First off, let me say that I am actually completely sober and have been while thinking up this idea. Now, try to follow me on this:
Imagine a spider on your ceiling. I know most spiders don’t really behave this way but now just imagine it simply lets go of the ceiling and falls to the floor. No web or anything, just free fall to the floor. What do you think it would do? Would it be splattered into a little mush or would it just flip over and scurry under the nearest large object? I put my money on the scurrying.
Your average ceiling is about 8 feet above the floor, so that’s 96 inches. Your average spider isn’t very big but just for the sake of easy math, lets say he’s 1 inch tall. That’s a fall of almost 100 times the creature’s own height. Now compare this to a human. Take a 6 foot tall human and raise him up to 100 times his height: 600 feet. A drop like that and the human would definitely splatter and no scurrying would be possible.
I know spiders have fancy exoskeletons and humans don’t and there are plenty of other biological differences, but that’s not my point. My point has to do with how fast they fall. Anybody who took science in middle school knows that gravity is (just about) the same everywhere on earth and one thing wont fall any faster than another thing, regardless of mass. It’s the classic feather and bowling ball trick; they fall at the same speed. The catch, as most of you should know, is that the feather and bowling ball will not fall at the same speed on Earth due to air resistance. It’s a similar deal with the human and the spider. The ratio of surface area (creating air resistance) to mass is drastically different between the two. But most everybody should have realized that before they even started reading this paragraph.
So my point of all this is about trying to imagine an environment that is filled with a certain gas that is denser than oxygen, nitrogen, and whatever else we have here on earth. Something dense enough that it provide enough resistance that we could fall 100 times our own height and walk it off. Maybe a few scrapes and bruises, but no splatter or mush. The concept is very similar to how astronauts train for spacewalks in giant swimming pools. It mimics how they would feel in space. But I’m not trying to mimic that feeling as much as I’m trying to mimic that falling spider phenomenon.
These are the kind of thoughts that go through my head while I’m sitting at home on the crapper and see a spider on the ceiling…
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