From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Sun Jul 02 2000 - 18:28:35 MDT
Zero Powers wrote:
> Life would be pretty miserable for a half-mile high person, and there would
> be *very* little evolutionary pressure for that line of persons to continue
> to grow taller.
Understatement. Think of scaling laws. If one doubles ones
every bodily dimension, one's mass increases as the cube,
so 8 times heavier. But the strength of a muscle is a function
of its cross sectional area, so one is only four times stronger.
So a similarly scaled person twice the size would feel
as tho she is in a 2G environment.
The real kicker is that if every dimension is doubled, the
moment of inertia of every limb is increased by a factor
of 32. So the double-scale person can forget playing
ping pong. She can forget playing pretty much anything
for that matter, except maybe chess, so clumsy would
she be.
I have a cousin who is an inch short of 7 ft. He is
often asked if he plays basketball. Truth is it is quite
an effort for this young man just to walk without tripping
over his own size-15 feet. spike
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