Can you JUMP Inside a Falling Elevator to Avoid DEATH?

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Here's a cool question for you. If you're inside of an elevator and that elevator begins to fall from a multi-story building, ah, you're falling. Can you at the moment of impact with the ground, can you jump off the bottom of the elevator and spare your life and have no injury by jumping right before the elevator hits the ground?

[00:00:19]Well, the answer to this is unless you're absolutely superhuman, no, you're not going to be able to avoid injury or death and falling from a very tall elevator. And here's the main reason why. When you're falling inside of an elevator, the elevator is falling at so many meters per second and it's accelerating the whole time. You are inside of the elevator and you are also falling down at exactly the same rate as the elevator because gravity is affecting you both. So when you're inside the elevator, you are basically in freef fall. And for all practical purposes, you are going to feel weightless inside of that elevator while it's falling. So, problem number one that you're going to have is you're going to have a hard time jumping anyway because if you're in freef fall in the center of the elevator, literally floating like an astronaut, you won't have your feet planted on the ground ready to spring up and actually jump.

[00:01:08]It's going to be very hard to affectuate a jump like that when you're floating in the middle of the elevator. So, what'll actually happen is the bottom of the elevator will hit the ground and then you will then fall down inside the elevator and splat against the bottom.

[00:01:21]Now, let's say you were prepared for this. You strapped your feet to the bottom. You're weightless, but you're attached to the bottom. You're ready to spring up and jump. All right, you're still not going to have a good day because your muscles only have so much energy. And even the strongest human can only jump a tiny fraction of the velocity as compared to the velocity of that elevator coming down. If you're in a multi-story building, everything's accelerating at almost 10 m/s squared.

[00:01:47]And so that means you and the elevator are going to be traveling at tens of meters per second upon impact. So the only way to actually avoid injury is if you could jump up with the same velocity as the elevator is falling down at the moment of impact. And there is no way that human muscles can generate that kind of energy to jump. Even the world athlete, triathlete, Olympian would never be able to jump high enough, fast enough to counteract the downward velocity to be able to then gently set back down on the ground at 0 m/s. It's just not possible. All of that combined with you not knowing exactly when to jump because you can't see outside basically means unfortunately you're going to hit the ground. But modern elevators have numerous safety systems to clamp the elevator and slow it down so that this never happens. The absolute coolest thing that I know about our moon is that near the polar regions, there are actually craters permanently shadowed that receive no sunlight that we now know for a fact contain water ice in the bottom of those craters. Now, this is an artist rendition. It doesn't really look like that. that's bound up in the lunar regalith, but it's there and it's going to help us explore the moon and the solar system. So, as you know, the moon rotates just like the Earth. So, you have the polar regions.

[00:03:06]Now, near the south pole region, there are craters, many of them that are actually quite large that we now know from remote sensing and orbit around the moon contain quite a lot of ice. Now, this is an example of one at the south pole of the moon. It's called Shackleton Crater. You can see it's totally pitch black in the middle. it receives no sunlight at the very bottom of that crater because it's on the bottom and as the moon rotates, the sun just never gets to the bottom of that crater. Now, estimates say that there could be up to 600 billion kg of water ice in the bottom of a lot of these craters, not just Shackleton, but others nearby at the polar regions of the moon. Now, we've detected this water ice and only in the last few decades because of orbiters that have gone around the moon and used what's called a neutron spectrometer to look for the signature of water. And so, we've mapped the entire moon and we know where the water is. And obviously, it can only exist where the sun is not shining and sublimating or evaporating it away. Now, we can't see the bottom of these polar craters, but we have seen meteorites impact the bottom of these craters, and that ejects a plume up into the sky, and we can see that from Earth. Again, using spectrometers on the Earth to analyze the plume along with the orbiting spacecraft, we have a pretty good idea of the distribution of water ice on the moon. So, we have craters near the south pole region, and we even have some that are permanently shattered as we get farther away. This is going to be the way in which we can colonize the moon because if we don't have to bring water all the way from the earth. Remember water is very heavy and if it's already on the moon then we can extract it and use it while we're living on the moon.

[00:04:43]Now this is an artist rendition of some sort of lunar colony. Now this water would not be the bottom of a lake at the bottom frozen. It would be mixed in with the regalith and you really couldn't see it with your naked eye. The Apollo astronauts orbiting the moon could not see it with their naked eye. So we would mine the regalith. We would heat it up, driving the water out, and then we would condense that into tanks. Now, we'd obviously use the water to drink, but we could also use electricity to split it apart to make oxygen and hydrogen for rocket fuel. We could also use it for gardening and other tasks. We could also get the oxygen out of the water to make breathable air. I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about just how ridiculously fast the speed of light really is. Now we know that light itself is an oscillating magnetic field and an oscillating electric field propagating through space with no medium. It comes in chunks or packets of energy called photons. And the speed of light is always the same number no matter how fast you are moving or no matter how fast the source of the light is moving.

[00:05:47]In numbers, the speed of light is about 186,000 miles per second. That's a second.

[00:05:55]That's a second. That's a second. I'm even going a little too fast. 186,000.

[00:05:59]186,000 and so on. That's about seven times all the way around the planet Earth every single second. In terms of meters, that's about 300 million meters every single second, which is about 300,000 kilometers per second. And that means that a photon can travel from the earth all the way to the moon in about 1.3 seconds. Now the earth is about 93 million miles away from the sun. But even at that distance, it takes light about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. And that means that if the sun somehow just disappeared right now, we wouldn't even know about it for about 8 minutes. Now think about how fast light is. seven times around the Earth in 1 second, but yet it still takes light about 8 minutes to get to the sun.

[00:06:54]That tells you two things. Light is really ridiculously fast. And the universe and everything in it is ridiculously spaced out far apart. At the other end of the solar system, we have Neptune here, which is about 4 1/2 billion kilometers away, and it takes light about four hours to travel all the way out to Neptune. Here's another picture with the sun at the center. The helopause is the boundary of the solar wind and it would take light about 17 hours to reach the edge. But that's not where the solar system stops. After that, we have the Kyper belt and then the Orc cloud. It would take light about 2 years to reach the edge of the Orort cloud. Here's a cartoon of the Milky Way with two satellite galaxies that we have. The Milky Way is about a 100,000 lighty years across. It would take light about a 100,000 years to cross our galaxy. The Milky Way has a couple of satellite galaxies that you can see right here, which are about 200,000 lighty years away. And the Andromeda galaxy is about 2 1/2 million lighty years away. Today, I actually want to talk about how does a laser work from a layman point of view. You know, lasers are actually all around us. They're the best example of quantum mechanics in your everyday life. Probably the best example of a laser is a laser light show. You've seen those at concerts and other venues. Of course, we've all heard of lasers cutting through metal, almost like a lightsaber, cutting through something and leaving no marks behind.

[00:08:24]But most people are actually surprised to learn that a lot of the data sent over the internet is actually sent over laser light in fiber optic connections or between satellite to satellite through a laser connection. Now in a nutshell, laser the word is an acronym.

[00:08:41]It stands for light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation. All it basically means is you have to have a laser medium where light can be released and amplified and to where it can build up over and over but it has to be the same color monochromatic and the same phase. That means the crest and the troughs are all lined up together. So you have to have the proper laser medium. You have to have the proper cavity. And then what comes out of the out the other end is monochromatic light that is of the same wavelength that's coming out all in a parallel beam. So light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation. Once we form a beam like this that's all the same color which means the same wavelength that all has the same phase crest and troughs are all lined up and that's coming out in a very narrow very tight beam. then we can focus the power instead of like a flashlight all over the room down into a very narrow cross-sectional area and that's what allows it to be able to cut things and be focused into a beam. Now, you need some kind of laser medium.

[00:09:44]Often, it's a gas, but it could be other things. And then you have often something to pump up the laser material.

[00:09:50]In this case, it's a flashlight of some kind. Basically, you pump energy into the medium either from highintensity light like a camera flash bulb, think of that, or electricity that pumps up the electrons to a higher state, and we have what's called a population inversion.

[00:10:05]When they're up in that high state, they immediately want to decay back down and release a photon. So, what you do is you put this laser medium between two very polished mirrors. One mirror is very slightly transmissive, so the photons can escape out that one end. The photons bounce back and forth, become monochromatic, same wavelength, all lined up in phase. And with that population inversion, you're constantly pumping them up and releasing photons of the same character. This cavity is the exact length to only let one wavelength of light out as a beam of photons that we call a laser. Now, one of my favorite movies of all time is actually the movie Alien and the sequel Aliens. And in that movie, when the alien bleeds, it drips onto the metal decking of the spaceship and it immediately eats through the decking going through several decks of the spaceship. So my question to you is, what exactly is an acid? And why does it actually eat through stuff anyway? Now, basically acids are substances when they're in a water solution, they donate what we call hydrogen ions, right? So you may have heard of the pH scale. pH actually stands for power of hydrogen.

[00:11:18]I'm going to explain why in a minute, but the more hydrogen ions that you have floating around in a water solution, the more powerful or the stronger the acid is. So on the pH scale, something that is neutral, neither acidic nor basic, the opposite of an acid, has a pH of 7.

[00:11:35]And as you go to the left to lower and lower numbers, you get to stronger and stronger acids with more and more hydrogen ions in solution. And as you go the other way, you get to something called more alkaline or more basic.

[00:11:49]Basically, the chemicals on this side don't donate hydrogen ions. They like to react with or accept hydrogen ions in solution. So acids and bases are basically uh opposites of each other.

[00:12:01]Now, this is the most famous acid. It's hydrochloric acid, HCl. This is actually what's in your stomach breaking down your food. So when this stuff goes into water, the hydrogen pops off as a hydrogen ion and then you have the chlorine ions as well. The hydrogen ions, the more of them is what makes the acid stronger. Another very common acids called nitric acid. Notice the formula HNO3. This hydrogen pops off as an ion making it acidic. Finally, another really common acid is called sulfuric acid. H2S04. Notice there's two hydrogens's in this one, but again it's the hydrogens that's making it acidic.

[00:12:38]The more hydrogen ions you have, the stronger the acid you have. Now hydrogen's element one with one proton and one electron. So when I say hydrogen ion, I mean simply a hydrogen without the electron. That means a proton, a naked proton is exactly the same thing as a hydrogen ion. So basically acids are substances that donate protons, naked protons in solution. And if you remember, gravity is actually the weakest force in the universe. The electric force is millions of times stronger. So naked protons floating around solution can attract electrons really really powerfully and strongly.

[00:13:17]So they can rip the electrons off of metal. They can rip them out of your flesh. They can rip it out of the decking. And that's why they react so much and dissolve stuff like in the movies. Learn anything at math and science.com.