if i wanted to create my own angel, ie a genetically altered human with wings, how big a wingspan would he/she need to get off the ground and fly about? lets say ive already incorporated bird DNA so he/she has lightweight hollow bones similar to those found in,well, bird skeletons.
would it be theoretically possible for them to fly about, disregarding the whole altered DNA argument?
mmm?
pauly t
I’ve seen an artist’s impression of what a human-sized angel would have to look like in order to fly; the attachments for the flight muscles made for a very deep chest.
In Earth Gravity, a human-sized flying sentient human would need to have a similar wingspan to the giant pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus…
Even then the body would have short legs, some difficulty in walking, and a very broad chest (as Mangetout says.
Far better to attempt this type of genetic modification on a low gravity planet or microgravity habitat in space where you could create a species more or less like a classical angel ;
and the wings could actually make movement in low gee a lot easier in some respects.
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http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
On the purely practical side, IANAMolecular Geneticist, but I really doubt you could do this for real by just mixixng up human and avian DNA; some of the bird genes might code for proteins that serve multiple, diverse functions, you might only want only one of the functions (in fact the others might be deleterious), but you can’t pick and choose. Ditto the human genes.
Gonna have to build the genome from scratch, I think.
i can do that.
Are you going to want this critter to be able to fly in Earth gravity? In Earth atmosphere? How many limbs do you want it to have, four or six? Will the primary mode of transportation be walking or flying? Some birds are excellent flyers, but poor walkers, others are the reverse. Then, of course, there are chickens, which don’t seem to do well at either activity. I’m pretty sure that bats are excellent flyers, but very poor walkers, though I could be mistaken on their walking abilities.
You need to give us more information for better answers.
well, id like the angel to have the best of both worlds, ie walking and flying.
walking as in normal healthy human walking, and flying in earth gravity as in long distance, hover and glide type thing, like an eagle sort of job. would making both of these possible have much of an effect? i would of thought healthy legs wouldnt be much of a problem assuming the angel has wings sprouting from its shoulder blades…
I think you should maybe go looking for some bumble bee DNA
Even making every bone in the body of the humanoid hollow and reducing the body weight to a third of normal human weight, the wingspan of a neogen humanoid capable of flight in earth gravity would have to be thirty feet across…
The human brain is heavy, and needs a large skull to contain it… similarly the legs of a human are long and heavy, and will break if you try to make them hollow-
you don’t want to do that anyway, unless the angel is only going to land on water, it will need strong legs for landing.
If you have a thirty-foot wingspan, the wings will fold up to be ten feet tall on a six foot individual…
four feet of folded wing will protude above the individual’s head.
So make the body as small as possible, short legs, and a crawling gait like a fruit bat- that would work…
By the way, I truly believe that such genetic engineering will be possible at some point in the future- the genome will need to be designed from scratch, and the function and interaction of every base pair, protein and enzyme will need to be understood, but as the idea doesn’t break the laws of thermodynamics, in theory it is possible.
Sci-fi worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
what about redisgning the bones? why not aluminium bones? would that lower the weight enough?
I was thinking about that myself, Titanium might be an even better choice, but if you want your organism to grow metallic bones, then there is going to be some pretty exotic bioengineering involved, carbon fibre/nanotube might be a little easier to do biologically, but then maybe nanotech is the answer…