You are quite right about the OP - sorry.
But I’m not sure about natural modes of propulsion. If that were accepted, there’d be no reason for the human exclusion - no one is going to argue that a self-propelled human is a contender for the Most Momemtum prize.
As the OPer, I think I can speak with authority. I added the other than humans comment specifically to avoid someone talking about Chuck Yeager or something… but now I am curious… would our Apollo astronaut have more momentum with space craft and all (the little re-entry thing) than say, the enormous and massive but relatively slow modern aircraft carrier? For that matter, which has greater momentum, the Apollo rocket on the way out or the Apollo landing pod on the way back in?
Just a few nitpicks:
They came close to the length of a blue whale, but not the mass. I’ve never heard of a sauropod estimated to be even half the mass of a blue whale.
The blue whale isn’t the biggest thing that ever lived. Not by a huge margin. It is, however, the biggest animal that ever lived.
When I was growing up, they taught us that the largest living thing was a sequoia called the General Sherman Tree. Net weight: 1385 tons. That’s almost ten times the weight of the largest blue whale.
Then, they announced that a particular grove of quaking aspens were actually one single organism growing from a single root base. Net weight: 6,500 tons!
Currently, there’s a fungus laying claim to the “largest living thing” title. I haven’t seen a weight estimate, but this fungus apparently covers 2,200 acres!
Just out of curiosity, if that mother of a sequoia fell over, could it beat out a blue whale?
Ah ha, so if a giant sequoia reached a speed of only 3 mph, its momentum would beat that of a blue whale!
Anyone here seen a giant sequoia moving like that? If so, then I think we have our winner.
Good thread.
To continue with the hijack (sorry) … I have heard Great Barrier Reef referred to as a single organism. But it doesn’t quite move (or does it? other corals can.), so I guess that’s not a contender.
Mrm…no.
If such a tree fell on me, I don’t know what would be worse: The moving, or the halting.
“As God as my witness I thought turkeys could fly!”
Interestingly, a branch fell off of a giant sequoia some years back (I think it was in the 1960s or '70s). Typically, the branches start 100 feet off the ground on those monsters. They said that the branch by itself massed more than any tree in the U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains. I’ll bet that branch had some serious momentum after falling 100 feet!
Argentinosaurus weighed at least half that of a blue whale, and it’s speculated that, if they were described correctly and are not hoaxes, A. fragillimus and Bruhathkayosaurus may have even exceeded the blue whale in weight.
If they were panserbjorns wearing full plate mail, like Iorek Byrnison in the His Dark Materials trilogy, you’d be well advised to step lively.