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For the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing a bunch of ants crawling around my house. I’ve been dutifully trying to kill them all, although I have yet to go buy some insecticide. However, I saw an ant yesterday crawling around near the balcony of our second floor. Instead of just squashing and killing it, I decided to flick it off the balcony wondering if it would die due to the fall. Seeing how I was doing something else at the moment I decided to flick the ant, I wasn’t able to check if the ant actually died. Then, being the enginerd that I am, I was thinking what would be the equivalent to the ant falling 10 feet to a person falling off a building?

For simplicity sake, let’s say that ant is 1cm in height, and the distance of free fall is 10ft. Now let’s say a person is on the short end and is 5ft tall, and a story is 10ft. Let’s keep the ratio of a person to a story the same as an ant to a story of a building. So, since a story is twice the height of a person, a “story” for an ant would be twice the height of the ant. If you calculate it out, a 1cm ant falling 10ft would be equal to a person 5ft falling 152.4 stories.

However, the only problem is gravity… gravity pulls on a person a 9.8m/sec^2 and would instantly kill a person if they fell 152.4 stories, but since the ant is only falling 10ft, there’s not enough distance to create enough force to kill the ant. Therefore an ant should theoretically be able to walk away from a 10ft free fall.

I believe my calculations are correct, but please correct me if you found something wrong. I passed on trying to figure out what height would be required to drop the ant from in order for the ant to die from the fall. Feel free to try and solve that yourself and post the answer. This also goes to show how much time I have on my hands