Well, unless I’ve remembered it wrong, only two or three people have ever survived that fall. If I’m wrong, substitute a plane. Or a personal unprotected atmospheric re-entry.
Sometime there really are problems that can’t be helped.
There are problems which happen so quickly that you can’t do sustained thinking while you’re in the middle of them, but sustained thinking might help install good reflexes for the general case.
For example, I fell safely on ice for the first time this past winter. I’m reasonably sure that the Five Tibetans (a sort of cross between yoga and calesthenics) strengthened the muscles around my knees and possibly had other good effects such that I didn’t twist my knee.
Someone just threw you off the Golden Gate Bridge.
There’s one problem thinking won’t much help with.
But then again, to make that point I had to reach for a problem nothing could be done about.
Alas, rigorous truth is the constant enemy of the aphorism.
The thinking how to fall to get a minimal possible damage is still a potential way out.
At least, the thinking increases your odds to survive in any situation you are thrown into.
How many people died needlessly of chocking, when they could invent the auto Heimlich - but they failed to do so?
Well, unless I’ve remembered it wrong, only two or three people have ever survived that fall. If I’m wrong, substitute a plane. Or a personal unprotected atmospheric re-entry.
Sometime there really are problems that can’t be helped.
Falling toward a black hole would do. No way out, except in the form of Hawking radiation, much later in your death.
But don’t give up even then! Schwartzshild coud be wrong. Think hard in any circumstances!!
There are problems which happen so quickly that you can’t do sustained thinking while you’re in the middle of them, but sustained thinking might help install good reflexes for the general case.
For example, I fell safely on ice for the first time this past winter. I’m reasonably sure that the Five Tibetans (a sort of cross between yoga and calesthenics) strengthened the muscles around my knees and possibly had other good effects such that I didn’t twist my knee.