Would a Penny Dropped Off Empire State Building Kill You? Turns out, the answer is no. And the solution to this comes straight from the world of physics. See, when something is falling it is acted on by gravity, but also by air resistance.

Items that are more aerodynamic or heavy, such as a ball point pen or bowling ball, may be able to cut through the air better. Both items, Bloomfield said, if dropped from the Empire State Building, would hit the ground at close to 210 mph.

Anything larger would be unlikely to survive. If you dropped a flea off the Empire State Building with no air present, it would fall much faster and splatter against the ground. But the air is plenty to keep the flea safe.

If a 50-gram nut, or a roll of pennies weighing 50 grams, were to fall from the Empire State Building, it would fall about 1,000 feet. Ignoring air resistance, it would reach a velocity of about 250 miles per hour. That gives it energy of about 100 foot-pounds, which is fatal if it hits you on the head.

Is the urban myth true: can a coin dropped from the top of a skyscraper actually kill someone? The short answer, says physicist Jon Butterworth of University College London, is no. At a weight of 7.12g, a 2p coin would in theory reach terminal velocity at just over 19km an hour, hardly fast enough to kill you.

Free fall / falling speed equations Gravity accelerates you at 9.8 meters per second per second. After one second, you’re falling 9.8 m/s. After two seconds, you’re falling 19.6 m/s, and so on.

There’s a fairly common belief that if you happen to fall from a great height, you’ll be “dead before you hit the ground”. The reality is that it’s the huge deceleration (as you suddenly stop) that kills you. It’s really hard to die while you are in “free fall”, ie, falling freely through the atmosphere.

Humans generally bounce. It’s not very high, but the body stays intact usually. Think of it like an aggressive slam. The only detachments would come from say if they landed on an arm or leg weird, but even so it’s more likely to have big bone breaks with bones sticking out than a detachment.

If the thousand foot fall was terminated by a solid object, you would die very quickly. If the thousand foot fall was terminated by a body of water, you would die just as quickly as if you had hit a solid object. If you didn’t have a parachute you would be frightened, possibly to death if you had a weak heart.

We usually estimate around 10 seconds for the first 1,000 feet, then 5 seconds for each 1,000 feet after that.

“A free-falling 120lb [54kg] woman would have a terminal velocity of about 38m per second,” says Howie Weiss, a maths professor at Penn State University. “And she would achieve 95% of this speed in about seven seconds.” That equates to a fall of around 167m, which is nearer 55 storeys high.

Parachutes. The all-time record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute belongs to Yugoslavian flight attendant Vesna Vulović. She was the sole survivior of a bomb placed onboard JAT Flight 367 in 1972 which saw her plummet more than 30,000 feet.

Hitting a bird while in freefall is very unlikely to happen, nearly impossible in most areas since an overwhelming majority of birds do not fly high enough. Most jumpers open their canopies between 2000–4000 feet.