Missed it at the time, but Gawker's piece made me smile:

^^ That tickles me.

Ditto though would a cat still land on all four 4 and walk away?

Ricky Gervais can be very accurate when it comes to religion. Maybe the new replacement for the late Christopher Hitchens.

I saw a TV thing about this, the answer is probably yes, at least in terms of the distance fallen. Cats instinctively know how to maximise their shape to minimise their terminal velocity (see how when the cat jumps it spreads itself into a star shape?) and they have very 'springy' arms and legs, which they tuck under themselves at impact to act as shock absorbers. Essentially, cats know how to make the speed at impact slow enough so they can walk away from a fall no matter how high. All comes from them being tree dwellers in the wild before they were domesticated. There's an evolutionary advantage to surviving if you accidentally fall out of the tree.

This means something quite interesting. If you drop a cat from a short distance, it will be fine. if you drop a cat from above a certain height, it will be fine. If you drop a cat from a height between those two, it won't have time to re-orientate itself and spread out it's limbs to brake the fall, so it will probably be hurt.

This was all found out after a vet in New York noticed that all the cats he was seeing coming in with injuries from falling lived with people who had apartments between the second and fifth floors. Above that, the cat has time to 'parachute' and would walk away. Below that, the fall is short enough not to injure them anyway. In between...

According to that study, if you could give the cat an oxygen supply and protect it from the low pressure somehow it could probably fall from even such an extreme distance, without a parachute, and walk away.

One for Mythbusters or Redbull? I think that they might have problems throwing a cat, even in a spacesuit, out in space.

The issue I see with this is whilst a cat could minimise it's velocity at any given altitude, it will still be travelling a lot faster than it normally would when in such thin air. The question would be whether it could slow itself down fast enough in the upon entering denser air (ie. could it slow down at the same rate as the air becomes more dense) and also what would be the effect of increased air resistance on the moggy.

Indeed. You could probably assume it's got enough height left when it starts to hit dense atmosphere (say 20,000 ft) for the drag to decelerate it to a 'safe' terminal velocity but the subsidiary question is what happens to all the energy it's got to dump off to reduce from it's must faster 'thin air' TV to it's safe landing 'thick air' TV. You might end up with a slightly toasted cat.

Anyone want to figure out the KE difference between an average domestic housecat doing say 600MPH and 30MPH?

Assuming the cat is about 4Kg and mostly water, then about 1.6 Terajoules.

That's enough to raise the temperature of a million cats from freezing to boiling, or enough to vaporise it 180 thousand times over.

That cat would need a nice space suit, like the man had.

A lot more energy than I would have guessed - I must be wrong, surely?!

A new power source that will sustain mankind forever.

Ahem - yes I just realised I did do it wrong. That was for 600 miles per second :lol:

:edit:

120 KJ which is enough to warm up one cat by about 7 degrees, not quite vaporising entire feline nations on re-entry

I bet I've done that wrong again anyway...

Cats in spaaaaaacceee...

I believe there possibly is potential in studying cats attached to bungee ropes as a new sustainable power source.

Perpetual motion?