Skydiving Dilemma
Electricity and Magnetism
Level
1
You're skydiving and you realize that you're going toward a pair of high voltage transmission lines. You have enough control to try any of the choices given. Which should you choose if you want to stay alive?
Grab one wire with both hands, and hang on.
Grab one wire in each hand, and hang between them.
Try to fly between the two wires and land on the ground.
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1 solution
Discussions for this problem are now closed
The essential problem here is that the two lines have an extremely large difference in electric potential. It is clearest to think about the transmission lines as two sides of a simple closed circuit, which is driven by a kind of battery, which is the power plant.
The absolute worst thing to do would be to grab one wire in each of your hands. This would essentially form a closed circuit through your skeleton, and flow a massive amount of current from arm to arm, almost certainly killing you.
Another bad thing would be to aim for the middle. Because the voltage gap is so large, current is liable to arc between them and deliver a massive charge to something in the middle.
The most sensible choice is to grab one wire with both of your hands. This puts both terminals of your body at basically the same potential, which (due to a simple application of Ohm's law) means no current will flow through your body.