Ah, farts. The butt of immature jokes.

Farts are an interesting quirk of nature when you think about it. (Admit it: You have thought deeply about farts at some point in your life). After all, we’re essentially talking about a putrid gas that escapes from your butthole on command. It sounds so sci-fi!

Flatulence is combustible—as we all know thanks to those YouTube videos of people lighting their farts on fire. That’s because farts are made-up of methane (in addition to nitrogen gas, hydrogen gas, and carbon dioxide).

Considering farts are literally explosive: Is it possible to propel yourself through space by farting?

While this question may seem ridiculous, it’s actually something that scientists thought about. Seriously! In a Reddit AMA, gastronaut astronaut Chris Hadfield admitted to experimenting with astronaut fart propulsion. (I’m sure the Canadian Space Agency couldn’t be more proud of his important research).

Okay, so we know that flatulence can’t exactly accelerate a human at great speeds, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t theoretically harness the power of farts for propulsion.

“Flatulence would propel an astronaut forward very slowly, but if you used the gas as fuel for a combustion reaction the astronaut could get going much faster,” says physics doctoral student Matt (Reddit user VeryLittle) in a post in Reddit’s science community.

Farts are basically rocket fuel, but you’d need a fuck-ton of it (more than the most ravenous Taco Bell eater is able to produce in a lifetime) to propel yourself through space by farting.

Interestingly, astronauts do fart more in space, but it’s not enough to generate thrust.

According to a flatulence study, the average person releases around 1 liter of gas per day. That’s roughly the same size as this water bottle and Matt estimates that the fart would weigh around 0.5 grams:

Diego Torres Silvestre/Flickr Commons

And he estimates that the speed at which a fart leaves your butthole is around 1 meter per second.

To figure out how far you’d move—based on an average day’s farts—Matt put those numbers in this equation:

(1 m/s)(0.5 grams) = 0.0005 kg m/s

Basically, he determined that you’d barely move at all.

“The astronaut will now be traveling 7.7×10-6 m/s forward, which is only about 1000x faster than hair grows. If an astronaut in space farted every day, it would take 10,000 years for him to get up to a normal highway speed.”

But if there was someway to harness fart’s energy, by exploding it backwards like a rocket to push you forward, then the astronaut could theoretically travel at faster speeds:

“If we had one of those fancy gas backpacks that they put on cows to harvest the methane from their farts and a jetpack to burn it, then this gas would be enough to get a particularly flatulent astronaut up to highway speed in a day.”

Cow photo: Theleetgeeks/Flickr