Mad geneticist flying human experiment

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Ok, so I’m a mad genious geneticist and I decide to make a human who can fly under his/her own wing power.

How large would my mutant’s wings have to be?

How strong would they have to be?

How much food would my mutant need everyday?

Would my mutant need tail feathers or could his/her legs suffice?

I don’t want to make a big bird with a human brain. I want it to look just like a normal human, but with wings and some minor interior alterations like maybe lighter bones, increased muscle strength, better lung capacity, etc.

Is this doable you think?

And if you’re wondering, yes. I’ve had two vodka tonics and am currently gazing out the window at my bird feeder.

2

well…under normal circumstance,s i doubt a person would be able to get lift-off very well. but if we could.

i’d say about a 15-25 foot wingspan, with some serious muscles. we’re heavy compared to birds.

hollow bones could be used, but due increased of the subject, they might break too easily under normal stress. so that’s unsure.

extra lung capacity wouldn’t be very nessecary, unless you wanted high altitude flight.

and lots of wind currents would be needed.

also, some sort of feathers or afull body of hair would be needed in order to make the subject streamlined.

i guess a nirmal human isn’t at all suited for flight except in an airplane or with a hang-glider.

3

Given earth gravity, I don’t think you could make a human strong enough.

Avvording to AskJeeves, the heaviest flying bird is the Great Bustard at 46 pounds.

Pterodactyls (Pteranadons?) had a wingspan of over 23 feet.

Hey, chimpanzees are supposed to be incredibly strong! They weigh less than humans too. Try flying chimps first. Please put diapers on 'em.

4

According to “Winged Humans” on page 40-41 of GURPS: Bio-Tech by SJGames (a game company obsessed with factually correct game books): The maximium gravity for human flight is about .16G. A rough estimate of wingspan is given (in flavor text) is 50-60 feet.

5

I am thinking about Pterosaurs, and great apes.

The largest Pterosaur yet found was a Quetzalcoatlus, having a wingspan up to 50 feet, and weighing about 190 pounds. It might even have had some hair and possibly was endothermic. The large ones probably soared mostly, but they could flap their wings to lift off, etc. The didn’t have tail feathers. From what I can gather, they had relatively large legs & just dangled along behind them during flight.

I weigh about 160 pounds, and am endothermic (most of the time).

Chimpanzees, and especially Gorillas are very strong. Pretty heavy though.

But I’m a genious mad geneticist, so I figure I can rearrange pretty much anything nature has ever invented into whatever I want. So I’m thinking a 160 pound guy with sufficiently large wingspan, with hollowed out bones and some beefed up gorilla muscles could do a pretty good job at flying. Certainly hangliders get off the ground pretty easily. As for being covered in hair or feathers, I’m not sure that’s absolutely necessary. Why not just an aerodynamic skin suit of some sort? I’m not proposing my flying mutant human fly around naked, after all.

On my third vodka tonic, I don’t think I’ll be able to defend my experiment much further tonight.

6

Too late. They were already created by the Wicked Witch of the West, weren’t they?

:smiley:

7

Pterodactyls and pteranodons were both pterodactyloid (short-tailed) pterosaurs (ptooey). Pteranodon sternbergi, of the late Cretaceous, had a wingspan of over 30 ft, while some of the larger Pterodactylus (of the late Jurassic) specimens had wingspans of “only” about 16 feet.

The big guy, however, was Quetzelcoatlus, which reached wingspans of close to 40 feet (the 50’ mentioned by levdrakon is something of an overestimate).

Calculations indicate that Pteranodon may have weighed only about 28 to 53 lbs, while Quetzelcoatlus may have weighed about 190 lbs. The body size for the big Q was close to 18 feet from tail-tip to beak-tip.

As for the “gorilla muscles”, that’s not necessary. What matters most are the attachments and size of the muscles, not the animal that has them.

8

I’m thinking those 25 foot long wings make up a significant portion of the Pterosaur’s 190 pounds.

So think 80 pounds for wings, 110 pounds for the body. Huge pecs and toothpick legs.

You know, the mad geneticist has an advantage over natural selection. Your flying human doesn’t have to compete with other animals for food - he can just go to Priceclub and buy caseloads of powerbars and carbo drinks to feed his huge metabolism.

9

I always thought that Pterandons (et al) glided (glud?) rather than flew.

10

Exactly! I’m creating a human who doesn’t have to worry about surviving in the wild.

Don’t know how much of the body weight would be taken up by the wings, but from what I’ve read, the Pteroaur’s wings were pretty strong, but pretty light.

I think I could keep the legs pretty much normal sized. The bones could be hollow, keeping the weight down. I don’t think a person with 40’ wings is going to be doing a lot of jogging anyway so stress fractures wouldn’t be a normal problem. As Darwin’s Finch said above, the big Q’s body length could be 18 feet. But I’m a measly 5’8" so I could keep some meat on the legs.

I’m not sure about the oversized pecs. I want my flying human to look otherwise normal, so I have to figure out how I’m going to attach the wings while keeping normal arms. Some shoulder & back muscles may have to get bigger, but again, I want to keep this person pretty normal looking. My flying human will have to be pretty physically fit, lean but reasonably muscled. Not Schwarzenegger muscled tho.

11

The larger pterosaurs, just like large birds today, probably tended more towards soaring than flapping flight. The smaller ones were more than capable of active, flapping flight.

Which means in all likelihood, a “flying man” would probably really be a “soaring man”.

12

You’d probably want to look to bats as your model, then. Both birds and pterosaurs have (or had, depending) large pectoral muscles; one need only look at the depth of their “keels” (the sternum) to see this.

If you’re going to start grafting on limbs, you’ll have a bit more leeway in terms of musculature, bone structure of the wing and such. But either way you go, in order to generate a downstroke sufficient for this guy to become airborne, you’ll need a lot of power.

In bats, the downstroke muscles alone constitute about 12% of their body weight, so they’re still going to be pretty beefy.

13

IMHO, strictly, as a medical/genetic professional in training.

  1. Humans, having 4 appendages, will probably lose their arms into an arm->wing transformation if you want to do this. So pouring aforementioned carbo beverage into birdman mouth, or wiping up after a messy birdman shit will be arduous at best. Birds and bats both have it this way.

  2. I suppose you could duplicate the arms and force one into a wing fate. This would be pretty complicated, though. Appendage development is pretty strongly tied to body patterning, and so it would involve gross reorganizations of early embryonic development. Angels, for instance.

  3. If we go with the more likely option 1), the human shoulder girdle isn’t nearly strong enough for this. Imagine trying to flap two 200 pound wings well enough to generate lift. Again with gross remodeling of not only the arm but the body wall.

  4. There is a way to do this, probably in 50 years. We have to computer evolve a flying human, and then synthesize it.

Assume Moore’s Law holds, and we have some great advances in oligonucleotide/artificial chromosome sequencing and proteomics. We could very easily build a “human simulator,” by which I mean a computer simulation of a fertilized embryo with the genome. Then, you would be left to synthesize said evolved human at the end of the project.

Let’s say there are 1 quintillion (10[sup]18[/sup]) processes going on in each human body per second.

Let’s say we wanted to age this human at 1 million speed, so we would need 10[sup]6[/sup] simulation seconds/real world seconds x 10[sup]18[/sup] processes/real world second. So around 10[sup]24[/sup] processes/second. Let’s say 10[sup]28[/sup] processes/second for a population of several hundred humans.

I bought an Athlon 1800 processor on Tuesday. I have no idea how many processes/second it does, but I also bought a GeForce4 Ti4400 graphics card and it say right here on big text on the front of the box: 1.12 trillion operations per second. I assume the best supercomputers around probably are sitting at around 20 trillion operations per second.

Moore’s law states that computer speed doubles every 18 months. So, correct me if I’m wrong but, if Moore’s law holds, then:
time left to wait before Joe Scientist can do this is = [ln(10[sup]28[/sup]/2x10[sup]10[/sup])]/[ln 1.5]
time left to wait before Joe Scientist can do this is = 100 years

Woo! I may still be alive. I’ll be a crusty old 126, but that age won’t be uncommon by 2102.

For storage space, we would probably need around 10[sup]31[/sup] bytes of information. I suppose you can outfit a computer with around 10 terabytes practically now (10[sup]13[/sup] bytes). So, hard drive space will be there in
= [ln (10[sup]31[/sup]/10[sup]12[/sup])]/[ln 1.5]
= 102 years
So, we download the Human Genome Project, the Human Proteome Project, and the concentrations of each nuclear factor and compositions of each factor in the fertilized zygote onto our computer. Write a program to deal with all of this, and subject said human to 1 million times growth, with specific selection factors. Of course said evolved computerized humans would be selected for disease survival, intelligence, etc. You would have to build a little world for the humans to run around in, etc. Kind of like the Matrix on crack and LSD, but there would be no real humans. Most importantly, you would have a strong selection for the humans to gain the ability to fly. For instance, most food sources are avian and difficult to catch, whereas the humans are slow. The ones who get the most food reproduce the most, and get to live.

Let the program run for a year or so, and you have evolved a small population of humans 1 million years. This should be dandy to keep a recognizable human but definitely one with some novel adaptations to flying.

Select the one that flies the best, hit Cntrl-P to print out the genome and proteome and nuclear factors, etc. Run down to your local beer brewing/embryonic vat store and purchase a jumbo container or find a suitable surrogate mother. Here’s the tricky part – you would have to find a way to synthesize your new human. Above I mentioned you would need some huge advances in oligonucleotide synthesis, so go out and buy the latest ABI oligo synthesizer, which would be capable of spitting out a chromosome a day or so. Synthesize your new chromosomes and package either in a cleaned out nucleus or in a synthetic nucleus (this depends on large advances in proteomics). 1 million years of evolution may have made the genetics so divergent that you would have to do the whole thing synthetically, which could be a real pain. Implant said synthetic/reconstituted nucleus into a cleaned out or synthetic oocyte, implant into Jumbo Vat or surrogate mother and incubate 9 months. If you are going to use a surrogate mother, you may want to run your simulation with uterine environment held constant to prevent maternal rejection of fetus, etc.

It could work, I betcha. Then you wouldn’t need to worry about all of the uninteresting mechanics, newtons of force required for the shoulder girdle, bone structure, embryonic repatterning, etc. etc. etc. Evolution, in a cohesive way, will take care of all of that.

I’ll start saving up now.

14

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by edwino *
**IMHO, strictly, as a medical/genetic professional in training.

  1. Humans, having 4 appendages, will probably lose their arms into an arm->wing transformation if you want to do this. So pouring aforementioned carbo beverage into birdman mouth, or wiping up after a messy birdman shit will be arduous at best. Birds and bats both have it this way.**

Nope, we’re not losing normal arms to this.

2) I suppose you could duplicate the arms and force one into a wing fate. This would be pretty complicated, though. Appendage development is pretty strongly tied to body patterning, and so it would involve gross reorganizations of early embryonic development. Angels, for instance.

Yeah, I’m a mad geniusl geneticist. I can do it.

3) If we go with the more likely option 1), the human shoulder girdle isn’t nearly strong enough for this. Imagine trying to flap two 200 pound wings well enough to generate lift. Again with gross remodeling of not only the arm but the body wall.

Gorilla muscles. I’ve already planned for that.

4) There is a way to do this, probably in 50 years. We have to computer evolve a flying human, and then synthesize it.

Yuh, that’s what I’m doing now.

Assume Moore’s Law holds, and we have some great advances in oligonucleotide/artificial chromosome sequencing and proteomics. We could very easily build a “human simulator,” by which I mean a computer simulation of a fertilized embryo with the genome. Then, you would be left to synthesize said evolved human at the end of the project.

Yuh.

**Let’s say there are 1 quintillion (10[sup]18[/sup]) processes going on in each human body per second.

Let’s say we wanted to age this human at 1 million speed, so we would need 10[sup]6[/sup] simulation seconds/real world seconds x 10[sup]18[/sup] processes/real world second. So around 10[sup]24[/sup] processes/second. Let’s say 10[sup]28[/sup] processes/second for a population of several hundred humans.

I bought an Athlon 1800 processor on Tuesday. I have no idea how many processes/second it does, but I also bought a GeForce4 Ti4400 graphics card and it say right here on big text on the front of the box: 1.12 trillion operations per second. I assume the best supercomputers around probably are sitting at around 20 trillion operations per second.

Moore’s law states that computer speed doubles every 18 months. So, correct me if I’m wrong but, if Moore’s law holds, then:
time left to wait before Joe Scientist can do this is = [ln(10[sup]28[/sup]/2x10[sup]10[/sup])]/[ln 1.5]
time left to wait before Joe Scientist can do this is = 100 years**

I’m a genious, I’ve already surmounted these obstacles.

Woo! I may still be alive. I’ll be a crusty old 126, but that age won’t be uncommon by 2102. <<huge snip>> 'talking about computer programs, growng multiple generations in a virtual environment etc.'

It could work, I betcha. Then you wouldn’t need to worry about all of the uninteresting mechanics, newtons of force required for the shoulder girdle, bone structure, embryonic repatterning, etc. etc. etc. Evolution, in a cohesive way, will take care of all of that.

Well that’s what I need to work out, and I don’t have time to let an evolutionary program just sort of evolve it. Would take too long.

15

I scoff at your week science.

I have been working on the Flying Human Project for years and MY flying mutant human flies via a rapidly spinning propellor on the top of his head. Top that.

16

I scoff at your weak science.

I have been working on the Flying Human Project for years and MY flying mutant human flies via a rapidly spinning propellor on the top of his head. Top that.

17

:rolleyes:

Not only does my human beanie cause me to fly with twice the efficiency of your silly winged mutant…it also causes me to double post as well. Doh.

18

I’d want to engineer a race of flying dogs.

Then I’d unleash them on a major cities, and buy up as much stock in umbrella companies as possible.

You figure it out. [Maniacal laugh]

20

At this point, it would have to be zombie bats.

Welcome to the SDMB, Win80.

Regards,
Shodan

21

But don’t you need a counter-rotating propeller on your feet (or butt) to keep your body from spinning? Or maybe you can use a tail prop like small helicopters have.