The Reverend Clank absolves you of your un-whole-ness 
?
You are one bizarre individual. Are you suggesting that these people had the time or presence of mind to do back-of-the-envelope calculations? If anything, they may have realized that a 1,000 foot fall was going to kill them no matter what.
EDIT: Added a âdâ at the end of ârealizeâ in the third sentence.
Time for a quick order-of-magnitude guess is a second or two. Great thing to maintain presence of mind as well. I do that habitually to keep mind sharp.
1000 ft fall is well below documented freefall survival cases. That indicates there is a chance that may be small but is certainly worthy to try for, given the alternative.
They jumped because their friends were screaming and their asses were burning. It was time to go. What is so hard to understand about why a human would take matters into their own hands when faced with horror?
Hey, Iâm on your side, and I sympathize with the jumpers and everyone else who was a victim, directly or otherwise. Could your response have been meant for âshaddack?â
I can only hope youâre never put in a position to find it necessary to test your theory.
I have a feeling Iâm responding to a troll.
EDIT: Or youâre a sociopath.
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I canât tell who I responded to on my phone, but if you donât want to be responded to, then consider my response to be for shadrach or meshach or abednego instead.
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I hope the same. But being prepared for options keeps these options less risky once they happen. You can do it too; e.g. when entering a facility, look around for possible escape routes, how to get out if needed. You can get it ingrained to the level of automatic behavior in few years, then you donât even have to consciously trying.
Dead have no use for sympathies. Living have use for survival strategies. How many more people would survive fires if they knew more about behavior of fire and smoke and the toxicity and incapacitating power of smoke. But no, the socially acceptable conversation topics do not involve this.
Why sociopath? I just have questions that bug me.
Excellent link, thank you. (Why I missed that one in my earlier searches?) Still no answer to the streamer brake question, though; I should ask there.
A car roof acts as a deformation zone, in addition to your legs. Anything that absorbs and dissipates the kinetic energy better than concrete will do a job. Stack the bonuses for the saving throw, as a gamer would say. And it is always better to try and maybe or even likely fail than to give up because it âwould not workâ. Even improbable happens, especially if you help it a bit.
I guess I overreacted - I apologize. It just seems like an odd thing to think that people would try to calculate their odds of survival when contemplating a 1,000 foot drop. I love to fly, but if I look over the edge of a 100 foot bridge, I nearly wet myself.
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And that pretty much says it all about your posts in this topic.
I get that you have a ânever say dieâ attitude. I admire that you always scope out your environment for potential threats and escape routes. I grok how having that little game underlying your every observation would go a long way toward making life considerably less mundane.
Randall Munroe made an xkcd comic about it, and I found it very amusing.
But we donât get âsaving throwsâ in real life. A saving throw is a game mechanic to give imaginary characters a mechanism for avoiding harm or death. Itâs a way to keep the game going, rather just having it end.
- GM: Your character died. Sorry about that.
- Player: I failed my saving throw?
- GM: There was no saving throw. You just die. And
since youâre dead, Iâm going to have ask that you leave the room. - Player: But⌠what? What if the other players resurrect me?
- GM: No resurrection. Youâre dead. For you, itâs game over.
- Player: How about if I just sit here and watch while they finish the mission?
- GM: Youâre dead. Youâre not a ghost or a disembodied spirit. Youâre dead.
- Player: That doesnât sound like much fun.
- GM: Your fun is over. Youâre dead. Go home. Now.
In your first post in this topic, you called the jumpers âdumbâ because they didnât try to improvise a parachute or some kind of braking streamer. Youâve since retracted that remark.
But did you ever really mean it? Because each new time that you bring up the physics of a possible escape, you weaken your retraction.
Youâre going to view life your own way, and Iâm not trying to dissuade you from it. Indeed a part of me wishes to recapture that sort of mindset.
But this isnât life. Itâs a comment thread about a poignant image that captured the last few moments of a personâs life.
I suggested you make another topic for a dispassionate discussion of how to get out of burning skyscraper, but you keep coming back to this topic, insisting on applying your own personal values, your own notions about possible vs. probable vs. inevitable, to the horrific situation and decision that person made on that day.
Since the above, every post youâve made in this thread suggests that you are not even prepared to consider that your death might be inevitable.
Your insistence on being ârightâ about the possibility of your survival in the circumstance they faced comes at the implied cost of them being âwrong.â
I say again: youâre in the wrong topic for that.
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No need to apologize. In a sea of real assholes a nonintentional one becomes a logical frequent false positive. [grin] I have my own scary situations and focusing on the reality and probability aspects there helps greatly to keep calm(er).
Every action done to avoid premature expiration is a saving throw. Actual dice are not involved, probabilities they represent in the game are. Remember the gaming system is quite a simulation system; the terminology and concepts are quite convenient. You almost always get a saving throw. Sometimes you can stack bonuses and prepare. Sometimes all you get is the couple dozen milliseconds to dodge the car that heads at you. You can take offense on the terminology but you canât make the underlying principle to go away. And at the end it is almost always something that you did not count with that does you in. In the better case when it is not Alzheimer.
The cartoon is funny. I donât go that far, usually I stop with âhow to get the hell outâ. Does good to alleviate anxieties enough to not be a problem. (Okay, I go that far but only when bored, waiting, and without a book.)
Everything that happens is life. And it deserves to be dissected and lessons learned. It is irresponsible to not do so.
The argument I retracted is that the people were dumb. Some reportedly actually tried to macgyver their way out of the situation. I hoped for at least one to try. That happened. And I stop here in order to not end up with a philosophy tome of what I said and did not say and wanted or not; just not assume a bad intent. I did not retract it was impossible to survive. It was improbable. Thatâs what I donât dispute.
You are likely projecting that I think Iâd certainly survive that. All I said was about attempt to raise the PROBABILITY, and every meter per second you can shave off the impact speed, and every g of the impact itself you can avoid, counts in your favor.
OK, you seem to be prepared to use objects around you in novel ways, have some acrobatic ability so you wonât just slip on the ledge and you may be able to use diplomacy to convince others to help you prepare the escape plan and let you use it while they burn to death. You get (roll, roll) 9 for dexterity and (roll, roll) 14 for charisma. The towers were 1,368 and 1,362 ft high, but weâll assume you got down to 1,000 ft for the sake of simplicity. [Hmm⌠(scribble, scribble)][1] Roll 100 d10 for damage, plus 500.
[1]: Falling | D&D4 Wiki | Fandom[quote=âshaddack, post:54, topic:32575â]
Every action done to avoid premature expiration is a saving throw.
[/quote]
This is reality so you donât really get saving throws, but your improvised parachute slows you down a little: -5% damage. Your acrobatics check also reduces your damage, but only by 10 points as you donât have any practice and this is still a low level skill.
Some people actually did get out of the towers from above the point of impact, but they used the stairs. I donât get why a dragon would bother with either though.
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Using objects in novel ways would be a natural thing if people werenât annoyingly blinded with the usual uses of the objects. The rest you are construing as a straw man.
In reality, you always have a saving throw. It is just not performed as a probability simulation with dice, and the dexterity/intelligence/whatever checks are not done numerically. (You also have only one life, even if Buddhists disagree here.) The difference between a simulation with variables and a reality with the aspects named by the simulation variables. Is it so difficult to understand, or are you misconstruing what I said intentionally? Or is it a case of getting (perhaps willfully) blinded with the terminology borrowed and taking it more literally than it is?
Last time I played was some two decades ago, give or take, and only a little. The concepts learned there however turned useful as a framework for ad-hoc semiquantitative guesstimations.
True re stairs. But in only one tower and only one staircase, so while the best choice, not always the available one. And my avatar has no relevance to the discussion, the backstory is not related to gaming.
Is it so difficult to understand, or are you misconstruing what I said intentionally?
I just wasnât being entirely serious, thatâs all 
To be honest, I find it difficult to imagine a novel solution to this problem that stands even the remotest chance of changing your situation for the better; apart from using the stairs (which as you say, were only available on one tower and one staircase even then), youâre left with a 1000+ foot drop onto concrete. Landing on a car, dumpster or pile of boxes might help if you fell 3-4 floors, but you are very unlikely even to hit them from that distance. Even if you did it perfectly, itâs not going to make any difference at that speed.
You might be able to MacGyver a solution that could help you improve the odds of survival in less extreme cases, but here the odds are far too low and your best options are to find a staircase thatâs still free or head for the roof and wait to get rescued by air (that never happened, but of the options these people had, it was one of the smartest). You could carry a parachute with you in advance if you wanted a personal third option and you felt tall buildings were too risky, but that and any other possible improvised solutions wouldnât help anyone else.
I do admire attempts to find solutions or refusal to give up in the face of almost certain death, as often there is something that you can do that youâll miss by quietly accepting your fate. (I used to work as a fireman on a ship; if there was a fire or other accident at sea, we were the official response (including in the case of abandoning ship), so I spent quite a bit of time learning about my environment and considering or actively playing out different scenarios during drills)*. Still, my point with the D&D metaphor was that talking about slightly improving your chances in this case is fantasy. Carpet or other office equipment wouldnât give you enough lift and would be too heavy. Even bedsheets or something closer to parachute material wouldnât work (not big enough, not strong enough, wrong shape etc.). Youâre talking about base jumping from a burning building with no experience and materials that are in no way designed for the job, put together in the time since you realised there was no other option and the towers were going to collapse. If you had started earlier, you should have brought the parachute with you that morning or tried the more likely and standard options first.
The people who jumped realised what their odds were and may have jumped through fear of burning to death, desire to take control of the one major decision they had left, just because of the intense heat (some may just have slipped) or maybe because it was an opportunity to fly for ten seconds and they could kid their brains into thinking that they had a parachute. At least then they could die quickly in exhilaration rather than agony. That doesnât make them heroes or geniuses, but it does show them to be recognisably human.
*And in that vein, this guy pretty much meets all possible criteria for a hero:
At 8:46 a.m. on the morning of September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 struck World Trade Center Tower 1, (The North Tower). Rescorla heard the explosion and saw the tower burning from his office window in the 44th floor of World Trade Center Tower 2 (The South Tower). When a Port Authority announcement came over the P.A. system urging people to stay at their desks, Rescorla ignored the announcement, grabbed his bullhorn, walkie-talkie and cell phone, and began systematically ordering Morgan Stanley employees to evacuate, including the 1,000 employees in WTC 5. He directed people down a stairwell from the 44th floor, continuing to calm employees after the building lurched violently following the crash of United Airlines Flight 175 38 floors above into Tower 2 at 9:03 A.M. Morgan Stanley executive Bill McMahon stated that even a group of 250 people visiting the offices for a stockbroker training class knew what to do because they had been shown the nearest stairway.
He had actually predicted the attacks years before and put in all sorts of measures to educate people and prevent more casualties.
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The situation is extreme. However, at this height thereâs a steady state achieved (which simplifies the calculations and allows referring to cases of parachute-fail survivals). For impact survival, minimizing the deceleration (g) is the key. The steady-state free fall speed is influenced by drag - maximize that with anything you can and slow the speed down. (I still do not have an equation for streaming airbraking. Have to find it somewhere. (Where?)) I read somewhere about a case of survival where the braking was provided by a wind jacket, but I was unable to find it again and am by far not sure if I remember it properly. The other factor is the landing itself, which you have much less control over. Attitude control (falling legs-down) increases the chances; falling flat or even head-down is a lousy situation. Airbraking helps here as well. The most dicey part is the trajectory control, which I donât believe will be much likely. Anything that absorbs energy and slows down the deceleration will help here, IF you can steer at it. If these three factors can be stacked, you could fight out a few percents of chance; if you actually can, that has to be answered with the tables of what human body can withstand and that bloody equation I cannot find that drives me mad. The theoretical possibility is there; qualitative estimations are clear. Quantitative, if it is actually feasible, have to be calculated.
Obeying the authority can kill. Whether it is the Port Authority telling people to stay in place, or a ship captain sending people under the decks (where they get trapped) when the ferry is sinking⌠Same for not challenging the authority when it is wrong (like in that aircraft where captain told the passengers about trouble with right engine and switched that off, while it was left engine that was spitting fire, which they saw and nobody told the crew about the discrepancy). But the tendency (need?) to obey is built into the human mind, as numerous experiments shown; standing up to somebody higher on the pecking order requires quite some courage. I wish Iâll have enough if itâll become needed.
As of starting earlier, the best option would be calling in sick.
The mishap was entirely predictable. I myself proposed using large aircraft as a cruise missile in late 90âs. (Not that difficult, I was primed with a kamikaze documentary on TV. Combine that, a suicidal bombing, and a hijacking, all in the news maybe perhaps that same day, and you cannot not see it.) Any politico that claims it was impossible to predict either lies (unsurprising) or lacks imagination (also unsurprising).
Firefighting and damage control in general on a ship, from what I read, is quite a bitch to do. My hat off to you.
Canât say more now, must run!
I was referring to the options that would have increased your chances of surviving as a person who happened to be in that situation. You could use the emergency escape arrangements or make what you consider to be reasonable preparations in advance if you think the official arrangements are inadequate. I guess you could also change your job, but you canât call in sick every day just in case.
It never came to that in my case, in part because we had official procedures in place to ensure that the risk was reduced as much as possible (fire watches on multiple decks during welding and other hot work, no hot work at sea, properly maintained fire fighting equipment, regular training for all crew and staff, clear markings and notices around the ship, awareness of the whole ship and its possible risks, building on knowledge of past emergencies on other ships etc.). Similar techniques used by Rescorla were very effective in preventing more deaths. He was so dedicated to this and convincing in his assessment of the threat that he got the whole complex to carry out regular drills for years. When you think of the effort and loss of income involved in this, it is a very impressive achievement. Significantly, this vigilance lead to a number of peopleâs lives being saved, while as far as I can tell, nobody survived by less conventional means. Even if you personally could beat the unbelievable odds, this is not that useful on a larger scale, as everyone else is in the same hopeless situation. Rescorla died in the towers but saved many other people - he is a hero, but the best you could be is a genius and incredibly lucky.
Actually, I agree with a number of other people on this thread; this is not a particularly useful picture in the sense that it is emotionally charged, but thereâs not a lot to say other than âoh, thatâs horribleâ. Hereâs a similar picture that I think is much better:
This was taken by Stanley Foreman, who won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize in the category of âSpot News Photographyâ. The fire escape collapsed while the woman was waiting for the fire truck turntable to pick them up. The woman died of her injuries later that evening, but her goddaughter survived by landing on her body. This picture was instrumental in changing fire safety laws in Boston and throughout the country. Through a picture like this, actual safety measures have been brought into place that have saved many peopleâs lives. Rescorlaâs focus on implementing official measures also lead to significant results. His refusal to accept orders was based on years of preparation and was instrumental in helping everyone. Improvised parachutes have worked before in pretty specific circumstances and we could argue the odds of any one method working for hours, but at the end of the day the statistics favour prior planning, clear emergency plans, trained teams and an informed public.
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I had never heard of that man, but what an epic story, thank you! I was really sad to see that he did die, but what a way to go. His time to save hundreds had called and he answered.
On that note, what a stupid, murderous announcement. If one is in the vicinity of a very violent, dangerous event (say, a plane mowing the building next door), you have a right to seek solace and safety. Fuck âproductivityâ.
ETA: The âmurderous announcementâ being the one that told people to remain at their desks.
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