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I wonder what surviving human held the record before balloons (excluding edge cases like jumping gaps on a mountain bridge). Probably it was someone falling from a cliff into snow or water, but maybe it involved something weird like a gunpowder explosion or volcano.
Explainxkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3039:_Human_Altitude
I thought this was a beautiful way to see our progress out in one frame. Then I thought, what about human object reach? So Voyager 1 would be about three more log ticks up at 25 billion km (about the top of the nav buttons) with other probes falling below that at their appropriate times.
I want to see how this looks without the log scale on the y axis.
…I||
The pre-1800 numbers sound too low. There are lots of old buildings much higher than 10 meters high, and I doubt they were all unoccupied at the same time.
If you look at the description of the data ie. That falls are considered to be gaining altitude not losing altitude, they seem to be referring to distance from solid object connected to ground not distance from ground or sea level. So mountains and buildings don’t count unless you jump off of it.
Even before tall buildings, trees should put the noise floor above 30 meters.
very approximate
But what are the constant dips between years?
Must be years without launches.
So in 1882 nobody went above 1.5 meters.
Something weird must’ve been going on for sure. Two years later Flatland was published.
Lol, immediately as the 2D book is published, boom, 3km in 3rdD!
I’m more interested in the altitude of the median human. I suppose it’s increased slightly since the invention of office buildings, chairs, and so on.
Chairs were a game changer
Chairs are overrated. I pretty much always choose the floor. Even the couch tends to be used mostly as a backrest for sitting on the floor
The floor is great. It’s really hard to fall off the floor.
vertigo enters chat
Are you Carlito?
I wonder if it may well have gone down with the combination of boom in population and rapid urbanization around coasts.
Poster’s note: I just noticed it uploaded and didn’t see it posted yet, so I rectified that.
But the Apollo program was fake propaganda!
Should include below the earth’s surface too. That would be a lot less impressive.
