• Question: will humans ever be able to fly :)

    Asked by esme to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 29 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 29 Jun 2012:

      Hi esme,

      As much as I’d love us to be able to fly, I doubt it will ever actually happen! I don’t think we are designed to fly if you compare us to birds. Even if we grew wings, birds have plenty of adaptations to help them fly, such as hollow bones, to reduce weight and changes to the way they get oxygen to the muscles because of the energy involved in flying.

      So, sadly I can’t see us being able to fly outside of planes and other flying machines!

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 1 Jul 2012:

      Hi esme,
      We’d need to do a lot more than just develop wings to be able to fly! For starters, we are far to heavy. To lift ourselves into the air, we’d need to develop a huge amount of muscle to lift our weight. It’s been estimated that to have the muscles needed, our chests would have to be a couple of meters thick at least of solid muscle.

      Also, our arms and hands are really important for everything we do in life. So if we evolved so that our arms became wings, then we wouldn’t be able to do all that important stuff with our hands. Which would be a massive problem for us.

      So I don’t think humans will ever be able to fly (at least, no without a jetpack!!!)

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      Hey esme,

      Technically it is possible. any animal can over time evolve to be able to do something if they need to in order to survive. So if the world were to change so that we needed to be able to fly to hunt or escape from predators then yeah we could fly. I don’t see this ever happening because we are the top of the food chain so we don’t really have any predictors and we have a pretty steady food source. I think our bones are too heavy as it is and our arms aren’t actually long enough to be able to support us in the air so we would have to change quite a bit! I think we will just have to stick with airplanes and helicopters for now!

    • Photo: Davie Galloway

      Davie Galloway answered on 2 Jul 2012:

      Hi esme,

      am with the rest of the scientists on this one … sadly, i don’t think we’ll ever be able to fly (unaided, anyways) but you never know … maybe one day in the distant distant future something may happen that will force the issue and enable us to evolve with wings … how good would that be!!

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