If I could fly

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>>1054472

I remember reading somewhere that you need a 20m wingspan

>>1054473
If that isn't a work of art, I don't know what that is.

Average height would need to be a lot smaller, and our bones would need to be hollow to save that weight.
The wingspan would still have to be fuckheug.

>>1054472
>Would we even have enough energy to lift ourselves?
There is a human powered plane. And an ongoing attempt to create human powered helicoptery thing.

>>1054483
Last I heard was a failure of their machine, but I guess they finally pulled it off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syJq10EQkog

>>1054486
Flight time is limited but not by strength of the pedaler. The crank spools up drive rope which has to be unwound after every flight.

>>1054487
See the movie "Brewster Mc Cloud" especially the end.

>>1054487
>>drive rope
>>unwound

I guess these idiots haven't thought of making a continuous loop? ie, belts

and don't tell me its for weight savings, in that vid I saw steel plumber's hose clamps being used in construction

>>1054884
With it fixed to the rotors you don't have to worry about maintaining proper tension to avoid slippage. The rope would have been chosen for its weight and being a synthetic probably couldn't avoid slipping at any reasonable tension.

>>1054472
This was brought up in some PBS program I saw a long time ago. According to them, in addition to having hollow bones, and adult would need legs the size of a 10-year-old, and would need a keel bone that projected at least a foot further out than our sternum to anchor flight muscles.

>>1054481
I never understood hollow bones. Are they full of air?

>>1055708
The hollow part of a bird bone isn't wasted space. In some bones, the hollow cavities contain extensions of the air sacs from the lungs. These air sacs help the bird to get the oxygen it needs to fly quickly and easily. The same is true for the air sinuses in the human skull. Some other mammals (notably the elephant) have huge air sinuses in their skulls.

If the gas were allowed to stagnate, the gas composition would gradually change as the oxygen were slowly absorbed. But in all the species mentioned, the gas circulates often enough that its composition remains very similar to the air you find in the trachea (warmed, humidified atmospheric air).

>>1054472
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ketusOFabb4

>>1055722
That's really cool. Thanks for the knowledge drop. I like to think you're an ornithology professor wearing a padded tweed jacket while biking to class and smoking a pipe.