Marc is working on the newly rebooted Mythbusters show (I’m not,
but wouldn’t that be cool!) working with the crew as a physics consultant. This particular myth has the hosts jumping off a 12-m building to see if it is possible to survive. However, their insurance company made them put in safety precautions and so the hosts built a cushioning system similar to the one shown below. Being the physics consultant, it is Marc’s job to determine if their rig was safe. Marc built a scale model of their rig (seen below) to do tests with. The m0 = 0.15-kg base he used stretched the spring x0 = 0.04 m. He used a M = 0.2-kg lump of putty as a replacement for a human and dropped it h = 30 cm above the bottom of the base.