I got to thinking last night that theoretically, with enough hair, the air resistance would slow you down so that your terminal velocity would be low enough to land unharmed. How long would it need to be? How would one go about calculating this?
I assume you need some kind of drag coefficient and a density for hair to start with. Not sure where to find that information.
Tried looking it up but I’m not finding any academic research on the drag coefficient of hair as a property of its length.
I do know that drag scales with cross sectional area, but I imagine it would require a very voluminous afro to function as a parachute.
Solving the drag equation for velocity and assuming* a drag coefficient around .5, then for a 80kg person to be slowed to a 7m/s parachute landing speed they’d need a 'fro roughly 10.5 feet in diameter.
*this assumption is most definitely wrong, but close enough for humorous purposes.
Yeah the math checks out, but real hair would be even worse since individual strands create less drag than a solid surface - you’d need something like 20+ feet of afro diameter to slow down enuf, and the weight of that much hair would probably snap your neck before you even jumped lol.