About 25 years ago, my (awesome) Diff Eq TA had us calculate the volume that all of the humans on earth would fill, if you pureed them into a cube 100 yds square. IIRC, it was about one-third full.
This was also the TA who had us calculate the proof of why, when flying, you want to be wearing a unbuttoned trenchcoat – in case you suddenly get sucked out of the airplane at cruising altitude, its drag coefficient could slow your fall to “barely survivable”, instead of “assured splat”
Anyway. Back to the topic. Um… dragon reproduction – hemipenes? They are reptiles of a sort, after all. damn Tolkien, leaving out all the important details. Balrog wings. Dragon reproduction.
Yes - a sad end for the mighty man who, among other things, killed seventy of the enemy single-handed while covering his allies’ getaway at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. And a lot of those seventy were trolls, at that.
Lizards and snakes have hemipenes. My vote for the most frightening reptile penis goes to the tortoise. (NSFW if you work in an office filled with turtles.)
I’m also pretty sure it’s wrong. I found a couple of sites citing human volume at about 0.07 cubic meters, and assuming 1 meter = 1 yard, that’s only about 14 million humans to fill the cube, way short of the 7 billion alive today. Unless you’re assuming a lot were eaten by dragons first.
I did carefully qualify my remarks. The echidna penis definitely looks like something out of Alien. (Possibly SFW, since everyone will think that’s some kind of weird parasite instead of a penis.)
Zelazny is on-point in Jack Of Shadows, where two characters discuss how a gold-hoarding dragon was once a man until his greed transformed him into what he is now, with bonus points for explaining that he may yet master his passions and return to manhood (as has been managed before).
There has been and it is. Well, sort of. Nowadays, taxonomy is all based on cladistics, and what’s usually called “reptiles” don’t form a clade. The smallest clade which includes all the reptiles is the amniotes, which also includes all mammals and birds.
The idea of monsters using a massive amount of gold and jewels just to attract wandering heroes is the basis for Lord Dunsany’s Horde Of The Gibbelins. It’s a great story. I should get around to reading more of his work one of these days.
Either you learned DEq a long time ago, or you lost a decimal point somewhere. Assume humans are water, and weigh 60 kilograms on average. 7 billion humans gives 420 billion kilograms. 1000 kilograms/ cubic meter means 420 million cubic meters, or a cube about 750 meters on a side, much larger than a 100 yd cube.
For an author that prided himself on structuring the Middle Earth legendarium after Nordic/Germanic cultural structures, Tokein wrote the Narn i Chîn Húrin chock-full of Greek tragedy, including hubris and a great hero suffering a great fall.
My personal take on this is that because dragons are generally solitary creatures that also happen to be very long-lived, they instinctively hoard treasure as a means of granting a sense of objective meaning to their lives. The bigger their hoard, the greater their sense of personal accomplishment – “I managed to acquire THIS much treasure, and no one can take it from me!”
I believe for an intelligent race that lives thousands of years (depending on the fictional universe), this makes sense as a kind of psychological anchor. While shorter-lived, more communal races find personal meaning in family, duty, philosophy, friendship, and the like, in the lifespan of a dragon all of those things are transient. Treasure lasts as long as one can hold on to it.
This would also explain why dragons are willing to fight to the death to protect what is essentially just “stuff” – to them, their hoard isn’t just a big pile of goodies waiting to be spent, it’s literally a major part of their identity.
