What If You Floated Up And Couldn't Stop?

Your feet leave the grass in your own backyard, and you don't come back down. You float past your roof, over your whole town, through the clouds and above a sea of white. An airliner passes so close you can see the windows. The sky turns black in the middle of the day, shooting stars burn up around you, the space station races past… and you keep rising, all the way past the Moon. The two readouts are real the whole way: your altitude, and how much air is left around you. Half of all the air is below 5,500 m. Climbers call everything above 8,000 m the death zone, and Mount Everest is 8,849 m tall. Airliners cruise at about 10–12 km, and in 1973 a Rüppell's vulture was hit by a plane at about 11,300 m, the highest a bird has ever been recorded. Above about 19 km (the Armstrong limit) the water in your body would boil without a pressure suit. Weather balloons swell to several metres wide before they burst. Felix Baumgartner jumped from about 39 km in 2012, and Alan Eustace from 41.4 km in 2014. The highest clouds on Earth glow at around 80 km, meteors burn up between about 70 and 100 km, and space officially begins at 100 km. The International Space Station orbits at about 400 km, circling Earth every 90 minutes at 28,000 km/h. GPS satellites orbit at 20,200 km, geostationary satellites at 35,786 km, and the Moon is on average 384,400 km away. Only 24 people have ever travelled that far. Some of it is not real. You'd lose consciousness long before space, and nobody could rise this fast. The airliner, the vulture, the balloon and the space station are shown much closer, and the space station much slower, than they would really pass. The streaks of light in space are there to show your speed; real stars wouldn't streak. The Moon is placed right beside your path so you can fly past it, and the continents are imagined. You floated for ten minutes. Everyone you've ever met is down on that tiny blue dot. CHAPTERS 0:00 39 kilometres above your home 0:15 Past your own roof 0:29 Birds beneath you 0:43 Above the tallest trees 1:04 Higher than the tallest building 1:18 Into the clouds 1:33 Breaking through 2:03 Half of all the air 2:19 The death zone 2:44 An airliner passes 2:59 The highest bird ever recorded 3:21 The Armstrong limit 3:46 A weather balloon… and burst 4:15 The record skydives 4:38 A black sky at midday 4:46 The highest clouds and shooting stars 5:17 Officially in space 5:33 The northern lights from above 5:50 A planet beneath you 6:14 The International Space Station 6:54 Hubble and a train of satellites 7:26 GPS satellites 7:42 Geostationary orbit 7:58 The whole Earth 8:38 The Moon 9:02 Passing the Moon 9:25 A tiny blue dot 9:38 The end Subscribe and step into the next "if". #whatif #space #science #earth #couldntstop #stepintoif #pov