This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Doug S. Machina: I think I've heard that because of this law, a human reduced to the size of an insect (The Atom, The Incredible Shrinking Man, etc.) would freeze to death because they wouldn't be picking up enough heat. Anyone have an idea on that?
Ellen Hayes: they wouldn't be generating enough heat from their mass, to compensate for the heat loss from their surface area. This is why real biological shrews eat all the time. I seem to recall an essay by either Asimov or Stephen Gould about exactly this; and whichever-it-was also mentioned surface tension. You'd stick to things like your own clothes (if you were small enough) and a drop of water could drown you because you couldn't get it off.
Burai: I edited this ...
- And a human being with the proportional strength and agility of a spider would be weaker than a regular human being, because a spider seems proportionately strong and agile because of the square/cube law, not because of any special qualities.
arromdee: Uhh, "proportional strength [and speed] of a spider" is the standard term used to describe Spider-Man, taken from his origin story. No version of that story has him bitten and claiming to have received a notional anything. Yeah, it's inaccurate, but it's the phrase used.
Burai: Well, yeah ... it's the phrase used because that's what it means — that Spider-Man's strength relative to his body mass is in the same proportion as a spider's strength is to its weight. But the problem with the original wording in this entry is that it's not just inaccurate, it's just self-contradictory — the equivalent of saying "a human with FTL velocity can't go faster than light".
arromdee: Deleted
- Frankly, this troper isn't convinced of the applicability of this in the case of Humongous Mecha. Engineering and special alloys can make a concrete canoe float, and Boeing made a 350 ton metal bird fly in 1969. A 40 ton mecha doesn't seem to be too far off, possibility wise.
First of all, it's discussion in the main page. Second, there's a reason why we don't typically make canoes out of concrete. Yes, if you have strong materials and good engineering, you can make an impractical design better, but if you do, you can make *any* design better. If you can design a concrete canoe to float, you can apply the same principles to a regular canoe and make it float even better. (And in the specific case of canoes, water displaced is proportional to volume, and is not subject to the square/cube law.)
- Hmmm... We all know the phrase "The bigger they are, the harder they fall." Is there a page discussing when this law ISN'T ignored? Usually that phrase is uttered in Stock.
<random troper>: It would probably depend a lot on the size/mass of the mecha in question, really. For example, in the Battletech/Mechwarrior universe, the biggest, 100-foot-tall mechs only weigh around 100 tons, which sounds like a lot but really isn't when you get into heavy military hardware (a modern MBT weights around 65 tons, and at the end of WW 2 the Germans were prototyping a 200 ton monster of a tank). Which would make sense, as materials science strives to make stuff not only stronger, but lighter. There's definitely a lot of Unobtanium floating around the anime world, though.
The Gunheart: I'm still not convinced on this one either, since it's not entirely clear what beyond body shape is being scaled up. Even the Bad Astronomy blog didn't raise a stink over the principle of the Transformers, just how their weight seemed to differ between car and robot modes.
Air Of Mystery: Isn't all of this assuming that a 50-foot human's bone strength/density/material would be the same as a six-foot one? I mean, couldn't the 50-foot human have a different bone structure or something?
- Narvi: Then that's not a direct scaling-up now, is it?
- Air Of Mystery: Did I say it was?
- Narvi: What's your point? The article includes examples like elephants, to show that even if the scaled-up human could support its own weight, it wouldn't be as maneuvarable as a smaller one would be. What more do you want to add?
- Air Of Mystery: My point is, if the giant ant/human/whatever had been genetically engineered for stronger muscles/bones (I'm sorry, I do Physics) rather than just enlarged, would it be able to move around fine?
- Narvi: No, it wouldn't be able to move around fine. The humanoid shape just doesn't stack up linearly. I don't think it's structurally impossible, but such a lifeform would be very easy to kill. Heehee, just trip it up and watch it go splat.
- Air Of Mystery: Did I say it was?
arromdee:Deleted:
- Dinosaurs. Scientists have grumbled about it for decades, but no theories explain how lizards bigger than buildings could support their own weight, let alone walk around or fly. This would literally be Older Than (most) Dirt.
The first link is to a pseudoscience page; the idea that dinosaurs could stand because the atmosphere was thicker is not scientific. The Hogan link is also to a pseudoscience page; he's a Velikovsky supporter. The ideas that dinosaurs can't support their own weight is not believed nowadays, being limited to Velikovskians and creationists, and even when it was believed the usual solution is that they lived in swamps and were partly supported by the water.
Kalaong:Albatrosses are called gooney birds for a reason. How do you get a flyer that can choke down a sumo wrestler? Hogan is controversial only because science only advances when old farts die but nobody attempts to explain it in other ways! They just ignore you. Like you're about to. I'll leave the theories out. Even though it's just about the only one you can find online, no matter how stupid.
Re-Deleted, and please don't bring this one back, since it just makes the page look dumb. We can conclude beyond any reasonable doubt that dinosaurs were able to walk, and current models have no trouble accounting for that. Besides which, it's pointlessly hyperbolic; the largest walking dinosaurs might have been longer than most houses, but weighed less. Besides, houses can be built on stilts that are skinnier than dinosaur legs. No creature approaching that size ever flew, but if they were fast enough, that wouldn't have been an issue either (witness the Boeing 747).
Um... Pterodactyls were about the size of cars. PUT UP SOME REFERENCES! THERE ARE NO REFERENCES ANYWHERE THAT ARE NOT STUPID!!!
Here
are the numbers, but I guess its' still pseudoscience because the Book of Arromdee does not include it.
