I got to thinking last night that theoretically, with enough hair, the air resistance would slow you down so that your terminal velocity would be low enough to land unharmed. How long would it need to be? How would one go about calculating this?
I assume you need some kind of drag coefficient and a density for hair to start with. Not sure where to find that information.
They did a study and found that long, curly hair increases drag by 8.7%. I’m going to assume that’s for 1m of hair and that drag increases linearly with hair length. To decrease terminal velocity by a factor of 2 I think we need to increase drag by a factor of 4, which would mean adding a total of 34m of hair the first time, 172m the second time, and 356m the third time. I think that would probably be enough to get you down to a survivable terminal velocity.
Incredible, thank you. Where did you get the 8.7% number?
https://www.theweek.in/news/sports/2024/08/09/do-hair-and-outfits-really-slow-down-athletes-study-reveals.html
Imma be real with you though, I didn’t actually read the study