With how much force did brachiosauruses vomit?

Sort of. The amount of time required for a collision is one part of what determines how large of a force a body experiences. The other part is the relative speed between the two impacting objects. So the reason that a belly flop off the diving board may hurt while a smooth dive from the same height does not is because the smooth dive takes longer to slow you down. So I’m arguing that any decent sized creature below a puking brontosuarus is probably going to escape without dying because the collision time is far more likely to be about 1 second or so and not the 0.01 seconds we might expect if the puke were like a concentrated blob like a rock. This would give a force of about 830 Newtons and not 68,600 N. It would probably still hurt a bit, but I doubt it would be lethal.

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about 68,000 Newtons per hurl

So a brachiosaur that hurled 68 times would exert a force of just 1000 newtons?

No, the unit here is newtons, not newtons per hurl. Check your units, people!

(68000 newtons per hurl) / (68 hurls) = 1000 newtons per hurl2, whatever that means.
(68000 newtons per hurl) × (68 hurls) = 4624000 newtons (cumulative).

Check your units indeed. I know this is silly, but I wonder what it is about it that’s bringing out such mistargeted pedantry.

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I mean, so it doesn’t kill you instantly. You’re still covered in hydrochloric acid or something like it. And pepsin, a digestive enzyme. :man_shrugging:

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Nope. It’s your shape when you hit the water and how much contact you make with it and how much water you displace because of it. Surface area counts.

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Actual puking, 12 minutes after eating, so from the stomach.

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Most owls, too. They chuck up whole chunky pellets of indigestible detritus.

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Michaela Coel Netflix GIF by Chewing Gum Gifs

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My avatar removes its mask before hurling, obviously.

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girl thanks GIF by shapefruit

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It’s the time taken during a collision that determines the average size of the impact force. So your intutition about the impact area being an important factor is a good one, but the reason it matters is what I’ve already said – the time for the collision is shorter for the belly flop than for the diver. But impact area alone isn’t sufficient. We can consider that a belly flop into water will hurt less than a belly flop onto ice from the same height. It’s the same impact area, but the ice stops you a lot quicker. Getting back on topic – the time of collision for dinosaur puke falling on one’s head isn’t going to be the roughly 12 milliseconds required to create a force of 68,600 Newtons. It’s going to be something around 1 second, which is around 80 times longer, making the average force about 80 times smaller. The creator of the original graphic messed up the last step in the physics, so the conclusion that dino chum is going to kill anything by impact is far far less likely than having it kill something by asphyxiation, which is just nasty.

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Seriously GIF by Debby Ryan

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Muphry’s Law strikes again! Thanks for the help.

Yep. The intuition that a larger impact area means a larger force is wrong in many situations. Here’s an example. A 200 gram solid copper sphere has a diameter of about 3.5 cm. A 0.22 caliber copper bullet is about 2.60 grams and has a diameter of 5.6 millimeters. When the sphere is dropped from a height of 1 meter into a pool of water, it has the same linear momentum upon impact as the bullet hitting the water at the speed of sound. Both objects slow down in roughly the same distance (about 1 meter), which means that the bullet must slow down much quicker. (If you liked “MythBusters”, see episode 34) Consequently, since the average force on both objects in this example is defined to be equal to the amount of linear momentum lost divided by the time for collision, the bullet experiences a much larger average force than the copper sphere. The copper sphere has a much larger area of impact compared to the bullet, but experiences the smaller force, not the larger one.

tenor

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