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Weightless cats – Do space cats land on their feet? (2011) [video]
- alex_young 5y agoWhat was the zero-g cat dropkick at the end about? Seems pretty unethical. https://youtu.be/O9XtK6R1QAk?t=29 https://youtu.be/O9XtK6R1QAk?t=29
- syllospri 5y agoThat's not what a dropkick is. In a similar way to someone else pushed a cat, the man used his foot to move the cat away from the floor, but because of the zero-g, it caused the cat to move to the ceiling. Hardly unethical.
- Simplicitas 5y agoIn a priori, isn't this kinda obvious ... LMAO
- xwdv 5y agoI’m not sure what they expected? Which way is a cat supposed to auto-right to in a weightless environment?
- ce4 5y agoProbably the same reason as discussed here recently: A naked skydive inspired a way to keep pilots oriented in flight (military.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30959126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30959126 Edit: Probably that submission led to this one.
- teraflop 5y agoBut a cat free-falling from a height is also weightless, and yet they manage to right themselves using perceptual cues. The point of the experiment is to see how the behavior changes when the sensation of weightlessness is presented for an extended period of time, without the "falling" motion (relative to the perceived local environment) that normally accompanies it.
- ars 5y agoThis is what most of the people replying here are missing - all falls are "free fall" (zero g). Yes the cat manages, but not in this situation.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoThe cat's system has memory. The transition into free-fall from a state where it was previously experiencing ground reaction force provides a cue for the self-righting reflex on the direction of "up/down". Apparently even blind cats can self-right based on their vestibular system.
- moron4hire 5y agoAny fall is a weightless environment, whether it's in a plane or off a building. But in a plane, you don't have the air rushing past your whiskers.
- jstanley 5y agoThe cat might use visual cues to right itself. It might have been interesting to re-run the test with a more obvious "horizon" and see if the cats react to that. Then if the cat still doesn't right itself, it seems like it is using acceleration rather than vision to determine which way is down.
- nealabq 5y agoDo we know it's visual? If you drop a cat in darkness (onto a pillow of course), will it right itself? What if you put it in an elevator that accelerated downwards at 1G so the cat fell to the ceiling? How does it know which way is down? Is it the horizon, or the bright sky, or does the cat remember the scene before it was dropped? Or is it the air rushing by?
- cecilpl2 5y ago> Then if the cat still doesn't right itself, it seems like it is using acceleration rather than vision to determine which way is down. This is not possible because objects (including cats) in freefall do not experience the sensation of acceleration.
- true_religion 5y agoBefore a cat (or any object) experiences free fall, they experience acceleration so they know which way gravity is pulling them. Surely, a cat can remember what happened to it in the last few seconds and instinctually put its feet in that direction?
- throwawayben 5y agoYou don't feel any acceleration from gravity - it can only be determined from other senses like vision or the air flowing over your skin/fur
- true_religion 5y agoWhat about inner ear sensations? Or the pressure of your organs pushing against one another?
- PaulHoule 5y agoI'd like to take a cat to a space station like they did in some Heinlein books. One would think they'd learn to deal with weightlessness better if they had a few weeks to get used to it rather than a few minutes on a plane. Don't know what you'd do for the litter box though.
- Jaruzel 5y agoHowever, Heinlein cats also walk through walls - not good when space is on the other side.
- jimmygrapes 5y agoPixel walks through walls because nobody explained that it can't be done, so I imagine the same would apply for breathing in and staying pressurized in a vacuum
- qbasic_forever 5y agoJudging by how my cat can disappear and reappear at will all around my place... I wonder if household cats already have that ability.
- jxy 5y agoYou can probably put a few mice in a centrifuge of 1 meter and they would be happy. Make the centrifuge 10 times larger, we can fit a litter box.
- gnu8 5y agoThis sounds like a worthy experiment. Why don't we already have a mouse artificial gravity habitat on the ISS?
- pkdpic 5y ago> Don't know what you'd do for the litter box though. pray
- 5y ago
- c22 5y agoDo cats in zero-g fall?
- ISL 5y agoTo a reasonable approximation, cats only fall in zero-g.
- yupper32 5y agoIt's relative.
- glouwbug 5y agoConsidering cats fall feet first and buttered toast butter side down you can power your spaceship by taping buttered toast to your cat's back and attaching the cat toast contraption to the rotor of a generator
- FabHK 5y agoThat experiment has been performed and indeed produces surplus energy, according to reliable sources :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8yW5cyXXRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8yW5cyXXRc
- Rebelgecko 5y agoI think this post is using a technically-wrong-but-still-more-or-less-gets-the-point-across definition of "zero-g"
- emerged 5y agoIt wouldn’t be a super ethical test.. but I wonder if a cat would adapt and start doing some really crazy ninja moves all over the place, if you left him in zero-g for a few years.
- secondaryacct 5y agoYou misunderstand cat adaptation !!! These little bastards would learn to swim lazily before spending any effort on ninja moves :D Have you seen a well-fed pampered cat, the thing will meow for his food before even turning his head towards its human slave. Those auto righting reflexes are just there to ensure their eternal survival when presented to (rarer and rarer) danger. They're Gods making us do their bidding while they pretend we're the masters :D
- Epiphany21 5y agoUnethical? Have you seen the inside of the ISS? It's cat heaven with all the cables and stuff hanging around, and nothing is too high to jump on when you're almost weightless :)
- progre 5y agoWhat? To me it looks like they try to turn their bodies but in freefall they can't make sense of where down is. No reflexes lost.
- itslennysfault 5y agoI was thinking the same thing. They're still rotating the way they normally would. Toward the end of the video the orange cat floats "up" from the floor toward the ceiling and turns it self around to "land" on the ceiling feet first.
- ordu 5y agoYeah, those guys kept kicking or pushing cats preventing them to orient themselves. Cats were surprised by the lack of gravity, but they were not given a chance to adapt to new circumstances.
- Steltek 5y agoI feel like there was an indirect experiment here: how quickly defenseless humans can be mauled by a struggling cat in an enclosed space.
- kazinator 5y agoWhen a cat is in free fall, that is weightlessness. At least initially, until air resistance starts limiting the velocity. In zero-g, you do not directly sense in which way gravity is pointing. Probably, under the conventional free fall situation, the cat is relying on visual clues, and the sensation of air moving through its fur, to establish which way it is falling, as the basis for the righting reflex: which way to aim the paws. Those clues are absent in the simulated zero-g environment, which feels like free fall, but the cat doesn't see any relative movement to anything, or feel any air movement.
- floxy 5y ago>the cat is relying on visual clues That should be pretty easy to test. Anyone know if blind cats land on their feet? If blind cats are in general too geriatric to test on, what about a blind fold, and dropping your cat upside-down on a bed?
- aidenn0 5y agoSo maybe repeat the experiment, but with a giant fan?
- kazinator 5y agoThen, separately, experiment with LCD or projector screens simulating motion, and then the two in combination. (Remembering to reset the cats to initial values of the feline parameters before each attempt, or else using freshly allocated cats.)
- geenew 5y agoCould you accomplish the same thing in a ground based lab with a fan blowing air up at ~80 degrees? If airflow is used for orientation, then the test subject should orient to be parallel to the direction of airflow as it is falling. All for Science, of course. (The 80 degrees thing is there so they don’t hurt themselves when they reach the ground - hopefully being only 10 degrees off vertical will be recoverable).
- someweirdperson 5y ago
- hjek 5y agoThis is animal abuse!
- madacol 5y agohttp://paulgraham.com/heresy.html http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html
- tyingq 5y agoThese parabolic flights give you ~25 seconds of a close to zero-g environment, but bookended by some pretty uncomfortable ~+-2g before and after periods. It would be interesting to see the cats in a more stable and extended zero-g environment to see how they adapt over time.
- pwdisswordfish9 5y agoA buttered piece of bread would be cheaper
- xallarap 5y ago
- eterevsky 5y agoCan a cat barf from disorientation?
- progre 5y agoYes. Source: Have traveled with carsick cat.
- rossdavidh 5y agoWe know humans in zero-g often barf a lot, and cats often barf a lot, so it seems like cats in zero-g was a high-risk experiment.
- pdonis 5y agoIn zero-g there is no such thing as "landing on your feet" because there is no such thing as "landing". There is no "down" direction so of course cats can't detect something that doesn't exist.
- miked85 5y agoNever underestimate cats.
- lgessler 5y agoThat's certainly the intuition most people would have about this, but it's still interesting to see it borne out when in principle there could have been other, surprising signals that cats respond to in order to right themselves.
- pdonis 5y ago> That's certainly the intuition most people would have about this Actually, though, it's wrong. See my responses to others elsewhere in this thread.
- throwawayben 5y agozero-g is the same as falling though, just with no apparent acceleration.
- nemothekid 5y agoI've never thought critically about this - but in free-fall on earth, you are falling through the air which could be used to measure the direction of the fall.
- ndr 5y agoIs it? What about the resistance of air that was not going at your own speed?
- dfxm12 5y agoAcceleration is a vector. A vector is magnitude and direction. "Down" is a direction. If there's no acceleration, there's no "down". That there is no acceleration in "zero g" is a critical difference between "falling" and "zero g" in this context. Therefore, they aren't the same.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoDear scientists, for the love of all that is good, don't repeat this test. Cats aren't ever going to forgive you for engineering a situation where they are seen to land in an ungraceful way, and there's a tiny chance that they will make us all pay when they evolve opposable thumbs.
- frederikvs 5y agoCats can't be bothered to evolve opposable thumbs. They have human staff to take care of anything that requires an opposable thumb, why would they bother doing it themselves?
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoCats are crafty enough to both survive and plan for a post-human landscape, such as climate change, World War III, or supply chain issues driving up cat food prices.
- cpsns 5y agoI have 3 cats with “thumbs”. Believe me they’re working on evolving them.
- engineer_22 5y ago->Cats in zero-g lose their auto-righting reflex Same for humans.
- daneel_w 5y agoSince the ability depends on motion sensing, is this really surprising to anyone? In other news, kettlebells lose their "heavy" in zero G.
- daveloyall 5y agoOff topic: Kettlebells might lose their "heavy" in micro-gravity[1], but they don't lose their "massy". I first read the term "massy" in some sci-fi book, by Heinlein, I believe. It takes more effort to overcome the inertia of an object with a lot of mass than it does to overcome the inertia of an object with less mass. So, you can still use massy objects to work out in micro-gravity! Or so I've been led to believe by convincing fiction. :) 1: I've also been led to believe that micro-gravity is a better term than zero-g for the conditions experienced during free fall.
- hosh 5y agoPoor cats. It looks like they are completely outside the parameters of their instinctual movements.
- carabiner 5y agoAt the 28 sec mark, in the upper right one of the cats appears to be walking on the ceiling.
- technick 5y agoButtered Cat Paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttered_cat_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttered_cat_paradox
- KarlKemp 5y agoThis is the sort of experiment the biologists I know come up with towards the end of a long night.
- Melatonic 5y agoWe probably should keep cats out of space - can't have them spontaneously evolving into Kzinti or something :-D
- draw_down 5y ago
- digitalsanctum 5y agoYou had me at "cats in zero-g"
- arwhatever 5y agoAm not surprised that zero G severely disorients them, already knowing how a much a simple piece of tape disorients them. :-) https://youtu.be/mdBegLNE6OU https://youtu.be/mdBegLNE6OU
- gene-h 5y agothe cat righting maneuver is a zero-angular momentum maneuver, so if the cat has a slight amount of spin, it is not possible for the cat to correct it. That may be what happens in the video
- JumpCrisscross 5y agoSmarterEveryDay did a great video series exploring cats' self-righting mechanisms [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtWbpyjJqrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtWbpyjJqrU
- ghostly_s 5y ago(~1965), not (2011).
- williamtrask 5y agoThis seems perfectly evolved. In zero-g they have no need to auto-right. They’re not falling!
- ramesh31 5y agoIt unironically makes me very happy to know that probably hundreds of thousands of our defense dollars were diverted to studying cats.
- djmips 5y agoI believe that cats, like humans would adapt to weightlessness.
- Zobat 5y agoAs suggested by some I guess cats would (eventually) learn to move in zero-g. I also guess that these cats didn't get enough time to "learn" what to expect and their disorientation kept them from turning to land on the oncoming wall. Their eyes tells them that the "human" is sittning on the floor and for some reason they're floating towards the ceiling. It's not like cats evolved in a place where the direction of up changed that often. I wonder if "zero-g cats" would learn to use their claws to hold on to "walls" (provided suitable surfaces were provided).