DON'T PANIC

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 🌌   (sideblog)

[gurumog]

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1981) by Douglas Adams BBC Television

[catchymemes]

[meganfox-s-wife]

the stars and the universe love you

[dovesndecay]

if i dropped a whale and a mouse from 50,000 feet in the air to a concrete landing -- I do want to be clear that, ethically, I'm against doing this, but let's say I wasn't -- would the mouse or the whale take the most damage? like, percentage wise?

[wakewithgiggli]

The whale by a huge margin. The whale would absolutely, 100% die and be splattered all over.

The mouse might survive.

Both would have reached terminal velocity, which depends on mass and surface area - and a whale has much larger values than a mouse for both of those :)

Terminal Velocity: once you reach this speed, you don’t get any faster. Mice terminal velocity is very low, and whales is very high.

From: https://www.theifod.com/can-a-mouse-survive-a-fall-from-a-high-rise/

An average mouse weighs a mere 25 grams (0.05lbs) and has a surface area of 78 sq cm. That results in a mouse’s terminal velocity being about 25 ft/sec which is about the speed a skydiver falls with an open parachute. Compare that to a human skydiver whose terminal velocity is about 170 ft/sec prior to the parachute opening.

[scifiscribbler]

What if as well as the whale we also drop a houseplant

[wakewithgiggli]

That would be very improbable.

[randomslasher]

Oh no, not again.

[thea-nymo]

Wait. The velocity of something falling isn't dependent on the mass. Didn't you pay attention in physics?

[dovesndecay]

I didn't go to school

[ianmalcolmptsd]

Mass does factor in here because the initial question was about dropping them through the AIR, not through a vacuum. In a vacuum, yes, they would have matching velocities the whole way because there would be no air resistance.

Terminal velocity is the velocity where air resistance (upward force) equals gravity (downward force). I won’t give the exact equation here cuz it’s hard to type, but what’s important to know for the whale-mouse experiment is that terminal velocity is proportional to mass and gravity and inversely proportional to surface area. Bigger mass and/or gravity means bigger terminal velocity, bigger surface area means smaller terminal velocity.

Gravity is actually stronger on things with greater mass too, but on the scale of mice and whales we can ignore that. It matters more with planets and asteroids and such. What we will pay attention to is that even the smallest whale has a mass/surface area ratio that is orders of magnitude greater than a mouse’s. A bigger mass/surface area ratio means that a bigger terminal velocity. So when we drop the mouse and the whale at 50,000 feet up, they both start at the same velocity (0), but the mouse will rapidly hit its terminal velocity and cease to accelerate. The whale has a much much larger terminal velocity and so has to continue accelerating for some time before reaching that speed.

Anyhoo, I did some quick math based on average blue whale sizes and it looks like a blue whale falling from that height would release the equivalent of just over one metric ton of TNT upon impact. So not only do you end up with whale smoothie, but I don’t think the concrete is gonna be in very good shape either.

[collgeruledzebra]

hitchhikers guide to the galaxy fans may i interest you in a podcast called fall of the house of sunshine

[so-far-as-we-know]

(via op)

the last part of the tags though.. XD

[headlesshorsemanxiii]

"'But,' says Man, 'the Babel Fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It proves you exist, so therefore you don't, QED.'

'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that.' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

'Oh, that was easy!' says Man, and for an encore, goes on to prove that black is white, before getting killed on the next zebra crossing."

- The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams.

[chapeldean]

fandom is like. we create things for each other and isn’t that love in its purest form? 

[likethecastle]

Do you know any sci-fi?

[cookiedoughmeagain]

This is GLORIOUS! Someone has analysed The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in enough detail to form a fairly solid theory (on the basis of very scant evidence) of what IRL date the fictional destruction of the world corresponds to.

Absolutely glorious ❤

The Boring Talks - #1 - The End Of The World - BBC Sounds

What is the specific date of Armageddon according to Douglas Adams? Steve Cross finds out

[emmalily]

There are so many funny bits in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the terrible Vogon poetry, almost anything Zaphod says, the Beware of the Leopard sign) but I think the funniest part is when Ford & Arthur are picked up by the Heart of Gold and Arthur indignantly tells Ford to stop turning into a penguin.

My man's just learned his best friend is an alien, had his planet blown up, found himself in a Vogon spaceship and then unceremoniously tossed out of said spaceship into deep space, all in the span of a day and yet he still manages to find within himself to complain about people turning into semi-aquatic birds.

[incorrecthg2g]

Arthur: If you took a shot everytime you chose a bad decision, how drunk would you be?

Trillian: Just a bit tipsy.

Ford: Wasted!

Zaphod: Dead.

[porterr-robinson]

[succ-my-pandas-dick]

I have so many questions

[homopower]

In the name of everything decent in this world, you have got to turn the sound on.

[detafo]

@starlightcrystalline !! It’s the great mattress migration of Sqornshellous Zeta!! Look at all that flollopping!!

[lactoseinfuriated]

Everyone should try reading hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

[theclassicsreader]

In the beginning the Universe was created.  This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (via theclassicsreader)

[theclassicsreader]

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

– Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

[thelilnan]

I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

[ultrakillblast]

THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981)