Shower Thought: How different would history look if humans could fly?

Mommy Christmas wrote:I managed to levitate once for about 10 seconds. It was the most surreal experience I've ever had.
I lifted one foot off the floor and felt no extra heft. I then lifted my other foot out in front of me and while perfectly still, I was suspended with nothing around me but water. Amazing.

Houses would have more space for rooms as we wouldn't need stairs.
Climbing wouldn't be a sport.
We'd have quite a lot of people just dropping dead in the sky and splatting randomly.

Great post by site, but let's assume we come out as the dominant species.

Carlos wrote:Let’s go with wings for a sec because levitation is just outright magical.

Let’s consider the scientific basis for this. Based on the standard Terran 4-limbed genetic template all non-insect life follows humans would have wings under their arms (and possibly a tail) rather than looking like an Angel.

Birds only fly because their bones are incredibly hollow and light. Their power-to-weight ratio allows them to get off the ground with a 9.8m/s gravitational pull against them. Anything larger would need an exponentially larger force to get off the ground. Therefore if winged humans can fly either our bone structure is much lighter or the earth this race has evolved on has a much lower gravitational pull.

Let's go hollow bones, but great observation.

Humans as large, brittle creatures would make us incredibly delicate. We may have, in our earlier tribal days banded together more to offer greater protection from ground-based hominids that we would never have inter-bred with. Because flying humans have access to the sky above the clouds they never mutate lower melanin in the skin and different shades of human never appear. Because we appear as airborne gods the other hominids either worship us and become enslaved or are wiped out.

I'm with you on all of this. No other hominids is the outcome.

Humanity develops waterborne craft at a slower rate and as such civilisation in the americas and Asia is much more advanced when coming into contact with Europeans. In fact our lighter frames mean that heavy weapons and armour are not needed and so metalworking is much slower. As a result civilisation develops technology at a slower rate but at the cost of greater peace, a cleaner planet and less intercene conflicts. Space travel is never developed as the fragile flying humans cannot cope with the g-forces involved.

Gonna disagree on these though (except space flight). Assuming we exert as much effort flying as running, we are into top flight times of 3mins to 3hrs. Given hollow bones, we may be able to carry 10kg in flight. That probably still rules out sea crossings.

I agree metalworking would be slower, but I think we develop similarly for warfare. Caves are natural defence points to eliminate the flight advantage, but beyond that I think we stick to towers and walls for defence. You just get to higher altitude quicker from it. Attackers may be able to fly over walls (3min flight) but you then build your defences behind the wall rather than atop it. If the defenders are armoured then the attackers are now disadvantaged in the fight.

Intermingling with other people's really depends on our first contact protocols and I'm assuming we remain largely territorial. (If we switch to being migratory due to our flight then we are on a whole different evolutionary path, but I suspect it ends with us behaving like a swarm of locusts and ravaging the earth into habitat loss and famine)

Knoyleo wrote:

Tomous wrote:We'd all be asking why didn't the humans fly the ring to Mordor instead

Because they're weak willed, and would have succumbed to its influence before crossing the Anduin.

Yeah but we'd still be asking it to annoy you nerds

We'd have all died from bird flu.

Our brains wouldn't be anywhere near as large or complex as they are now, so we'd all be very stupid. Either that or our wings and the muscles that power them would have to be enormous, and the energy required to actually fly would be huge to the point of impracticality. Flight itself would be cumbersome and ill-suited to any kind of short distances or agile motion. We would, however, be able to carry out some killer medium/long-distance travel, assuming it was largely in a straight line and with favourable weather conditions.

I suppose distance itself would be redefined. Imagine Usain Bolt smashing out a formidable 1k sprint flight it would be a sight to behold.

A lot of us are already very stupid though

9/11 never would have happened.

Not with that attitude.

Knoyleo wrote:9/11 never would have happened.

You think jet fuel can melt steel beams but not a flying human with a blowtorch?