The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (39 page)

Surviving a plunge surrounded by a semiprotective cocoon of debris is more common than surviving a pure free-fall, according to Hamilton's statistics; thirty-one such confirmed or "plausible" incidents have occurred since the 1940s. Free-fallers constitute a much more exclusive club, with just thirteen confirmed or plausible incidents, including perennial Ripley's Believe It or Not superstar Alan Magee, blown from his B-17 on a 1943 mission over France. The New Jersey airman, more recently the subject of a
MythBusters
episode, fell 20,000 feet and crashed into a train station; he was subsequently captured by German troops, who were astonished at his survival.

Whether you're attached to crumpled fuselage or just plain falling, the concept you'll be most interested in is
terminal velocity.
As gravity pulls you toward the earth, you go faster. But like any moving object, you create drag—more as your speed increases. When downward force equals upward resistance, acceleration stops. You max out.

Depending on your size and weight, and factors such as air density, your speed at that moment will be about 120 mph—and you'll get there after a surprisingly brief bit of falling: just 1,500 feet, about the same height as Chicago's Sears (now Willis) Tower. Equal speed means you hit the ground with equal force. The difference is the clock. Body meets Windy City sidewalk in twelve seconds. From an airplane's cruising altitude, you'll have almost enough time to read this entire article.

By now, you've descended into breathable air. You sputter into consciousness. At this altitude you've got roughly two minutes until impact. Your plan is simple. You will enter a Zen state and decide to live. You will understand, as Hamilton notes, "that it isn't the fall that kills you—it's the landing."

Keeping your wits about you, you take aim.

But at what? Magee's landing on the stone floor of that French train station was softened by the skylight he crashed through a moment earlier. Glass hurts, but it gives. So does grass. Haystacks and bushes have cushioned surprised-to-be-alive free-fallers. Trees aren't bad, though they tend to skewer. Snow? Absolutely. Swamps? With their mucky, plant-covered surface, even more awesome. Hamilton documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn't compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the same as colliding with a sidewalk, Hamilton explains, except that pavement (perhaps unfortunately) won't "open up and swallow your shattered body."

With a target in mind, the next consideration is body position. To slow your descent, emulate a sky diver. Spread your arms and legs, present your chest to the ground, and arch your back and head upward. This adds friction and helps you maneuver. But don't relax. This is not your landing pose.

The question of how to achieve ground contact remains, regrettably, given your predicament, a subject of debate. A 1942 study in the journal
War Medicine
noted "distribution and compensation of pressure play large parts in the defeat of injury." Recommendation: wide-body impact. But a 1963 report by the Federal Aviation Agency argued that shifting into the classic sky diver's landing stance—feet together, heels up, flexed knees and hips—best increases survivability. The same study noted that training in wrestling and acrobatics would help people survive falls. Martial arts were deemed especially useful for hard-surface impacts: "A 'black belt' expert can reportedly crack solid wood with a single blow," the authors wrote, speculating that such skills might be transferable.

The ultimate learn-by-doing experience might be a lesson from the Japanese parachutist Yasuhiro Kubo, who holds the world record in the activity's banzai category. The sky diver tosses his chute from the plane and then jumps out after it, waiting as long as possible to retrieve it, put it on, and pull the ripcord. In 2000, Kubo —starting from 9,842 feet—fell for fifty seconds before recovering his gear. A safer way to practice your technique would be at one of the wind-tunnel simulators found at about a dozen U.S. theme parks and malls. But neither will help with the toughest part: sticking the landing. For that you might consider—though it's not exactly advisable—a leap off the world's highest bridge, France's Millau Viaduct; its platform towers 891 feet over mostly spongy farmland.

Water landings—if you must—require quick decision-making. Studies of bridge-jump survivors indicate that a feet-first, knifelike entry (aka "the pencil") best optimizes your odds of resurfacing. The famed cliff divers of Acapulco, however, tend to assume a head-down position, with the fingers of each hand locked together, arms outstretched, protecting the head. Whichever you choose, first assume the free-fall position for as long as you can. Then, if a feet-first entry is inevitable, the most important piece of advice, for reasons both unmentionable and easily understood, is to
clench your butt.

No matter the surface, definitely don't land on your head. In a 1977 "Study of Impact Tolerance Through Free-Fall Investigations," researchers at the Highway Safety Research Institute found that the major cause of death in falls—they examined drops from buildings, bridges, and the occasional elevator shaft (oops!)—was cranial contact. If you have to arrive top-down, sacrifice your good looks and land on your face rather than the back or top of your head. You might also consider flying with a pair of goggles in your pocket, Hamilton says, since you're likely to get watery eyes—impairing accuracy—on the way down.

Given your starting altitude, you'll be just about ready to hit the ground as you reach this section of instruction (based on the average adult reading speed of 250 words per minute). The basics have been covered, so feel free to concentrate on the task at hand. But if you're so inclined, here's some supplemental information—though be warned that none of it will help you much at this point.

Statistically speaking, it's best to be a flight crew member, a child, or traveling in a military aircraft. Over the past four decades, there have been at least a dozen commercial airline crashes with just one survivor. Of those documented, four of the survivors were crew, like the flight attendant Vulovic, and seven were passengers under the age of eighteen. That includes Mohammed el-Fateh Osman, a two-year-old wreckage rider who lived through the crash of a Boeing jet in Sudan in 2003, and, more recently, fourteen-year-old Bahia Bakari, the sole survivor of last June's Yemenia Airways plunge off the Comoros Islands.

Crew survival may be related to better restraint systems, but there's no consensus on why children seem to pull through falls more often. The Federal Aviation Agency study notes that kids, especially those under the age of four, have more flexible skeletons, more relaxed muscle tonus, and a higher proportion of subcutaneous fat, which helps protect internal organs. Smaller people—whose heads are lower than the seat backs in front of them—are better shielded from debris in a plane that's coming apart. Lower body weight reduces terminal velocity, and reduced surface area decreases the chance of impalement upon landing.

The ground. Like a Shaolin master, you are at peace and prepared.
Impact.
You're alive. What next? If you're lucky, you might find that your injuries are minor, stand up, and smoke a celebratory cigarette, as the British tail gunner Nicholas Alkemade did in 1944 after landing in snowy bushes following an 18,000-foot plummet. (If you're a smoker, you're
super extra lucky,
since you've technically gotten to indulge during the course of an airliner trip.) More likely, you'll have tough work ahead.

Follow the example of Juliane Koepcke. On Christmas Eve, 1971, the Lockheed Electra she was traveling in exploded over the Amazon. The next morning the seventeen-year-old German awoke on the jungle floor, strapped into her seat, surrounded by fallen holiday gifts. Injured and alone, she pushed the death of her mother, who'd been seated next to her on the plane, out of her mind. Instead, she remembered advice from her father, a biologist: to find civilization when lost in the jungle, follow water. Koepcke waded from tiny streams to larger ones. She passed crocodiles and poked the mud in front of her with a stick to scare away stingrays. She had lost one shoe in the fall and was wearing a ripped miniskirt. Her only food was a bag of candy, and she had nothing but dark, dirty water to drink. She ignored her broken collarbone and her wounds, infested with maggots.

On the tenth day, she rested on the bank of the Shebonya River. When she stood up again, she saw a canoe tethered to the shoreline. It took her hours to climb the embankment to a hut, where, the next day, a group of lumberjacks found her. The incident was seen as a miracle in Peru, and free-fall statistics seem to support those arguing for divine intervention: according to the Geneva-based Aircraft Crashes Record Office, 118,934 people died in 15,463 plane crashes between 1940 and 2008. Even when you add failed-chute sky divers, Hamilton's tally of confirmed or plausible lived-to-tell-about-it incidents is only 157, with 42 occurring at heights over 10,000 feet.

But Koepcke never saw survival as a matter of fate. She can still recall the first moments of her fall from the plane, as she spun through the air in her seat. That wasn't under her control, but what happened when she regained consciousness was. "I had been able to make the correct decision—to leave the scene of the crash," she says now. And because of experience at her parents' biological research station, she says, "I did not feel fear. I knew how to move in the forest and the river, in which I had to swim with dangerous animals like caimans and piranhas."

Or, by now, you're wide awake, and the aircraft's wheels have touched safely down on the tarmac. You understand that the odds of any kind of accident on a commercial flight are slimmer than slim and that you will likely never have to use this information. But as a courtesy to the next passenger, consider leaving your copy of this guide in the seat-back pocket.

FROM
The New York Times

T
HE NEWS OF THE DAY
often includes an item about some development in artificial intelligence (AI): a machine that smiles, a program that can predict human tastes in mates or music, a robot that teaches foreign languages to children. This constant stream of stories suggests that machines are becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should think of them as fellow creatures instead of as tools. But such conclusions aren't just changing how we think about computers—they are reshaping the basic assumptions of our lives in misguided and ultimately damaging ways.

I myself have worked on projects like machine-vision algorithms that can detect human facial expressions in order to animate avatars or recognize individuals. Some would say these are examples of AI, but I would say it is research on a specific software problem that shouldn't be confused with the deeper issues of intelligence or the nature of personhood. Equally important, my philosophical position has not prevented me from making progress in my work. (This is not an insignificant distinction: someone who refused to believe in, say, general relativity would not be able to make a GPS navigation system.)

In fact, the nuts and bolts of AI research can often be more usefully interpreted without the concept of AI at all. For example, IBM scientists recently unveiled a "question answering" machine that is designed to play the TV quiz show
Jeopardy.
Suppose IBM had dispensed with the theatrics, declared it had done Google one better, and come up with a new phrase-based search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained IBM's team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim of an artificial intelligence but would also have educated the public about how such a technology might actually be used most effectively.

Another example is the way in which robot teachers are portrayed. For starters, these robots aren't all that sophisticated; miniature robotic devices used in endoscopic surgeries are infinitely more advanced, but they don't get the same attention because they aren't presented with the AI spin.

Furthermore, these robots are just a form of high-tech puppetry. The children are the ones making the transaction take place—having conversations and interacting with these machines, but essentially teaching themselves. This just shows that humans are social creatures, so if a machine is presented in a social way, people will adapt to it.

What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flip side: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.

In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like "re-Tweeting," relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non trivial—real thought and creativity—takes place on a grand scale within a global brain. That is, people perform machinelike activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection-making. This is a devaluation of human thought.

Consider too the act of scanning a book into digital form. The historian George Dyson has written that a Google engineer once said to him: "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI." While we have yet to see how Google's book scanning will play out, a machinecentric vision of the project might encourage software that treats books as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from individual writers. In this approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost.