifting inside a rotating cylinder in a vacuum, unless there’s some sort of station keeping eventually you’re going to impact the cylinder. It might be one of the ends, or the middle. Just like if you inside a non-rotating cylinder. If you bump into the cylinder you’ll impact at the speed of the cylinder, whatever that is. If the speed of rotation is zero, or near zero, then you’ll drift into it with just whatever speed you have relative to the cylinder. If the cylinder is rotating rapidly, you’ll get smacked–but you’ll probably be bounced off pretty rapidly, so it won’t be like being dragged on the ground or being pushed into a belt sander.
And if, in the initial case, you’re shot out of a cannon mounted on the axis, you’ll hit the cylinder at much greater speed. The calculation must, if it’s to be meaningful, assume that your initial velocity is small compared to the velocity imposed by “gravity”. Which, in the zero-atmosphere case, means zero initial velocity.
I guess the main point of the clarification is that your interaction with the cylinder will be the same, whether it rotates or not, until you touch it. You’re not going to be pulled toward the rotating cylinder like you would be pulled toward a massive body. You might drift into it, but that’s because you drifted into it, just like you might drift into the side of a stationary cylinder.
Not quite the same though. It would be like stepping off a 60 mph train, but there would be no gravity pulling you “down”. You could watch the ground harmlessly whizz by below you, unless you get hit by a tree or something.
If the ground were smooth and slick, you could probably “land” without much problem.
This would only be the case if the cylinder contained vacuum; if so, trees would be unlikely. If there is any air in there it would be dragged around by the rotation, and this would accelerate you towards the wall/floor of the cylinder (as several posters have already noted).
True, but the basic point still stands. When you first contact the ground (edge of cylinder) you won’t have your full “weight” pushing you against the ground. You could possibly slide along the ground without doing too much damage at first. As you pick up speed, your “weight” would increase.
Depending on the terrain, I think you’re only going to slide for a little bit before you start to tumble. Motorcyclists here on Earth who crash sometimes “ragdoll” after they come off of their bike, tumbling violently until they come to a stop. Thankfully, at a speed corresponding to zero rotation around the cylinder’s axis, your apparent gravity would be close to zero, so unlike an earthbound motorcyclist, you wouldn’t be slammed into the ground very hard on the first impact - but as your ground speed decreased toward zero with each subsequent impact, the apparent gravity would increase toward 1G (or whatever gravity level has been set for that cylinder based on its size and rotation) - and you’d find your experience to be much more like that of the earth motorcyclist.