Comment on What happens to flies when you let them fly out the window of a car at 75 mph?
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Really small things are really good at surviving anything involving gravity.
But it’s not a 0-75 acceleration either. They’d be sucked out and fine a second later. The danger would be getting pulled around the car due to its aerodynamics, putting it directly in front of the next windshield in traffic.
thirdBreakfast@lemmy.world 3 days ago
This. When your mass is so small, you live in a very different world than we do - momentum and gravity are tiny forces on you, but others such as air resistance and static are huge. Additionally they don’t have the sort of inner-ear positioning system we do - so no real sense of “up” and “down” that would be recognizable to us - so probably the inevitable tumbling motion as you are sucked out of the window would not be disorientating to the fly the way it would be to a big animal.
So the answer is they will likely be fine. From their point of view the blob of air they are flying around in gets sucked out the window and they are just traveling in it. I imagine they would notice the acceleration, but it’s a tiny force on them. The sudden distortion to the block of air (being stretched out to fill the sudden low pressure zone outside of the car window) would be a big deal to the fly, but I don’t think enough to damage them.
Source: idle speculation, and a long standing interest in cats surviving huge falls.