6mo ago

xkcd #3039: Human Altitude

Human Altitude

Alt text:
I wonder what surviving human held the record before balloons (excluding edge cases like jumping gaps on a mountain bridge). Probably it was someone falling from a cliff into snow or water, but maybe it involved something weird like a gunpowder explosion or volcano.

Explainxkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3039:_Human_Altitude

19 comments

I'm more interested in the altitude of the median human. I suppose it's increased slightly since the invention of office buildings, chairs, and so on.
- Chairs were a game changer
  
  Chairs are overrated. I pretty much always choose the floor. Even the couch tends to be used mostly as a backrest for sitting on the floor
- I wonder if it may well have gone down with the combination of boom in population and rapid urbanization around coasts.
I thought this was a beautiful way to see our progress out in one frame. Then I thought, what about human object reach? So Voyager 1 would be about three more log ticks up at 25 billion km (about the top of the nav buttons) with other probes falling below that at their appropriate times.
The pre-1800 numbers sound too low. There are lots of old buildings much higher than 10 meters high, and I doubt they were all unoccupied at the same time.
- Even before tall buildings, trees should put the noise floor above 30 meters.
very approximate
But what are the constant dips between years?
- Must be years without launches.
  
  So in 1882 nobody went above 1.5 meters.
I want to see how this looks without the log scale on the y axis.
- .......I||
Poster's note: I just noticed it uploaded and didn't see it posted yet, so I rectified that.
But the Apollo program was fake propaganda!

19 comments