Post

My quote is from the cited article.

Miss them 😊

This is a great resource!

Hahahahhaa. Of course. Me stupid. 🤣🤣🤣🤣😭

Highest altitude in 1971:

I'm curious how high a person might've been launched from an exploding flour mill.

1900 was pretty quiet huh?

Ha!

Not just the log scale. What the alt text is about is much more powerful - it’s more like this, of which a log scale is only the first step: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%2...

Huh. I didn’t realize. Still impressive tho

Now do NIF or ELI focus beam... :)

It's a llama.

Americans be like what’s a kilometer 🤣

Do they say they're literally that far above the planet's surface, and not just sea level?

Over my head but Im interested.

‘Very approximate’ LOLOL

So interesting! Thanks for sharing:)

I love your take on life, very much appreciated!

@xkcd.com Hear me out. What about late period Pleistocene birds of prey lifting early humanoids? Haast's Eagle 🦅of NZ?? xkcd.com/3039/

Since 2000 there's always been someone in space, so the highest altitude human is never in a plane.

And although I will forever regret that Apollo didn't proceed, I now believe the fantasy of sending humans into deep space is foolhardy. Robotic space exploration offers a thousand times more bang for the buck.

Sell high buy low … ahhh wtf. Where my monkey ? and the bucket of shit

The Apollo thing was a lie....truth be told....with the current tech and no one has matched them....

Google Play search for E-Play free music software

On July 2, 1982, Larry Walters (April 19, 1949 – October 6, 1993) made a 45-minute flight in a homemade aerostat made of an ordinary lawn chair and 42 helium-filled weather balloons.[2] The aircraft rose to an altitude of about 16,000 feet (4,900 m) en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawncha...

Why are there 233 responses to this post and not one has the alt text?

And the rest of his kind.

We can send food on the second ship. After all, they're already used to living off other people.

Do you have footage of the "Catapult incidents" so we can verify this statement? 😂

Stagnation.

There would be a tiny blip for Polaris Dawn: 1400km.

Cool I can see my house from here.

My dad worked for NASA. They rented time from IBM- there were punch cards. They had to be in order. It was literally a like Manila colored cards with red printing on them. In stacks, of cards 3 inches by about 7 inches. They had holes punched in them. I knocked over a stack once. Dad was pissed! 😂

What about Polaris Dawn? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris...

That was unmanned.

Amazing metrics, how do people find such information?

Looks like we found our level.

Going to university, I've definitely seen people higher than this chart.

Wait,,, Snoop Dog isn’t on the chart somewhere?

Well drawn handmade scales i should say.

Oh man. For some reason, I originally read this as the highest a human has fallen from. I read ‘airplane fights’ and ‘space fights’ and when I got to the Apollo program thought, man this is dark. But my humor be like that sometimes.

Nice! Thank you!

Haha Musk's Space X mostly falls in the far left category. He had one explode today.

What about Mars?

Is there enough space? 😂

I first read "attitude". 😆

200 years of looking ever outward, followed by 50 years of looking ever inward.

moon

Should be a spike to 1400km at the end for Polaris Dawn en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris...

Oh this is great. I love these kinds of infographics. I miss getting the little added messages by mousing-over the image. Although if you wanted to you could use alt-text and do basically the same thing.

We ugly bags of mostly water haven't been beyond LEO since Apollo 17 in ~1972~. The Soviets were landing robots on Venus around about then.

I'm viewing this on Bluesky; I wish we could get the same tooltip as on the desktop when hovering the mouse!

This is why social media was invented.

Ain't got shit on me! Y'all thought I made you in my image, but we can't all be slim. If you guys were in my image you'd be planets, like be fr

Now I need to adjust my altitude

This is a logarithmic scale!!

ignoring the logarithmic scale and feeling smug about how personally high I am on this chart

if only we'd put a catapult on Apollo

Well, humans have never left earth orbit, so….

I'm disappointed that the perlan project is missing 😭

👍

Log scale

Yeah, the logarithmic scale threw me.

You are really boring

Not gonna lie, I recently learned of a duel in France involving two people in hot air balloons shooting at each other with shotguns, so I misread Balloon Flights as Balloon Fights, and thought 'oh those must have been more common then I thought.'

I appreciate the logarithmic scale 🙌🏼

Totally makes sense!

When he wrote "very approximate" he failed to mention the error margin and this is driving us all crazy

That would totally explain the bottom increase between 1930 and 1970!

I think the graph counts people standing on fixed structures as being on the ground. We've had multi-storey buildings for thousands of years so clearly there would always be people >10m above ground level for all of this graph.

I can’t believe you are here! My brother and I used to laugh and laugh at your what if scenarios when your website first came out and I bought your book in NYC. Core memories. Thanks for everything! 🙏🥹

Sad that there isn’t a single highest line in the Apollo series for Apollo 13

not many humans on those

Be my guest. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Humorously highlighting questions like that seems like one of the things XKCD often tries to do.

And if you include Human-made objects, there is also Voyager 1, which is currently outside the solar system (and still working).

Ah yes, the Jotaro-Point curve

Whoever climbed the highest mountain.

There were a few high-altitude balloons in the 1930s that should be higher than any peak here :P Someone needs to read more @nealstephenson.bsky.social

Nobody ever goes down a mine?

Ballon fights?!

Most people believe that our global temperature chart will be magical behave similar. .

It follows the trend of monetary return on investment

What about people sucked up into Tornadoes? Or do those count as hilarious falls?

The Wright brothers achieved an altitude of 3 metres, so they were comfortable beaten by someone with a ladder, and definitely buried below balloon flights at that time (first flight in 1783).

I think the second moon landing might have gone higher (1972).

Seems like America and humanity's "reach for the stars" crashed when America 'elected' the noted serial mass murderer, Ronald Wilson Reagan, and we are stuck in an endless rut.

Hey guys, wouldn't the first person to fly past that limit be the most innovative, smartest, endowed person to have the gifts and cash to win that space race? Man, they would sure be the best human ever! Oh, but I'm sure no human alive could possibly be THAT powerful, right? Or could they??

Banana for scale?

Cool infographic! But you missed Icarus… 😱