umm… the problem arises not only in balloons. Have you ever noticed that rock climbers take a day or more to reach the top of a cliff?
According to the national park rangers :
"If you must defecate while climbing, move off the route and away from rest areas "
Again I agree but some altitude is necessary for terminal velocity to be reached.
If the turd is released from a height of 50 ft., surely its terminal velocity is less than that of a congruent turd ejected from, say, 5,000 ft.
#1 - It’s more of a common courtesy thing… I’m sure not much of it reaches the ground, but would you really want someone peeing on top of your house/car?
#2 - Gas balloons can get up that high. The highest hot-air balloon ascent was ~69,000 feet. And at that height, you need pressurization and other things. I’m currently reading a book called “The Greatest Adventure” about the first guys to go around the world in a balloon. The made sure that they bagged up any fecal matter before ejecting it out the side, and they had to be conscious of where they were ejecting it, as it would hit the ground. #1 not so much.
… And just for the record, I haven’t done either myself.
While I haven’t urinated over the side myself, I have emptied my coffee cup, and watched the remaining liquid fall. It breaks up almost instantly, and you don’t see it hit the ground - Though that may be because the drops have broken up so small and spread out so much, that the eye can’t see them hit. I’ll have to wait till this winter and throw a cup off, and see if I can tell where it hit on the snow below.
… And yes, it counts, provided you’re at least 5280 feet high.
I dunno, but if ANY board on the internet has that combination in one person it’s gonna be this one!
Possibly fractionally less, but that would be due to increased air density, not the length of the fall itself.
Objects reach terminal velocity pretty quick, and once they get there their speed remains stable until something like increasing air density or solid ground changes that number.
Wow. It really is possible to be hit by a flying turd.
I am surprised that a “bed pan” and a blanket for privacy was not more commonly used.
Brain Teaser: A man is lying dead in the desert. He has no footprints anywhere around him for miles, but his pants are around his ankles. What happened? 
You do this.
Slight hijack: John Glenn said, many years after his historic orbital flight, that the most spectacular part of his trip was a “urine dump,” when he discharged accumulated urine into space, where it immediately crystallized and beautifully caught the sun’s rays.
Ah, the glories of spaceflight…
Do balloons no longer have sandbags? Bring an empty one and unload some sand into it. Use for toileting, catbox style.
But meteors only burn up because they slam into the atmosphere at far greater than terminal velocity and heat up because of the resulting friction.
To get a situation where a projectile dropped from a height within the atmosphere would burn up, you’d have release it in the thin upper reaches of the atmospere, and the projectile would have to pick up enough speed before hitting the dense lower air layers that it would exceed terminal velocity in the lower layers even if it didn’t in the thin air above. And it would have to exceed that lower-layer terminal velocity by a lot.
I don’t think it’s possible to float a balloon at any height such that you could simply drop an object in this way. So, yes, the material would have to be ejected at unusually-high speed, perhaps by Superman. And he could do that at any altitude.
At terminal velocity, would a turd begin to approximate the shape of a bullet? I wonder what kind of noise it would make as it whistled by.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard one break the sound barrier before.
Bullets are rigid and designed for passage at greater then terminal velocity.
I seem to recall that the shape achieved by raindrops falling at terminal velocity is NOT bullet-shaped, or even spherical, but more squat. Imagine the droplet resting on a surface under the influence of gravity, but not wetting it, and spreading out under the influence of gravity. A liquid droplet falling at terminal velocity would be under somewhat similar conditions and would tend to spread out. This would be affected by the relative wind, so eventually the spread would be countered by aerodynamic forces that would try to break or twist away the extremities. It wouldn’t be the same, but it wouldn’t be bullet-shaped either.
I think the shape would be goverened by the viscosity or lack of rigidity of the falling object.
BTW, do y’all know why a turd is pointed at each end? It’s Mother Nature’s way of keeping your asshole from snapping shut.
Sorry
