The Longest Infographic Ever

I really love the BBC. I have to admit though, it's mostly for their Science and Environment section. I love knowing, for example, that plants warn each other when under attack, that bees have been used to end the conflict between Elephants and African farmers and that flies behave the same way as humans do when they're drunk. I value knowing about that sort of stuff as much as I value knowing about current events, which is why I have it as my news feed over to your right there

Browsing through today, I found probably the longest infographic ever. The excessive length is because it is a to-scale representation of the space race which goes right to the outer reaches of our galaxy. It even gives you an estimation of how long you'd have to scroll to get to the edge of the known universe. What I really loved about it though was that it reminded me of an old favourite story and led me to discover something new and equally cool.

The old story had been lost and floating somewhere in my hippocampus but came fluttering back out when I saw the highest ever sky dive marked on the infographic. The guy who did it, Joe Kittinger, travelled up in a gondola attached to a high altitude balloon. The trip up took something like 7 hours and he reached 31 km above the surface of the Earth before jumping. Now Joe had been skydiving plenty of times and was used to feeling that massive rush of wind after jumping. But when he leapt from the gondola he felt nothing. It was like he was floating, suspended in the atmosphere. This was back in 1960 and it was an exploratory mission to see how far out into space a human being could go. Joe's head pounded with the realisation he had gone too far and wouldn't be able to get back down. He turned back towards the gondola but struggled to find it. Then, looking up, he saw it rapidly shooting away from him. Only then did he realise he was actually descending. His free fall lasted 4 minutes and 36 seconds and it wasn't until within the last minute that he felt the familiar upwards rushing wind. I'll let Joe fill you in on the rest himself:

Right next to Joe on the infographic I saw "lego-naut" marked out as having reached 24 km. Curiosity piqued, I flicked over to Google and found the following Youtube video: 

How cool is that? The students who uploaded it were all over the news and, since then, other people have been sending all sorts of random stuff up. 

The first person I told about it was completely unimpressed, couldn't see the point of it and then shot the whole thing down saying, "it didn't really get to space anyway". To me though, the point is that we have access to all this cool stuff. And those kids might not have been pioneers in the space race but they were pioneers for ordinary people to do extraordinary things.