This video was made possible by Skillshare. Get unlimited access to over 25,000 classes
for free for two months by signing up at skl.sh/hai23. Hello and welcome back to highly ambiguous
inquiries. So what’s the fastest manmade object ever? I’ll give you a hint—it’s not the US
military when a developing country finds oil, it’s not James Charles’ plummeting subscriber
count, and it’s not Sonic—the terrifying human-toothed shrew-Gollum that haunts my
nightmares. What is the answer? Well, if you’ve watched this channel before,
you probably know what I’m going to say—it’s complicated… and good for watch time. If we’re talking about moving on land, then
it’s the ThrustSSC, a British rocket-car that looks like it should be piloted by either
James Bond or Anakin Skywalker. Its actual driver, British fighter pilot Andy
Green, for apparently no reason other than, “hey, why not,” drove it to top speed
in the middle of the Black Rock Desert, reaching the record speed of 763 miles or 1,228 kilometers
per hour on October 15, 1997. But we’re really not talking about the fastest
manmade object on land because this video’s not long enough yet. If we’re talking about travel through air,
though, then that’s another story—a much longer, and much stranger story. Starting in 1945, the United States began
conducting tests of nuclear bombs. At first, most of them were above ground,
but in the late 50s, people started to think, “blowing up air isn’t satisfying enough,”
and, “maybe this radiation thing isn’t too good for us,” and so they moved the
big boom tests underground. The thing is though, they didn’t really
know what would happen. The first test was conducted on August 27,
1957. They dug a long, cylindrical hole into the
ground, put the bomb in it, put a two ton concrete plug at the top of it, which was
covered by a 4 inch thick, steel manhole cover. Then, as one does, they went ahead and set
off the bomb. To their surprise, the concrete plug was vaporized
instantly, turning it into a mass of superheated gas that expanded and essentially made the
entire hole into a gigantic gun barrel. When the gas hit the manhole cover, bam. It was blown off the ground instantly, shot
into the sky, and disappeared out of sight. Now, normally we’d just shrug our shoulders
satisfied with the continued mystery of how fast the manhole cover went and get back to
inconsequential nuking of the ground, but luckily, this time there was a high-speed
camera on site that caught a glimpse of the manhole cover. The camera shot at 1 frame per millisecond,
or 1000 frames per second, and it only caught the manhole cover in a single frame which
allowed them to calculate, using math stuff, a lower bound for the manhole cover’s speed. By looking at where the manhole cover was
in the frame, and then calculating the distance between there and the bottom of the frame,
we find the shortest possible distance it could have traveled between when the last
frame was taken and when this frame was taken. In other words, we’re assuming that when
the frame was taken, the manhole cover was here, just below the frame. Then we take that distance, and divide it
by 1 millisecond—the time between the frames—to get distance per second. So, we’re basically saying, if the manhole
cover was here, and then one millisecond later it was here, how fast did it travel? Now, we can’t do the actual calculation
ourselves, because the government has never released the video and for some reason refuses
to declassify it for what is one of the internet’s most regarded YouTube channels, but we do
know that the scientist conducting the experiment, Dr. Brownlee, took that information from the
high-speed camera, combined it with calculations of the blast force from the bomb, did math
things, and reported that the manhole cover had been moving at six times the earth’s
escape velocity which would put it at around 125,000 miles or 200,000 kilometers per hour
or 34 miles or 55 kilometers per second. So like, fast. There is disagreement as to whether or not
the manhole cover made it into space. Some say that it would have burned up on its
way out of the atmosphere, while others say that it may have been moving so fast that
it wouldn’t have had time to burn up. Either way, just like my ability to write
decent jokes, the manhole cover has never been found. If it did really make it into space, it would
have been the first object ever launched into space. The experiment happened on August 27, 1957—just
over a month before Sputnik’s launch on October 4, 1957. Take that, commies. As of today, it seems that no other object
has managed to come even close to the manhole cover’s speed while still in the Earth’s
atmosphere. If we count space travel, though, then the
manhole cover has met its match. Although the manhole cover would have been
moving over 4x faster than Apollo 10, the fastest manned space vehicle, its record for
fastest manmade object was surpassed in the 1970s by NASA’s Helios probes, and then
again in 2016 by the Juno probe. The Helios II probe became the fastest ever
manmade object in space in 1976. The probe, designed to study the sun, was
in an elliptical orbit around the sun. Because it followed the conservation of angular
momentum, its speed increased as it got closer to the sun, and it eventually topped out at
157,000 mph. Then, just recently, in 2016, the Juno space
probe broke that record, when it was sucked in by Jupiter’s gravitational pull, reaching
165,000 miles per hour. It was actually moving so fast that it had
to hit the brakes so that it could enter Jupiter’s orbit instead of flying right past it, but
it’s also important to note that both of those probes only reached those speeds by
using the gravity of the Sun or another planet which kind of feels like cheating. I mean, if I was allowed to use the Sun’s
gravity to pull me, I maybe wouldn’t have come in last place at my 7th grade track meet. So, if we only count self-propelled objects,
then, unbelievably, the manhole cover still reigns supreme. What should really be the fastest object in
human history, though, is your mouse when you hear that you can learn for free for two
months by signing up for Skillshare at skl.sh/hai23. That’s because Skillshare has over 25,000
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Does anyone know which Epidemic Sound song was used in the background of the video?
(timeframe: 3:27) Dude!
Earth's escape velocity = 11.2km/s
6x Escape velocity = 11.2 x 6 x 3600 (to get kmph) = 241,920 kmph
That's like almost 42,000 kmph higher even after rounding to the closest ten thousand! (as compared to what was in the video)
That equates to ~150,000 mph, not 125,000 mph (as shown in the video) and 67.2 km/s not 54 km/s (showin in the video)
Pinging /u/WendoverProductions (maybe Sam will see this)
Apart from that and kph instead of kmph, it was a normal funny HAI video (yes I was a day late)
Seems like BS to me, honestly. Where's the source?