I know about the square cube law, With the square cube law a 5 ft tall woman that weight 100 pounds would weight 1000 time as mush, so at 50 ft tall she would weight 100,000 pounds, This is false because human are not square shape. And if the square cub law for human is true it should be the same with a multiplying more than 1 and less than 2. I callculate on the guy who reach 8ft 11.1 inches history 490 pounds. When he was 7ft 4 in 301 Pounds. So first I change the Inch portion to Ft. 4/12= 0.3333333… 11.1/12=0.925. Then I did A×7.3333…= 8.925 So that end up as A= 8.925/7.3333… A= 1.217045455 and than I cube the result that makes 1.802687287 and than I multiply that number with 301 Pounds So at 8ft 11.1 with the square cube law he should weight 542.6 Pounds However he acctually just weight 490 pounds at that weight with this proof a 5ft tall woman that his 100 pound. That multiply here height by 10 50ft tall She would only way arround 4600pounds to 5600pounds. So do you have an answers for that new proof?
The square cube law still applies in this case - the principle of the law is not about how to scale up weight as an individual animal gets larger, it’s stating that strength is a function of area (cross-section) while weight is a function of total volume. Therefore, weight tends to increase more quickly than strength, limiting the size.
When you look at real people who are unusually tall, they don’t scale up every dimension at the same rate, so someone twice as tall isn’t twice as thick and doesn’t weight eight times as much.
Looking at some real examples from nature, you’ll see that you can’t really be both 50 feet and only 5000 lbs at once.
Smallish adult elephants can be 5000 lbs, and one that size is probably 7 feet tall. OK, they’re four-legged, but even if they stand upright, you’re not getting 50 feet.
A sperm whale gets you the 50 feet you want… but weighs in at about 40 tons.
A dinosaur like a brachiosaurus which is mostly neck and tail achieves a 50+ foot length (and 30 foot upward reach), but at a weight estimated between 30-40 tons.
There is one candidate for something that length and weight: a snake. The extinct titanoboa is thought to be 40 feet long and about 2,500 lbs.
A woman’s body shape is not much like a snake’s. If you made her proportionately thin enough to be that height, she wouldn’t be able to hold herself up.
Gotta be that tall so I can fit it all in.
[/Mojo Nixon]
And, all we could see was the tip of his toes…
FWIW, the limitations of very tall people are real. People over 8ft. tend to have heart problems, because even if their heart is proportionate, it still gets overworked trying to pump blood over a large frame, and they also have problems with their backs and joints in their lower limbs. I actually met the tallest living woman at the time (now deceased), Sandy Allen, who lived in Shelbyville, Indiana, just about 40 minutes from where I lived. She had to use a walker beginning in her 30s, and a wheelchair beginning in her late 40s. She lived to be 53, which was actually pretty long for someone with gigantism-- she was 7’7.
I’ve seen three documentaries about 50 foot tall women. They all had the same proportions as when they were their normal height. That doesn’t really represent the case in the OP because they were each women of typical height and their size increased through artificial means. A real 50 foot tall woman would probably be very different than the common women we are used to, their bones may be much lighter for instance. But it would still seem difficult for them to remain upright without having much larger feet in proportion to their bodies than we typically see in women. Their movements might also be sluggish without some kind of more complex nervous system.
Yes, that’s correct, assuming the 5-ft and 50-ft women had identical shapes.
The same applies to statues. If you make 6-inch statue, regardless of what it’s a statue of, or what shape it is, and then you make 12-inch statue of the exact same material in the exact same shape, the second statue (twice as high, twice as wide, twice as thick) will have eight times the weight. And if you make it 10x as high, 10x as wide, 10x as thick, it would have 1000x the weight.
The shape is irrelevant. The “cube” refers to the exponent of 3, where 2x2x2=2^3, or 10x10x10=10^3. It has to be 3 because we’re talking about 3-dimensional objects.
Absolutely, yes. It works for fractions as well as whole numbers. If you make the statue 1.3 times taller, it’s weight will be 1.3x1.3x1.3 times heavier.
What you’ve just proved is that his shape was not precisely the same when he was 7’4" as it was when he was 8’11.1". If his shape had remained exactly the same proportions, he should have weighed 542.6 pounds. The fact that he didn’t means that he got a little bit skinnier as he got taller.
My answer is that such a woman would be extremely skinny, so much so that she would look like a stick figure and her bones would break the first time she tried to stand up.
My response to a similar question from [POST=8449858]this[/POST] old thread:
*In bipeds, height increases linearly as surface area increases by a squared factor, and volume (and therefore weight) as roughly a cubic. So doubling the height requires four times the surface area, and eight times the mass; however skeletal strength (as previously noted) merely scales in cross-sectional area, such that you’d have to have dramatically larger bones, as well as an order of magnitude increase in supporting musculature (and correspondingly stronger joints, also making them larger by roughly the same factor) to support the same weight, which adds additional weight. This also has to be supported by the cardiovascular system, which has to be scaled to handle larger flow rates but keep pressure in a range that neither stagnates due to gravity nor creates more pressure than can be contained by delicate tissues. Oh, and it has to maintain requisite blood flow and blood sugar balance to the presumably proportionally increased volume of the brain.
So a 4m tall Homo gigantus would be very squat, with legs like an elephant, a spine like a firehose, and an enormous heart with oversized vavles and a slow, powerful pumping motion with a more limited capacity to increase blood flow on demand. You could probably intentionally design (via genetic modification and selective breeding) such a creature, but I think its lifespan would be short, intellect would be inherently limited, propensity for damage and chonic debilitating skeletal problems signficiant, and would not be competitive as a cursorial hunter; at best it would be an opportunistic hunter/scavenger like a brown bear. In nature, I suspect that human beings–already a giganticized version of our hominid predecessors–is about as tall as humans can get without major modifications. Why we are the size we are, and the advantage of bipedal plantigradism is still a hotly debated topic with no absolute consensus.*
A 50 ft (~15 m) tall plantigrade biped is utterly impossible just from a structural standpoint alone, notwithstanding the circulatory and metabolic issues involved in being able to sustain an omnivore biped of that size; somewhere around 4 m (~13 ft) in height is around the maximum it would be feasible to construct a humanoid biped.
I have difficulty understanding the o.p. but the scaling method he is applying is not applicable to a creature well beyond the height of any human, notwithstanding that he is scaling from a single individual at the extreme end of recorded human height to begin with.
Stranger
Is there a column that the OP of the thread is referencing?