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Ants Zone
question: How high of a height could you drop an ant off of and it will be ok? cuz if you think about it an at falling off a table is like jumping off a cliff for us which kills us. The ant lands perfectly fine. Does the difference have to do with it's mass, size, and weight?
>> Anonymous
You could drop it from the moon and it still wouldn't get hurt as it's terminal velocity is too low to do any damage.
>> Anonymous
The same even goes for mice.
>> Anonymous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity
>> Zone
>>102256
But would something like that get screwed up in the atmosphere? or is it too small or going to slow or both?
>> Anonymous
Terminal velocity is only part of the puzzle. The other is the ratio of surface area to volume.

As an object gets bigger, the volume (and therefore mass) goes up accoring to the cube of the object's size. However it's surface area and cross-sectional area only go up by the square.

Thus, if we're talking about larger and larger animals, mass increases much faster than the the strength of the body.

If you had two animals of different sizes, and you dropped them so that they had the same velocity at impact, the lighter one would have a much better chance of avoiding injury.
>> Zone
so how fast would an ant be supposedly be dropping at during terminal velocity? 5mph? 10? say one of us ran into a brick wall at one of those speeds, it wouldn't kill us, but we wouldn't particularly feel good.
>> Anonymous
>>102274
ants =/= people
Ants can lift many, many times their body weight and it's not because they're super strong, but they're just miniscule and many many times their body weight is still negligible.
>> Anonymous
But you haven't got an exoskeletons
>> Anonymous
I'd like to know how you could drop an ant from the moon. You'd have to drop it pretty fucking hard, upwards. Moron.
>> Anonymous
>>102276
Uh, no, it's not miniscule to the ant. They are quite strong for their size. Upscaled they wouldn't work at all (collapse under their own weight I think) but for their size they are quite efficient little creatures.
>> Anonymous
>>102310

This goes back to the stuff explained in 102269.

The strength of a muscle (or the strength of a physical object) has to do with it's cross-sectional area. Whereas the weight of an object at that scale as an extra dimension added to it. So, the larger a "prime mover" such as a muscle is, the weight it can lift becomes proportionally smaller.

This is why truly huge animals (such as whales) can't survive on land, they would be crushed by their body weight. It also explains why larger animals can lift propritonally smaller loads.

For example, insects like ants can lift many times their body weight.

A fit human can lift fairly close to their bodyweight. (being able to bench-press your bodyweight is a commonly exceeded milestone for weightlifters)

An elephant can lift a ton or so. Impressive, but that's about 1/8th of it's bodyweight.