And it’s a long day, livin’ in Reseda
There’s a freeway, runnin’ through the yard
And I’m a bad boy, ‘cause I don’t even miss her
I’m a bad boy for breakin’ her heart
And I’m free, free fallin’
Yeah I’m free, free fallin’
Why would you need a parachute if it’s a bottomless pit? You’re never going to hit the bottom anyway, there’s no view to savor with a slow decent because it’s a pit…it makes no sense to use a parachute instead of just free falling forever.
What’s the point of jumping off a cliff if you have to wait 2 to 4 days to die? Give me that sudden stop baby.
Now I’m just thinking of Homestar Runner’s Teen Girl Squad: “if you fall in a bottomless pit, you die of starvation”
I suspect dehydration would be a bigger issue, rushing through the air like that would make you lose moisture quickly, and the air would keep getting denser (and maybe hotter? I don’t know that much about bottomless pits).
shouldn’t get denser or hotter. that implies there’s a center of gravity and thus a bottom.
if anything it would be frigidly cold.
I honestly don’t know but that quote lives rent free in my head lol. YouTube Source
You’d be cheese gratered from friction skimming the sides long before.
To truly understand the horror of this comic, read this: https://archive.org/download/TheLibraryOfBabel/babel.pdf then read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_Stay_in_Hell
There are no freeways in Reseda. This part of the song always bothered me.
Maybe he meant the 118? Kinda comes close.
The 118 is way over in NoHo. The 101 is closer but it runs through Tarzana and Encino.
I wonder mathematically how long it would take for a person that deployed a parachute, died, and decomposes to be caught up to by a free jumper.
The skeleton would have taken 1 month to years depending on if the pit has insects.
We can safely ignore the acceleration time, so the distance is just terminal velocity times time. Catching up means equal distance for both, so
v1*t1 = v2*t2Substituting t1 with t2+T, where T is the headstart, we can solve for t2:
v1*(t2+T) = v2*t2 v1*T = v2*t2-v1*t2 t2 = (v1*T)/(v2-v1)v1*T is also the distance of the first jumper when the serving jumper jumps. So it’s headstart distance divided by the relative velocity.
That parachute looks comparatively tiny, but the typical wing loading for a newbie will have you descending at 15-25mph (20-40 feet per second, approximately). I think I remember an advanced canopy instructor mentioning that with his high wing loading, he could hit 100mph or so (150 feet per second, give or take) in a diving turn. Interestingly, if there is no landing with the bottomless pit, you could give newbies advanced canopies without too much worry. Sure, there’s a chance they fuck up the lines and ruin the experience, but they could just cut away and then enjoy the freefall.
Let’s just say this fella was given an appropriate newbie-sized canopy for his weight, and is at the lower end of the spectrum. A typical fall rate for a belly-to-earth orientation (which is the beginning orientation taught, as it’s the most stable and easiest to manage) will be between 100-125mph (150-180ish feet per second). That’s a difference of ~1:4, which means if your fastest decomposition occurred, our freefaller would be a week in his fall already, and probably dead himself… IF the canopy dude had died immediately upon entering. That would make sense, seeing as how it’s a bottomless hole, not an entire world. He’s probably bounced off the sides a few times. Hitting a cliff face is the beginning of death for most base jumpers, so it could be our friendly pilot’s cause of death here.
BUT let’s not jump to conclusions too quickly. If this dude is decomposed, that means quite a bit of weight is gone. My search history has probably just gotten mildly spicy for an investigator somewhere. A quick search showed a graph of decomposition reducing weight by approximately 70-90%. That means our pilot here might have gone from a conservative wing loading of 0.8 to something like 0.2. That’s going to be suuuper floaty. The vast majority of the weight comes off after bloating stops and the active and advanced decomposition sets in. So let’s say by day 15 (to make the math easier), the canopy pilot is only falling at a rate of 8 feet per second. I don’t want to actually break out the calculus, so simple arithmetic and algebra here. We’ll take the difference between 8 and 20 feet per second and multiply that by 15 days worth of seconds, then see how long it takes our freefaller. So by day 15, canopy-man is at 18,144,000 feet in the pit. He’s now descending at 8fps, compared to the fastest 180fps of the freefaller. The freefaller gets to 18,144,000 feet in 28 hours. The canopy is another 806,400 feet down. In another ~1.3 hours, the freefaller catches up. I think our comic is a possibility now.
We could also say that our freefaller is quite experienced, or very inexperienced, and is vertical more often, which typically sees speeds closer to 180mph, or around 250-300fps. That changes things again (and really makes the scenario easy), but meh. Do the math yourself, nerds.
I suspect 30 day would be the bare minimum to become a skeleton and that’s a huge give to the math. If it takes 30 days then the free faller would make it in 56 hours. Which is plausible to survive for that long without food or water.
But if decomposition takes longer, which is likely, then our free faller could not reach the skeleton alive. If our free faller packed some supplies though this could add more decomposition time
Decomposition would likely be slower in this environment too. It would be harder for worms and maggots and so on to get a foothold. You’d have to rely mostly on bacterial means of decomposition
I mean, the comic shows a skeleton, but I’m reasonably certain that the skeleton wouldn’t be intact by the time it looks like that. The jumpsuit might (big might there) keep some of it in place, but there’s no way the hands are still gripping toggles and the skull is there, looking upwards in horror. I think we can give everything we’re talking about some pretty big leeway and make things work.
Plus we could always give our freefaller some superspeed by making him want to practice his speed competitions. World record right now is somewhere around 374mph, I think. That’s over 500fps, and probably means we could expect him, with a little pack of water, to be alive for long enough to reach ludicrous distances compared to the canopy pilot. Even if he’s only a wannabe speed star, I’m betting the scenario is plausible. Not from what we see, obviously, with him doing cannonball rolls and belly falling.
Would the air rushing by, even at lower speeds increase or decrease the rate of decomposition? I mean it’s one thing for a body to lay on the ground and decompose, but to have constantly moving air all around it would probably change the dynamic.
Depending on the humidity in the pit, it could be very dehydrating and cause them to basically mummify.
Mmm, bottomless pit jerkey
Minutes, actually, due to the flying piranhas.
The friction from the wind would push apart the weakening decayed flesh, no bugs needed. But cleared to the bone? That’s more a year than a month.
Can I bungee jump into the bottomless pit?
I don’t understand their menu.
I can jump for $10 or I can push someone else for $5? Neat. But naw, it’s probably [get pushed] $5
Same. Also what’s that giant burger doing there?
What’s the light source?
You develop your aura senses in the eternal descent, that’s why the background is black and only their bodies are colored in. The dead person’s spirit is, of course, trapped in an perpetual prison of decomposing flesh and bone.
