How is it that bugs take no fall damage?
In: Physics
Fall damage is the body being unable to keep up with the massive forces required to bring an object to a stop in a short period of time. For a human, trying to stop 100lbs within 5 feet (a **20:1** ratio for my example human) gets tough pretty quickly depending on how fast they are going. According to a brief google search, the average house fly weighs something like .00001lbs and is .023ft tall (a **1:2300** ratio). So the ratio is like 23,000 times better for them to start with. IE: bugs have less weight to decelerate in a relatively longer period of time (if we assume the two creatures are falling at the same speed)
However, another result of this smaller weight, is that air resistance becomes a much bigger factor when falling. A tiny little updraft can make the insect lose almost all of its downward momentum, and their terminal velocity is much slower as a result. So even though my previous paragraph assumed that the human and bug were falling at the same speed, that’s almost impossible. A bug will fall WAY slower.
Not only that, but there’s something called the Squared-Cubed law which says things like “if something doubles in height, it usually multiplies its weight by around 8” and that has further implications for our comparison. One effect of this is that while large creatures may have stronger bones compared to small ones (you don’t see us getting flattened by a fly swatter, for example), but a lot of that strength is spent simply keeping us upright in the first place to counteract the massive increase of weight our size comes with (see that ratio I posted earlier), so when something like a human is met with an impact, that force is being added on top of the strain our bodies are already under as we maintain our own shape. A bug barely has to spend any energy maintaining its own structure, so nearly all of its strength can be devoted to absorbing the impact properly.
So yeah, with all of that combined, comparing the amount of damage a human takes from a fall vs an insect, any damage the bug takes would be basically nonexistant compared to what us humans are used to.
Latest Answers