Can Working Wings Be Grafted on a Human? [Answered: NO]

[Xittenn]

Condorman?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorman

 

Field trip!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070209-wingsuit.html

I soooooooo have to get me one of those..........

 

Have you ever actually seen a flying squirrel? They're pretty cool! I saw one gliding from telephone post to telephone post.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exosquad

The work never ends.....................

 

Another idea even further into the realm of so not possible...................internal fuel tanks..............fuel conversion glands...................bio flap rocket cones...................

 

Oh energy wings not quite ionized Argon but something similar(that's twice I've said that.)

[Sisyphus]

But our best change is bioengineering. Direct neural interface bio-exoskeleton that works like a extended body, capable to function on its own ( heart, lungs etc) also providing protection - flying high in thin air etc. It "attaches" itself to you providing air supply and all necessary for you to function but when "joined" you feel as one.

 

So an airplane made of meat?

[Xittenn]

So an airplane made of meat?

 

You put that so delicately!

[visceral]

Yes, but by that standard, hang-gliding already counts.

 

No I meant an inorganic device that was attached to the body, like Wolverine's adamantium skeleton, but outside...

[Xittenn]

No I meant an inorganic device that was attached to the body, like Wolverine's adamantium skeleton, but outside...

 

So an embedded flying squirrel suit? Near massless energy wings, and meat jet propulsion fueled by an engineered and surgically implanted gland! Energy fields could line the meat cone and dorsal areas of the body to prevent burning. A touch of coloured fluorescence and we all look like fairies!

 

Some of this may lead to serious science someday.........................for now I'm literally laughing out loud in a public place and people are staring.

Edited March 17, 2009 by buttacup

[visceral]

No....like wings made from carbon fibre or something such, attached to your back...

[Xittenn]

Yes, but all of what I said above could be genetically engineered..............

[Sisyphus]

No I meant an inorganic device that was attached to the body, like Wolverine's adamantium skeleton, but outside...

 

So a hang glider that's attached to the body? Why would you do that instead of just... having a hang glider that's not attached to you?

 

buttacup, what's an "energy field," and how are you going to make a wing out of it?

[Xittenn]

I use the only example I know of..................Argon when ionized and discharged in space can under the influence of magnetism produce a field. This field can interact with 'Solar Winds' and act as a 'Solar Sail!' The hope here would be to find a chemical substance which could be ionized and made to form a sheet which could act as a wing. The challenge here would be to make its integrity maintainable in earths atmosphere under low enough 'magnetic pressure.'

 

I'll try to find anything to back any or all of what I just said up in the next two minutes I have left online!

---

Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast04oct_1.htm

 

Yeah well that's the just of it. Adjust the magnetics to form a wing shape and work your way around all.....'big list'......yeah all of the technical road blocks and, well you never know! I don't have any theories on how to keep the meat rocket cone from literaly being blown apart, well I have thoughts, but...........I'm outty on this one!

 

I'll keep my eye out for some stuff while reading Challas book!

Edited March 19, 2009 by buttacup
Consecutive posts merged.

[Xittenn]

Hot air meat balloons!

[Martin]

buttacup is unquestionably the most exciting person on Scienceforums today.

 

The solution to the naturally flying human problem is to do two things.

 

Migrate some humans to a colony where there is gentler gravity

like Ceres or one of the moons of Jupiter.

 

And there, where gentle gravity makes flying easy, genetically engineer a human offshoot species with small, tastefully designed wings.

 

A large artificially-lighted ice-cave on Ceres filled with ordinary earth-like air would be a satisfactory venue, at least for starters.

 

Earth gravity is unforgiving. With this kind of gravity wings would need to be awkwardly large and moved by unattractively bulky muscles.

In mild gravity the additional muscle could be graceful and the wings wouldn't get in the way of other activities.

 

In any case there need to be some new human species and this could be one.

[Mr Skeptic]

But what about the atmosphere on a lighter planet? Wouldn't weak gravity also allow the planet to lose its atmosphere? Or could we add a thick atmosphere even though it would eventually (geological time scales) be lost? I think that atmosphere thickness to weight is more important.

 

On the other hand, if your "atmosphere" is water, then that would allow great flexibility for "flying" in it, though it would not be quite the same due to buoyancy.

[Mokele]

On the other hand, if your "atmosphere" is water, then that would allow great flexibility for "flying" in it, though it would not be quite the same due to buoyancy.

 

Yes, but we can already do this, though admittedly none of our mechanisms of swimming are based on hydrodynamic lift.

[SkepticLance]

I read in a science article a couple of years back, that if we added air to the moon, its gravity would hold it for about one million years before the solar wind blew it off into space. The moon seems a better bet to me for those kinds of shenanigans. One sixth gravity should be OK, and it is much closer than Jupiter's moons.

[Xittenn]

So meat planes are out of the question but adding an atmosphere to our moon to fly in is a safe bet!

[cameron marical]

find a way to make our bones like birds, in the sense that there hollow to a degree, but still stable enough to carry our body weight and gravity.

 

if possible, i think you could do it.

Edited March 28, 2009 by cameron marical

[Mokele]

As I pointed out earlier in this thread, hollow bones aren't enough - we're still way too heavy, and lack anything close to the needed muscle power. Adding wings big enough, and muscles big enough would put us far above the maximum possible weight for a biological flyer.

[cameron marical]

then how are birds so light enough to fly in the first place? if its not there bone density compared to us, what is it?

[Mokele]

Oh bone density plays a role, don't be get wrong. But it can only go so far. It's a problem of scaling.

 

Imagine you have a cube. Now double it's linear size, so each edge is 2x as long as before. That means the cube has 4x the surface area, and 8x the weight.

 

The same thing happens as flying animals get bigger. Even with hollow bones, double the size means 8x the mass (which means 8x the gravitational force) but only 4x the surface area (which means only 4x the lift). Wings can get disproportionately bigger to support bigger mass, but you need bigger muscles to move bigger wings, which means more mass. And to make matters worse, maximum muscle force depends upon cross-sectional area, so it has the same scaling problem as wing area does.

 

All of this adds up to mean that even in the fossil record, there's no flying animal bigger than about 200lb, and all of those were so extensively modified for flight that to change a human to that degree...well, you might as well just transfer the brain to a new body.

[Theophrastus]

A little of topic, as this is meant to be a question of the rapidly evolving study of genetics, however, one of the pioneers of flight, a german inventor, Otto Lilienthal, designed ornithopters (flying machines that gain their thrust from flapping) which were actually relatively successful, despite the numerous dangers that the flaws of their design posed. I think that of all people on this earth, he probably enjoyed the closest thing to actually being a bird, as the ornithopters, were essentially giant systems of wings, attached to a person, however, these were incredibly dangers, that even their inventor could escape, as he was killed, after losing control, and going into a stall, falling back to the earth, lying eight hundred feet below. Shame...

Edited March 29, 2009 by Theophrastus
grammatical correction

[Mokele]

Yeah, ornithopters are pretty neat. The trick is that they can use materials unavailable to biological organisms, such as metal that's stronger than bone, or motors that have better properties thank muscles.

[cameron marical]

would it be possible to alter someone to produce metal instead of bone? different food intake would be required, but why not?

 

but motors are alot heavier than muscles right? so why would they be better than them in this?

[Mokele]

would it be possible to alter someone to produce metal instead of bone? different food intake would be required, but why not?

 

Possibly, but that would require altering everything about them down to the molecular level, altering pretty much every metabolic process they have.

 

but motors are alot heavier than muscles right? so why would they be better than them in this?

 

The two main drawbacks are length and speed. A muscle can only contract through about ~30% of its length, and outside of a range of ~7%, the force drops, sometimes dramatically. Also, muscle's force output declines exponentially as contraction velocity increases. Motors don't have these limits, or at least not nearly as severely as muscle. The last is most important, since flight requires rapid delivery of high amounts of energy, and this restricts maximal power of muscle to a relative narrow range of ~30% of maximal contraction velocity, with steep penalties for deviations much beyond this.

[cetus]

u could graft avian DNA into the steam cells of a human fetus then it could have all the necessary parts of a bird

[Mokele]

Except the two systems would be incompatible. Birds have major developmental differences from humans that would render such a fusion lethal very quickly.