We all have these ideas, those that come to us within the small hours of the evening. Who am I? Why are we right here? What if my cellphone ran on vacuum tubes as a substitute? Randall Munroe has the reply to, properly, solely a type of questions, but in addition the solutions to an entire bunch of others collected collectively into What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Yes, that could be a T-Rex consuming an airplane. In the excerpt under Munroe examines what it might take to haul a median sized human in a chair over Australia’s tallest skyscraper, utilizing solely the facility of pigeons. Lots and tons of pigeons.
Penguin Random House
Excerpted from What If? 2 by Randall Munroe. Copyright © 2022 by Randall Munroe. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No a part of this excerpt could also be reproduced or reprinted with out permission in writing from the writer.
How many pigeons wouldn’t it require as a way to raise the common particular person and a launch chair to the peak of Australia’s Q1 skyscraper?
In a 2013 examine, researchers on the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics led by Ting Ting Liu educated pigeons to fly as much as a perch whereas sporting a weighted harness. They discovered that the common pigeon of their examine might take off and fly upward whereas carrying 124 grams, about 25 % of its physique weight.
The researchers decided that the pigeons might fly higher if the weights had been slung under their our bodies, reasonably than on their backs, so you’d most likely need pigeons to raise your chair from above reasonably than help it from under.
Let’s suppose your chair and harnesses weigh 5 kilograms and also you weigh 65 kilograms. If you used the pigeons from the 2013 examine, it might take a flock of about 600 of them to raise your chair and fly upward with it.
Unfortunately, flying with a load is loads of work. The pigeons within the 2013 examine had been in a position to carry a load 1.4 meters upward to a perch, however they most likely wouldn’t have been in a position to fly an excessive amount of greater than that. Even unencumbered pigeons can solely keep strenuous vertical flight for a number of seconds. One 1965 examine measured a climb charge of two.5 m/s for unencumbered pigeons,* so even when we’re being optimistic, it appears unlikely that pigeons might raise your chair greater than 5 meters.†
No drawback, you would possibly suppose. If 600 pigeons can raise you the primary 5 meters, then you definitely simply must deliver one other 600 together with you, just like the second stage of a rocket, to hold you the subsequent 5 meters when the primary flock will get drained. You can deliver one other 600 for the 5 meters after that and so forth. The Q1 is 322 meters excessive, so about 40,000 pigeons ought to be capable of get you to the highest, proper?
No. There’s an issue with this concept.
Since a pigeon can carry solely 1 / 4 of its physique weight, it takes 4 flying pigeons to hold one resting pigeon. That means every “stage” will want at the least 4 instances as many pigeons because the one above it. Lifting one particular person could solely take 600 pigeons, however lifting one particular person and 600 resting pigeons would take one other 3,000 pigeons.
This exponential development implies that a 9-stage car, in a position to raise you 45 meters, would wish nearly 300 million pigeons, roughly equal to your entire world inhabitants. Reaching the midway level would require 1.6 × 1025 pigeons, which might weigh about 8 × 1024 kilograms—greater than the Earth itself. At that time, the pigeons wouldn’t be pulled down by the Earth’s gravity—the Earth could be pulled up by the pigeons’ gravity.
The full 65-stage craft to achieve the highest of the Q1 would weigh 3.5 × 1046 kilograms. That’s not simply extra pigeons than there are on Earth, it’s extra mass than there may be within the galaxy.
You might make issues extra environment friendly by reusing pigeons. In the 2013 examine, the researchers gave the pigeons 30 seconds to relaxation on the perch earlier than bringing them down for one more trial. If every “stage” is 2 seconds, and pigeons are refreshed after 30 seconds, you could possibly fly arbitrarily excessive with a 15-stage craft—however that will nonetheless require trillions of pigeons.
A greater method could be to keep away from carrying the pigeons with you. After all, pigeons can stand up to the highest of the skyscraper themselves, so that you would possibly as properly ship them forward to attend for you there as a substitute of getting their buddies carry them up with you. If you could possibly prepare them properly sufficient, you could possibly have them glide alongside on the applicable peak, then seize you and tug you upward for a number of seconds whenever you attain their altitude. Keep in thoughts that pigeons can’t seize and carry issues with their toes, in order that they’d want little harnesses with aircraft-carrier-style hooks to intercept you.
With this association, it’s potential you could possibly fly your self to the highest of the tower with just some tens of hundreds of well-trained pigeons. You ought to most likely be sure you have some type of security system that can maintain you from plunging to your demise each time a falcon flies by and spooks the pigeons.
The craft wouldn’t simply be extra harmful than an elevator, it might even be so much more durable to select your vacation spot. You would possibly plan to go to the highest of the Q1, however as soon as you are taking off… you’ll be utterly beneath the management of anybody with a bag of seeds.
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