A naive application of fluid dynamics would suggest that the answer to 2 is to go perpendicular to the flow until you reach a wall, then go against the flow towards an exit.

In the middle of a crowd/fluid your motion is determined by the humans/molecules around you. The closer you get to a wall, the fewer particles have an influence on you. Just make sure it's not a wall people are moving towards.

Not sure if anyone has studied how well this holds up to humans. Human crowds have very fluid-like behavior, but of course they don't behave perfectly like a liquid in a pipe

Is there anything to the notion that you might prefer to be batted around in the “soft body” portion of the dense-crowd “fluid” rather than pinned between several tons of soft bodies in motion and a hard limit? You seem rather more crushable than an individual molecule might be…

(edit: “crowd crush safety expert” Paul Wertheimer, who came to some notoriety through studying mosh pits from within them, apparently suggests—at least in situations where the crowd is moving toward a clear focal point—you’re right: he recommends the edges

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/13/us/how-to-stay-safe-at-concer...

That said I note that the authors of TFA draw a distinction between dense-crowd situations undergoing unidirectional flow and the steady, confined dense crowd whose behavior they describe.)

> Human crowds have very fluid-like behavior, but of course they don't behave perfectly like a liquid in a pipe

Hypothetically, how would the dynamic change if it were a crowd of cats instead?

Non-cat fluids don't usually spontaneously draw knives and start cutting themselves apart.

I don’t recall where, but for some reason I remember learning that if people start to bump into you too many times, that’s a warning shot to get out. It was something like “bumps per second”.