From: D. den Otter (neosapient@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Jul 02 2000 - 08:42:48 MDT
At 11:12 2-07-00 +1200, you wrote:
> > The perfect human would be:
> > -strong
> > -tall
>
>
>Where do you get tall from? Being tall myself I appreciate the compliment,
>but why is tall useful?
If you have two people with exactly the same muscle/fat ratios, same
fitness level etc., then the taller one will always be stronger because
there's simply "more of him". Danny De Vito could -at least theoretically-
grow muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he could never become as
strong as him. So being tall is (in this case) linked to being strong, and
being strong is quite handy for all sorts of things. If you got yourself an
artificial body, you'd want it to be "superhumanly" strong (among other
things) I presume, thus acknowledging that extra strength is good, but
until that's possible the best way to get the most out of a biological body
is to let it grow tall and muscular. Of course, somewhere around seven ft
or so you run into an effectiveness ceiling due to heart capacity (gravity
starts to become a real problem) etc., so you don't want to grow any taller
than that.
And yes, being tall simply looks better.
>Not good for space travel, for that matter it
>keeps air travel expensive.
I don't think that "biological" space travel has much of a future; the
final frontier will be the domain of anorganic posthuman entities that can
adapt much better to such a hostile environment. As for air travel: I doubt
that a couple inches more or less would have much of an impact on airline
costs, but even if this were the case, it would IMO be a small price to pay
for having a tall, powerful body.
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