Why You Don't Want the Power of Flight

this is why you don't want to fly like a superhero if I had to guess the power of flight is the most desired superpower and don't get me wrong if you could fly around like Superman all day it would be pretty dang awesome you can make your daily commute an adventure you can see the whole world from a new perspective and Airlines but this is what pop culture says is possible if we think about the potential drawbacks of a power like flights scientifically I don't know if you even want it I just said first I want to be very clear about what I mean when I say you don't want to fly because the power of flight has many more interpretations than a power like super-strength the kind of flight that we will be interpreting is I think the most common version of it an epic ability that allows someone like Superman or neo to move above the ground at high velocity and high altitude and like Superman we are gonna say for this version of flight that you can just go if we have to start evaluating thrust and fuel requirements this analysis isn't gonna really get off the ground I will argue that though this version of flight sounds awesome it would be more hassle than it's worth so much so that traditional air travel just might be preferable thirty dollar bag for you now that is bold let's consider flying at high altitude first because if you could fly you probably will not be going very high the Earth's atmosphere does not have a definite boundary with space but we consider it to extend all the way from the surface out to around a hundred kilometers what we call the Carmen line and as you move further away from the surface the air in the atmosphere thins way out the Earth's atmosphere is not evenly distributed a full 80% of the Earth's atmosphere is crammed into just the first 10 kilometers above the surface this leads to a drastic difference in air density which leads to a drastic difference in oxygen available fly up above the clouds an oxygen availability will be your first altitude limiter if you go up around nineteen kilometers above the Earth's surface around twelve miles you would have to wear a pressure suit just to keep your body from dying like Felix Baumgartner wore when he dropped from space go up around 12 kilometers and you would need to breathe pressurized oxygen like scuba divers do up around four kilometers you would need oxygen still and it would only be once you've got below this four kilometer line about two and a half miles that you would be able to safely breathe the air around you so you can forget if you had the power of flight flying over Mount Everest just for fun gate 42 these altitude based oxygen limits aren't just suggestions either fly too high and you can pass out almost immediately do you know why Airlines tell you to put on your own mask before assisting others in the event of a rapid decompression it's because when your body is exposed to ultra than air you may have only a few moments of useful consciousness for example at a common cruising altitude of say 40,000 feet you can become dangerously oxygen deprived in just five seconds and you pass out shortly thereafter and I'll tell you crashing into the ground from this height would end your super life super quick I mean [Applause] [Applause] the other altitude limiter for humans super flight also has to do with health thick the atmosphere is and its temperature the amount of heat energy in a system is directly related to the amount of mass in that system and so as we said you go higher up in the atmosphere and the mass per unit volume goes way down and so the heat energy is going to go down so in general the higher up in the atmosphere that you go the way colder it gets this increase here is just because of the ozone layer and it you know helps life on earth beat now where do you think your comfortable temperature zone would be based on this chart because before you even get 10 kilometers up it's negative 50 degrees Celsius outside and that would freeze your pee if you didn't want to go any higher than 4 kilometers in the atmosphere because of oxygen availability you wouldn't want to go any higher than 3 kilometers because of temperature any higher than that and you would literally start freezing all right so you can't fly as high as you thought so what you just do all your superheroing not enough oxygen so you can't fly as high as you thought so what right you'll just do all of your superheroing it is freezing up here just one second so you can't fly as high as you thought so what you'll just do all your super-hearing closer to the ground at top speed right well unfortunately you'd be velocity limited too another problem with flight specifically flying really fast is again temperature right now your body is most likely in contact with some kind of air I hope and when those air particles hit your body if they are colder or have less energy than your skin when they hit your skin and bounce off they will gain a little bit of energy and your skin will lose a little bit of energy this effectively lowers your skin temperature in a process called convective cooling this happens even when you're standing still but once you start moving through the air you're giving your body more opportunities to have these little collisions and these little energy exchanges so the faster you go through the air the more your rate of convective cooling increases and that's why the wind starts to feel colder what I'm getting at is if you fly through the air at high velocity like Superman you can experience significant wind chill as this chart shows and depending on the ambient temperature even if you go as slow as a hundred kilometers or 60 miles per hour through that air you can get frostbite on your skin for windchill in as little as two minutes if heat loss doesn't slow you way down something more immediate will a mid-air collision birdstrike is not the name of a cool avian superhero it is instead the term for when a plane unfortunately hits a bird mid-flight there an estimated 13,000 bird strikes in the US alone each year and it can be very very serious because although birds are very small relatively speaking compared to airplanes their change in momentum and therefore their force on impact can be huge when a plane hits a bird mid-flight the bird will go from whatever small velocity it was flapping along at the planes velocity which is enormous in a very very short amount of time and from smart boy Isaac Newton's equations we know that even though the bird weighs hundreds of thousands of times less than the plane this force is still going to be tremendous what Oh Zone two is boarding yeah no problem even if we assume a very small bird just one pound in one foot long in an average cruising velocity for our plane of 550 miles per hour the average force on the plane from this tiny bird could be as high as 90,000 Newton's 20,000 pounds of force from this simple calculation I think you can see how bird strikes can and do damage and disabled aircraft and aircraft are made out of metal and meant to fly so now imagine what a single unlucky bird strike would do to you or your face cone yeah so to minimize the chances of being fatally struck you would want to slow way down again way below the speed at which airplanes fly it you could take your chances with a bird strike but if it happens they won't make a movie about your life starring Tom Hanks my point is that if you could fly like superheroes do and didn't have any additional powers to protect you but you didn't have any additional powers to protect you your best bet will be to fly low and slow and even though there'd be more restrictions on your flying than you may think let's just think of everything we would actually need in order to fly in a more realistic and heroic way given everything that we've gone through so far well you're probably gonna get too cold and you might subject yourself to pressures you don't want so how about a flight suit we need one of those and oxygen we're definitely gonna need a tank of oxygen depending on what we're doing and even we're gonna be going relatively slowly we still want a head and eye protection so let's bring a helmet and goggles oh and just one more thing let's make a phone call to the FAA and government telling them that a human has superpowers for real and is going to be flying over populated areas for extended periods of time whenever they want and also doesn't want to be immediately captured an experiment done by scientists yeah oh you know who it is what you're headed here right now to take me to an unlisted government black site for how long indefinitely Oh even if we somehow lived in a world where everyone would just be suddenly cool with an unidentified human shape flying object all the time there would still be rules and regulations on you not only would you have to fly low and slow it's the 21st century you have to fly with other people in mind before taking off just like an actual pilot you want to check weather reports rules and regulations in your area and airspace maps and fly according to those for example though most of the air you would be flying through would be unrestricted if you live near a large city you might be near a large airport which restricts and monitors its airspace for miles around in every direction you could just wing it and take your chances with running into a thunderstorm or running headfirst into a missile from an f-16 but I would not recommend it look I will concede that's some kind of flight power that had you just floating above the trees at the speed of a car over to your friend's place would be awesome but then again that's not really the version of super flight that we see in pop culture is it so if you don't want to fly as I argue if you still wanted to fly well if you wanted to fly more realistically without all the hassle we are now more or less describing Iron Man with his suit he has temperature and impact protection so it's not velocity limited and with his navigation and sensors and contacts with the government he's not altitude limited but at this point you created a suit that does more than the power of flight alone does so you might as well just be Iron Man and forget the power of flight so why don't you want to fly like a superhero well if the power of flight is all you have and not invulnerability or super durability or what-have-you flight wouldn't be quite so super because of oxygen and temperature limitations you'd want to fly low and slow and because of civilization you'd want to fly more safely than you probably thought you could of course you can fly warm breathing nice oxygen filled air at hundreds of miles per hour in relative safety but we're just describing commercial air travel now unless you innovated like Iron Man we humans have figured out how to fly pretty dang well no powers required because science first class beta a coach [Music] look even after everything that I just said would I want some kind of even diminished power of flight to try it out yes probably but I think we're not even considering a bunch of other things that would come to play not just speed and windchill and restricted airspace and that kind of thing a lot of people are afraid of heights and just think of the the g-forces you could accidentally subject yourself to you we're like hey hey Maya cool check this out and you do like a dive like you would on a rollercoaster but it's too fast and you pass out and then you fall from like you know 300 feet up in the air a big learning curve when you're curved without learning oh thank you so much for watching Adam if you want more of me go to alpha at project alpha comm where if you go now and sign up for a free trial you can get this show two days earlier than anyone else Oh another premium content for myself Nerdist and geek and sundry please follow because science and myself on social media at these handles here and you can suggest ideas for future episodes which I often use so go do it [Music]

Channel: Because Science

Views: 897,180

Rating: 4.9072967 out of 5

Keywords: Nerdist, Fvid, Because Science, marvel, dc, superman, iron man, super hero, super powers, flying, flight, travel, breathing, atmosphere, body temperature, movies, kyle hill

Id: qP-2hMNnhgY

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 24 2019