What If You Floated Up and Couldn't Stop?

It's an October evening in Kansas. You're standing in your backyard in a pressure suit, and your feet leave the ground. You rise past a wind turbine, a flock of geese, the clouds, a passenger jet, the edge of space, the space station and the Moon. You can't stop, and you can't come down. THE NUMBERS ARE REAL • Air pressure and temperature on screen follow the U.S. Standard Atmosphere (1976). • Wind turbine: hub about 80 m up, blades about 50 m long; at 15 rpm the tips move at almost 300 km/h. • Statue of Liberty: 93 m with its pedestal. Eiffel Tower: 330 m. One World Trade Center: 541 m. Burj Khalifa: 828 m. • Canada geese fly south in autumn, often in a V, which saves energy for the birds behind. • A typical cumulus cloud holds about 500 tonnes of water — roughly a hundred elephants (USGS estimate). • Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 states: 4,421 m. Half of the air is below about 5.5 km. • Mount Everest: 8,849 m. Airliners cruise at about 10–12 km, where it's around −50 °C. Contrails are ice crystals. • Highest bird ever recorded: a Rüppell's vulture hit by a plane at 11,300 m (1973). • Armstrong limit: around 18–19 km. Above it, water at body temperature boils unless you're in a pressure suit. • Weather balloons are launched twice a day from about 900 stations and usually burst at 30–35 km. • Felix Baumgartner jumped from 38,969 m (2012). Alan Eustace jumped from 41,419 m (2014). • Highest balloon ever: 53.0 km (JAXA BU60-1, unmanned, 2002). • The U.S. awards astronaut wings above 50 miles (80.5 km). The Kármán line, the usual edge of space, is 100 km. • Most meteors burn up about 80–120 km high. • International Space Station: about 109 m across, about 400–420 km up, 28,000 km/h, one orbit every ~92 minutes, so its crew sees about 16 sunrises a day. • Gemini 11, Polaris Dawn and the Apollo crews are among the very few people ever higher than ~1,000 km. • GPS satellites: about 20,200 km up, ~31 working; a phone needs at least four for a position. • Geostationary orbit: 35,786 km. Satellites there take a day to go around, so they seem to stand still. • The Moon: on average 384,400 km away, 3,474 km across (about 27% of Earth's width), moving away ~3.8 cm a year. Light takes about 1.3 seconds to get there. • The James Webb Space Telescope works near the L2 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth. • At 3 million km, the Earth looks smaller than the Moon does from your backyard (0.24° vs 0.52°). SOME OF IT ISN'T REAL Nothing could make you float up like this, and no suit would keep you alive for the whole trip. Your speed changes so you can see things: real rising would be steady. The space station is shown 100 times slower than it really moves, and the satellites drift past slowly for the same reason. The Moon wouldn't be on your path: we put it 15,000 km to the side so you could pass it. The geese, the jet and the balloon are placed for the story. The farm, the town and the fields are made up. Earth images: NASA Blue Marble (a December mosaic), NASA Black Marble (city lights) and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (the Moon). CHAPTERS 0:00 Your backyard 0:56 Above the farm 1:36 The clouds 2:22 Cruising altitude 2:52 The stratosphere 3:40 The edge of space 4:22 Orbit 5:18 The satellites 6:20 The Moon 7:30 Deep space 8:20 Home New videos every few days. #whatif #space #science #3danimation #pov