Interesting. Helps to have a tail though dunnit.
I remember as a kid seeing them training in huge pools and I always wondered how close being underwater feels to actual microgravity. All I can really imagine is that you probably can’t move or reorient as fast in low gravity, since air isn’t as thick and is just about the only thing in the craft you’d swim through. I don’t even have a clue what pure vacuum would be like. And it’s not like I can just make an AskLemmy post like “People who have been in space: What’s it like?” 🤣
You got me thinking. Maybe part of the water training wasn’t only to mimic microgravity, but to train them not to move too fast. My dumbass would be one solid bruise if you threw me in the space station right now.
<CRACK>
“Yeah. Forgot. Again. Mass and inertia still in effect. MEDIC!”
Well they are already in the space suits when in the water, which is what makes you move slower from my understanding. It’s like being in an inflated balloon made out of something best described as a fireman’s jacket. It’s somewhat inflexible.
There’s that, but astronauts on the space station still move slow, and not because they can’t move fast. A billion years evolving in gravity is no help when you’re in space.
I mean, you could try. Might not work, but maybe?
I mean… I suppose it’s possible there are Lemmings that have done the Bezos thing where they basically just kissed space in an airplane. 🤷♂️
Not seeing the point as the cat is orienting on gravity. If there’s no “down”, what would a cat do? We already know.
When it falls, the cat, despite having nothing to push against, is orienting itself towards the direction it wants (the ground) while in free fall (-ish but it’s doesn’t use air friction like a skydiver could) with no initial rotation. Microgravity doesn’t mean being outside the Earth’s gravity field : it means being in it, free falling and missing the ground.
The problem the cats have in the plane in your link is that they have no idea where the ground is because the ground is the plane and it’s moving with them so they feel the free fall and it triggers their reflex, but they don’t know where they’re falling towards so the reflex sort of glitches. I believe this is also a disorienting feeling for humans, but when they get used to it, reorienting oneself when one can’t reach anything to pull to or push against feels like it could be useful in some situations.
Crud. I understood every word you wrote, still can’t get my head around it. Whether in the plane or the space station, there’s still no “down” to orient to.
Yeah, there’s no “down” to orient to, but big brained humans can train themselves to use the cat’s trick to orient themselves to any direction.
In cats it’s mostly a reflex, which is way faster when the problem you want to solve is “I fell from this tree branch and I have .1s til I hit the ground, hopefully with my paws”, but less adaptable to “this free fall will never end and there is no ground, so while I thank my inner ear for the information that I am in free fall there is no need to panic about it. However I do want to manoever my body to look this way rather than that, so I can (I don’t know if the following example is an actual concern or not, but I imagine the trick would be useful there if it is) reach for the tether that just accidentally disconnected from the back of my suit, and stop myself drifting away from the space station and into the infinite blackness”.
Or, you know, maybe less dramatically “I have nothing in reach in front of me that I can use to move my body around, but there’s a handle behind me that I could reach if I manage to switch orientations.”
I’m guessing that learning re-orientation like that can be used in a zero-G environment, but as cats do it largely on instinct, they can’t immediately apply it when exposed to zero-G. Like how dancing teaches you all sorts of motor skills, for which reason martial arts and dancing are associated in some cultures, but someone who is good, but ‘instinctively’ so at one or the other would have trouble transferring the skills; while someone who is practiced and educated on theory would find it easier to do so.
NOW I’m clicking.
