h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hmm, also true.

Thing is if you free fall out of a window, you hear the wind whistling in your ears before you hit the ground.

Right, but you get that with a motorbike, plus the sound of the engine going full out and the wheels spinning under you. And you may explode in a fireball.

But wouldn't the sound of the motorbike blot out the sound of the wind?

Well, I don't know. It depends how good the bike is, and how high a building you drive off.

Perhaps if you use a moped, you can still hear the wind. Also, you probably want to make sure there aren't any slightly shorter buildings too close to the one you're riding off of. That could lead to a really cool stunt, but might not work so well in the killing yourself department.

This is, of course true. You just have to aim right; tall buildings that are far away from other buildings are in short supply. So you have to aim, say, into the street. Which is difficulty, because you can't practise.

Although in some places the streets are pretty wide.

Even better, it means you are less likely to crash into the side of a building. Or the roof of a building.

Although in some places hitting other buildings may make it better. The more buildings you hit on the way down, the bloodier and more mangled you'll be when you eventually hit the floor.

Well, I don't know. I mean, there's something really satisfying about hitting the floor with a big squaBOOM!

I agree. The flatter you are at the end, the better.

Another plus side of hitting a building before the floor is that the splat area will be larger.

I disagree. I think that if you hit the building first, you'd tend to... fragment. You'd end up with a very large radius, but it wouldn't all be flat, and it wouldn't be in one place.

The bigger the splat radius, the more people see it.

Well, extend this to it's furthest reaches. If you splat massively hugely, you will splat so big that it's so thin that no one can see anything, surely?

True, but just how much splat will you get if you hit just one building on the way down?

Well, in truth, once you've hit, you'll probably leave some of you in the building or disappear into the building completely. And, in the former case, you may well hit the same building again. Thus you won't get splat, you'll get "slime" as gravity drags you down the building.

Hmm, I meant hitting the edge of the building at high speed. In which case your body would flip around and splatter blood and some of the grey matter everywhere.

But 50% of it would just go straight back into the building. In fact, the higher the speed, the more stuff goes into the building on initial impact.

Right. And then, the cleaning lady has to clean you up with a sponge and a bucket of soapy water, which isn't a very impressive way for a man to be cleaned up. We want to be scraped off the sidewalk with a shovel.