Misted: The Saturn Myth (part 1)
Warren vonRoeschlaub
The following is a misting of one of the files periodically posted
by Ted Holden. It's a bit long, but that's probably because he keeps
adding stuff in an attempt to cover up the holes as they get pointed
out. If you find Ted amusing he has recently resurfaced on
talk.origins and will gladly curse you out if you publicly disagree
with him.
-------
(Interior of SoL, Gypsy, Crow, and Tom are facing Mike.)
Crow: Then East earns an extra point?
Mike: No, or rather yes, or . . . well it is when the round is East, but
the direction of the dominant wind changes each time play returns to
the first dealer.
Tom: Why didn't you just say the direction changed every four hands?
Mike: Because a hand can continue indefinitely with the same player, you
see . . .(continues on in background)
Gypsy: (noticing the camera) Um, guys? Guys? (turns to camera) Okay,
well, um. Mike is trying to teach us how to play Mah Jong. I'm not
sure why.
Mike: No, you can only chow the person to your left . . .
Magic Voice: Commercial sign in ten seconds.
Gypsy: There seem to be a lot of rules.
Crow: What about the flowers and seasons?
Mike: The flowers and seasons give you extra points, but only if their
number matches your position relative to the dealer. In three handed
Mah Jong the dealer gets both one and four. So flowers will . . .
Magic Voice: Commercial sign in four, three, two, commercial sign now.
Mike: (hitting button) . . . and the jade dragon . . .
----------
Nazis sell Zima, punks sell mentos, and plant life sells deodorant.
----------
Mike: . . . but only if you pick up the fourth tile yourself . . .
Gypsy: (interrupting) Mike, uh mike.
Mike: . . . not with a Kong. Yeah Gypsy, what is it?
Gypsy: Why do we want to learn the rules if we don't have a Mah Jong set?
Mike: No Mah Jong set?
Gypsy: No.
(the mad's light starts flashing)
Mike: No Mah Jong set?!?
Crow: Well, technically, no.
Mike: Argh! (knocks head against table, lies there for a second) Okay, I'm
okay now. (noticing the light) Oh, looks like Ying and Yang are
calling.
(hits button.)
(In deep thirteen pipes, wires, and levers obscure most of the set, and
most of Frank and Dr. Forester)
Dr. F: Oh, can't play your little game, eh? Ask me if I care.
Mike: Do you care?
Dr. F: (seems to consider for a moment) No. Our invention exchange this
week is a rather cumbersome device, but infinitely useful when arguing
on the net. Frank?
Frank: Has this ever happened to you? You argue about a particular
subject, sure you are right, only to be proven wrong because of a
stupid misunderstanding?
Dr. F: Normally you would be forced to admit that you didn't understand the
meaning of a word you are using.
Frank: But not anymore. Not with the "Redefiner".
Dr. F: Let me demonstrate. Oh, Frank, you seem to have two personalities.
You must be schizophrenic.
Frank: Wait a minute, schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder are
two completely different things.
Dr. F: Well, we will see about that. I just enter the definition I want
"schizophrenia" to have, then pull this lever (doing so) twist this
knob (twisting away) and voila. (loads of klunking noises) These pipes
lead to every library on Earth. (finally, with a shudder, a book falls
out a hatch and lands on the table). Ha, Frank, you are completely
wrong. I have here a dictionary published in 1911 which has "varying
personalities" listed as the seventh definition.
Frank: (turning to camera) Given the millions of reference books published
in English it's inevitable that you will be able to find one that
gives the definition you want.
Dr. F: So, what do you think Jung?
(Back on SoL)
Mike: Well, I think you need our invention exchange this week. Crow?
Crow: (walking in carrying what looks like a phone book for the entire
state of California) Tom and I have been using our free time to solve
one of mankind's biggest problems.
Tom: That's right: lack of communication.
Crow: Too many wars have started because the speakers didn't understand
what the other person meant. So we developed a new language in which
every concept has a word, and each word means exactly one thing.
Tom: That's right. We started out assigning a unique word to every
definition and sub definition in the dictionary.
Crow: But that wasn't enough.
Tom: No, it wasn't. We also needed ways to communicate the emotion of the
person speaking, all temporal relationships, and the inclusion or
exclusion of third parties.
Mike: Gee, guys, this dictionary looks a bit thick to memorize.
Crow: Oh, this is just volume one, "a through ac".
Tom: Yeah, the other 257 volumes are still in the storage bay.
Mike: Hmm, this may solve wars, but only because diplomats will be spending
too much time looking up words.
Crow: (facing camera, whispering out the side of his mouth . . err, beak)
Don't try to be cute.
(back to deep thirteen)
Dr. F: Enough of this chit-chat. Today's experiment is a nostalgia piece,
created by the ever lovable net.personality Ted Holden.
Mike: Ted Holden? Where have I heard that name . . . oh no, please tell me
this is about Ada, please.
Dr. F: No such luck. Press the button Frank.
Frank: (reading the dictionary) Hey, this says that "computer" means
"accountant." (drops book on button)
(on SoL)
All: Ahhh, we have rant sign . . .
*...1...2...3...4...5...6
(Mike carries Tom into theater)
Tom: So who is this Ted Holden Guy, anyway?
Mike: Well, I've heard rumors . . .
Most of the evidence being presented in support of the Saturn Myth
Tom: . . . doesn't exist.
Crow: Boy he sure doesn't waste time. Where did this come from?
concept is either historical and heavily dependent upon
interpretations of mythological and classical themes, or of a highly
theoretical nature (e.g. Rose's explaination for the Tethys Sea).
Tom: But we already have an explanation for that. It's called plate
tectonics.
Mike: Somehow I doubt Ted cares.
Do we have any more concrete evidence, or any real way of knowing or
of proving that the Saturn Myth scenario is actually required for any
of the physical evidence of past ages?
Tom: (announcer) Of course not.
I believe that we do,
Crow: Here with an opposing view is Prof. R. H. Gumby.
and that a careful study of the sizes of antediluvian creatures and
of what it would take to deal with such sizes in our world,
Crow: "Antediluvian"? I don't think this guy is a geologist.
the felt effect of gravity being what it is now,
Mike: Oh, so it isn't gravity that is different, just what it felt like?
indicates that something was massively different in the world which
these creatures inhabited.
Tom: For one thing, it was made entirely of Fluffinutter.
I believe that something entirely like the Saturn Myth is positively
required to explain what turns up upon such a careful investigation.
In fact, I believe that there are at least five categories of evidence
which suggest that the super animals
Mike: Is that a new Saturday morning cartoon show?
of Earth's past could not live in our present world at all, due to
what must have been a change in perceived gravity.
Tom: Look even if gravity has changed, don't you need some sort of
mechanism?
Crow: Oh yeah, that coming from a Star Trek fan.
Mike: Quiet you two.
A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we know them today
Tom: Extinct?
requires that we relegate the brontosaur, once thought to be one of
the largest sauropods, to welterweight or at most middleweight status.
Crow: (announcer) And in this corner(erer), weighing in at seventy-two
tons, the brontosaur(auraur)
Fossil finds dating from the 1970's dwarf him. The Avon field Guide
to Dinosaurs
Mike: Well, I'm glad he is choosing scholarly works to quote.
Crow: Why would anyone make a field guide for dinosaurs anyway?
shows a brachiosaur (larger than a brontosaur), a supersaur, and an
ultrasaur juxtaposed, and the ultrasaur dwarfs the others.
Tom: Wait a minute, the size of the ultrasaur is close enough to the others
that scholars still argue if it is really a different species.
Crow: He must be using the original size estimates, the ones extrapolated
from a single vertebrae.
Mike: Hey, how do you guys know so much about this?
Crow: Well, what do you think bugzerpoidalosipka means in our new language?
Mike: I'd rather not find out.
Christopher McGowan's "DINOSAURS, SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS", Harvard,
1991 cites a 180 ton weight estimate for the ultrasaur (page 118), and
(page 104) describes the volume-based methods of estimating dinosaur
weights. McGowan is Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal
Ontario Museum.
Tom: Yep, that is definitely the old weight estimate. Not to mention that
a museum curator is not exactly the qualifications needed to be
considered an expert.
This same look requires that dinosaur lifting requirements be compared
to human lifting capabilities.
Crow: I know this is just a guess, but I'm going to go with the ultrasaur
being able to lift more than a human.
One objection which might be raised to this would be that animal
muscle tissue was somehow "better" than that of humans.
Crow: My muscle tissue is better than yours, nyah, nyah.
This, however, is known not to be the case;
Tom: They found some dinosaur muscles?
for instance, from Knut Nielson's, "Scaling, Why is Animal size So
Important", Cambridge Univ Press, 1984, page 163, we have:
"It appears that the maximum force or stress that can be exerted
by any muscle is inherent in the structure of the muscle
filaments.
Mike: So a muscle can't be better because if it was the same it wouldn't
be? I don't get it.
The maximum force is roughly 4 to 4 kgf/cm2 cross
section of muscle (300 - 400 kN/m2). This force is body-size
independant and is the same for mouse and elephant muscle.
Tom: Oh, please, the difference between a mouse and an elephant is
minuscule compared to the difference between a human and a dinosaur.
Mike: Tom, please, relax.
The
reason for this uniformity is that the dimensions of the thick
and thin muscle filaments, and also the number of cross-bridges
Mike: when you come to them,
between them are the same. In fact the structure of mouse
muscle and elephant muscle is so similar that a microscopist
would have difficulty identifying them except for a larger
number of mitrochondria in the smaller animal.
Crow: And that the elephant muscle is the size of a Buick.
This uniformity
in maximum force holds not only for higher vertebrates, but
for many other organisms, including at least some, but not all
invertebrates."
Tom: "higher vertebrates"? What, prey tell, are the "lower" vertebrates?
Mike: Well, there's lawyers.
Crow: And used car dealers.
Mike: And infomercial hosts.
Crow: And . . .
Tom: Okay, okay, I get the picture.
Another objection might be that sauropods were aquatic creatures.
Nobody believes that anymore;
Crow: Oh yeah, then what about the people making this objection?
they had no adaptation for aquatic life, their teeth show wear and
tear which does not come from eating soft aquatic vegetation, and
trackways show them walking on land with no difficulty.
Tom: Hey, if gravity was less, shouldn't the land tracks look like they
were made underwater?
A final objection would be that dinosaurs were somehow more
"efficient" than top human athletes.
Mike: (car salesman) Not only does this sauropod come with a better
warranty, but it gets five miles per gallon more than your old human.
This, however, goes against all observed data.
Crow: Terrific, now he's observed dinosaurs.
As creatures get bulkier, they become less efficient; the layers of
thick muscle in limbs begin to get in each others way and bind to some
extent.
Mike: Gee, maybe that's why elephants have larger bones in their legs than
mice.
For this reason, scaled lifts for the super-heavyweight athletes are
somewhat lower than for, say, the 200 lb athletes.
Tom: Is he saying that comparing humans to humans is the same as comparing
humans to dinosaurs?
By "scaled lift", I mean of course a lift record divided by the two-
thirds power of the athlete's body weight. As creatures get larger,
weight, which is proportional to volume, goes up in proportion to the
cube of the increase in dimension.
Crow: What?
Tom: He forgot to mention that they need to have the same shape.
Crow: Oh.
Strength, on the other hand, is known to be roughly proportional to
cross section of muscle for any particular limb, which is similar to
pr2 , and goes up in proportion to the square of the increase in
dimension.
Mike: What about thicker bones to improve leverage?
This is the familiar "square-cube" problem. The normal inverse
operator for this is to simply divide by 2/3 power of body weight, and
this is indeed the normal scaling factor for all weight lifting
events,
Tom: So he wants us to assume dinosaurs were weight lifters?
i.e. it lets us tell if a 200 lb athlete has actually done a "better"
lift than the champion of the 180 lb group. For athletes roughly
between 160 and 220 lbs, i.e. whose bodies are fairly similar, these
scaled lift numbers line up very nicely.
Mike: Not too surprising, since there aren't any differences aside from the
size over that small a range.
It is then fairly easily seen that a lift for a scaled up version of
one particular athlete can be computed via this formula, since the
similarity will be perfect, scaling being the only difference.
Tom: Now hold on. Is he saying that the only difference between Pee-Wee
Herman and Arnold Schwarzenegger is scaling?
Consider the case of Bill Kazmaier, the king of the power lifters in
the seventies and eighties.
Crow: He has since become rear-admiral of the power lifters.
Mike: The new king is King Vitamin.
Power lifters are, in the author's estimation, the strongest of all
athletes;
Tom: Well, God forbid the author should be wrong.
they concentrate on the three most difficult total-body lifts,
Crow: Picking up women, holding up a bank, and, uh, . . .
Mike: Talking to people while their nuts roast.
Crow & Tom: Huh?
i.e. benchpress, squat, and dead-lift. They work out many hours a
day and, it is fairly common knowledge, use food to flavor their
anabolic steroids with.
Tom: Hey, isn't that illegal?
Mike: Using steroids?
Tom: No, using that stupid cliche.
No animal the same weight as one of these men could be presumed to
be as strong.
Tom: What about gorillas?
Kazmaier was able to do squats and dead lifts with weights between
1000 and 1100 lbs on a bar, assuming he was fully warmed up.
Tom: And a gorilla could do twice that cold.
Standing Up at 70,000 lbs
Mike: But six weeks later the weight came back.
This brings us to the first of the five categories of evidence I
mentioned above.
Crow: Evidence of what?
Any animal has to be able to lift its own weight off the ground,
i.e. stand up, with no more difficulty than Kazmaier experiences doing
a 1000 lb squat.
Tom: Well, what if it doesn't stand up by doing a squat?
Consider, however, what would happen to Mr. Kazmaier, were he to be
scaled up to 70,000 lbs, the weight commonly given for the brontosaur.
Mike: Time for some ultra slim-fast.
Kazmaier's maximum effort at standing,
Tom: No, that was his maximum effort to *get* standing, not his maximum
effort while standing.
fully warmed up, assuming the 1000 lb squat, was 1340 lbs (1000 for
the bar and 340 for himself). The scaled maximum lift would be a
solution to: 1340/340.667 = x/70,000.667 or 47,558 lbs.
Crow: Hey, where did that .667 come from?
Mike: I think there is a "^" missing.
He'd not be able to lift his weight off the ground!
Crow: Boy, what a wimp.
Tom: But Kazmaier only had two legs, a sauropod has four.
A sauropod dinosaur had four legs you might say;
All: Huh?
what happens if Mr. Kazmaier uses arms AND legs at 70,000 lbs.
Tom: Hey, but arms still aren't extra legs!
The truth is that the squat uses almost every muscle in the
athlete's body very nearly to the limits,
Crow: Oh, yeah, I'm sure his arrectores pili get used a lot.
Mike: His what?
Tom: The muscles that make your hair stand on end.
Mike: Let me guess: your new language?
Tom: Well, we needed some meaning for qivitulasicos.
but in this case, it doesn't even matter. A near maximum benchpress
effort for Mr. Kazmaier would fall around 600 lbs.
Crow: Not on top of him, I hope.
This merely changes the 1340 to 1940 in the equation above, and the
answer comes out as 68,853. Even using all muscles, some more than
once, the strongest man who we know anything about would not be able
to lift his own weight off the ground at 70,000 lbs!
Tom: Yeah, but with four *legs* we get 81,588 lbs. And that assumes a
brontosaur has human legs, stands up with a squat thrust, and ever
sits down in the first place.
To believe then, that a brontosaur could stand at 70,000 lbs, one has
to believe that a creature whose weight was mostly gut
Mike: Those brontosaurs should really cut down on beer.
and the vast digestive mechanism involved in processing huge amounts
of low-value foodstuffs,
Crow: Yeah, only buy the expensive foodstuffs.
was somehow stronger than a creature its size which was almost
entirely muscle,
Tom: and shaped remarkably like Kazmaier.
and that far better trained and conditioned than would ever be found
amongst grazing animals.
Crow: Hey, Florence Joyner trained a lot more than an antelope, but I know
who to bet on if they race.
That is not only ludicrous in the case of the brontosaur, but the
calculations only get worse when you begin trying to scale upwards to
the supersaur and ultrasaur at their sizes.
Tom: What difference does it make if the calculations are fundamentally
flawed right from the start?
How heavy can an animal still get to be in our world, then? How heavy
would Mr. Kazmaier be
Mike: If he didn't use Jenny Craig.
at the point at which the square-cube problem made it as difficult
for him just to stand up as it is for him to do 1000 lb squats at his
present size of 340 lbs?
Tom: Mike, you're a human. Would you say that you stand up using a squat?
Mike: It depends on how much I ate.
The answer is simply the solution to:
1340/340667 = x/x^.667 , or (using the usual Newton's process)
Tom: Why not use the usual algebra and solve it exactly?
20,803 lbs.
Tom: See, it's really 20,814 lbs.
In reality, elephants do not appear to get quite to that point.
McGowan (DINOSAURS, SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS, p. 97) claims that a
Toronto Zoo specimen was the largest in North America at 14,300 lbs,
Crow: And gee, North America _is_ the land of huge elephants.
and Smithsonian personnel once informed the author that the gigantic
bush elephant specimen which appears at their Museum of Natural
History weighed around 8 tons.
Mike: Personnel? What was he, the janitor?
Tom: Hey, what's wrong with janitors?
Crow: Yeah!
Now, a number of what I refer to as the regular crew members of t.o
Mike: The S.S. T.O?
will always be quick to point out what they regard as fatal flaws in
all of this reasoning.
Tom: Don't be silly. You need to be reasoning before they could do that.
They note that 150 lb chimps have been observed doing some
unspecified kind of an arm pull (chimps are mostly arms) at 600 or 700
lbs or something.
Crow: Chimps are mostly arms? Something tells me this guy has not seen a
picture of a chimp.
Suppose a 150 lb chimp actually was somehow magically stronger than
any human powerlifter and could do a squat with 1200 lbs on a bar.
Tom: What is it with this guy and squats?
The same calculations I have used, e.g. 1350/150^(2/3) = x/x^(2/3)
says that this super chimp would still be unable to stand at any
weight above 110,000 lbs, and remember that most sources give a weight
figure of 360,000 lbs for the ultrasaur.
Crow: And please remember that his sources use the old size estimates.
Mike: And please remember to fasten your safety belts and put all tray
tables and seats in their full upright position.
Again, in all cases, we are comparing the absolute max effort for a
human weight lifter to lift and hold something for two seconds
Tom: Hey, once the weight is lifted it's just a matter of balance. The
whole reason they go with two seconds is that if you can keep it up
that long you can keep it up indefinitely.
versus the sauropod's requirement to move around and walk all day
long with scaled weight greater than these weights involved in the
maximum, one-shot, two-second effort. That just can't happen.
Tom: No comment.
Sauropod Dinosaurs' Necks
Crow: Oh my God!!
Mike: What, what?
Crow: That means he has only done one example out of the five he has
planned! We're only one fifth of the way done!
All: Auuugh.
A second category of evidence for attenuated felt effect of gravity in
antediluvian times arises from the study of sauropod dinosaurs' necks.
Crow: Oh, the old cradibulancitofilisology.
Mike: That new language is a curse.
Scientists who study sauropod dinosaurs are now claiming that they
held their heads low, because
Crow: of all the bridges on the freeway.
they could not have gotten blood to their brains had they held them
high. McGowan (again, DINOSAURS, SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS) goes into
this in detail (pages 101 - 120). He mentions the fact that a
giraffe's blood
Mike: Makes a good substitute for rams blood when summoning the forces of
evil.
pressure, at 200 - 300 mm Hg, far higher than that of any other
animal, would probably rupture the vascular system of any other
animal,
Tom: Hmm, maybe that's because it is higher than any other animals.
and is maintained by thick arterial walls and by a very tight skin
which apparently acts like a jet pilot's pressure suit.
Crow: I thought it was those muscles lining the arteries in the neck.
A giraffe's head might reach to 20'. How a sauropod might have
gotten blood to its brain at 50' or 60' is the real question.
Tom: To which there are many real answers.
Two articles which mention this problem appeared in the 12/91 issue of
Natural History.
Mike: Oh, God forbid he should cite any kind of a scientific journal, or
give any calculations.
In "Sauropods and Gravity", Harvey B. Lillywhite of Univ. Fla.,
Gainesville, notes:
Mike: Gee, like that name wasn't made up.
"...in a Barosaurus with its head held high, the heart had to
work against a gravitational pressure of about 590 mm of mercury
(Hg). In order for the heart to eject blood into the arteries
of the neck,
Crow: It needs to apply for an eviction notice.
its pressure must exceed that of the blood pushing
against the opposite side of the outflow valve. Moreover, some
additional pressure would have been needed to overcome the
resistence
Mike: . . . fighters in the south.
of smaller vessels within the head for blood flow to
meet the requirements for brain and facial tissues.
Tom: It's really too bad you can't say "Kleenex" anymore.
Therefore,
hearts of Barosaurus must have generated pressures at least six
times greater than those of humans and three to four times
greater than those of giraffes."
In the same issue of Natural History, Peter Dodson ("Lifestyles
of the Huge and Famous"), mentions that:
Crow: (as Robin Leech) This week on "Lifestyles of the Huge and Famous" we
visit Dom DeLouise in his enormous house. But not so enormous as
the gut he drags about, insured at Lloyds of London for ten thousand
dollars a pound. This man is a Giant star of the tiny screen. So
big, that a single buffalo shot can take weeks of planning.
Mike: Are you done Crow?
Crow: Yeah, I guess so.
"Brachiosaurus was built like a giraffe
Mike: (cowboy) Honey, you are built like a giraffe.
Tom: (falsetto) Oh, you say that to all the women with 8 foot necks.
and may have fed like
one. But most sauropods were built quite differently.
Crow: And boy were they built, why I'd . . .
Mike (grabbing Crow's beak) shhh.
At the
base of the neck, a sauropod's vertebral spines unlike those of
a giraffe, were weak and low and did not provide leverage for
the muscles required to elevate the head in a high position.
Tom: Gee, I guess that's why they had a nuchal ligament instead.
Furthermore, the blood pressure required to pump blood up to the
brain, thirty or more feet in the air, would have placed
extraordinary demands on the heart
Mike: We want ten million dollars in small, unmarked, bills, a helicopter
to take us to the airport, and a twelve piece McNuggets with barbecue
sauce.
(see opposite page)
[Lillywhite's article] and would seemingly have placed the
animal at severe risk of a stroke, an aneurism, or some other
circulatory disaster.
Crow: (announcer) the circle is coming in now, and, oh my God, it's burst
into flames. Oh, the humanity.
If sauropods fed with the neck extended
just a little above heart level, say from ground level up to
fifteen feet, the blood pressure required would have been far
more reasonable."
Mike: So blood pressure isn't a problem. Then why has he been putting us
through this? (grabbing Tom) Why? Why?
Tom: If my arms worked I'd slap you Mike, get a grip.
Dodson is neglecting what appears to be a dilemma in the case of the
brachiosaur, but there are at least two far greater dilemmas here.
One is that the good leaves were, in all likelihood, above the 20'
mark;
Crow: Oh, gee, I guess it would be kind of silly to expect him to back up
that claim.
Mike: What, back up every stupid thing he says? There wouldn't be enough
space on internet for all the references . . . if they existed.
holding his head out at 20', an ultrasaur would, in all likelihood,
starve.
Tom: Wait a minute, didn't the guy say fifteen feet above the heart? Since
when is the brachiosaur keeping it's heart at five feet?
Mike: Are you going to keep getting upset every time Ted makes a technical
error?
Tom: Well, yeah.
Moreover, it turns out that a problem every bit as bad or worse than
the blood pressure problem would arise, perceived gravity being what
it is now, were sauropods to hold their heads out just above
horizontally as Dodson and others are suggesting.
Crow: For one thing, they would get a nasty crick in their neck.
The volume-based techniques which McGowan and others use can be used
to estimate weight for a sauropod's neck, given a scale model and a
weight figure for the entire dinosaur.
Mike: Ten bucks says his "scale model" is a figurine from Toys "R" Us.
Crow: No bet.
An ultrasaur is generally thought to be a near cousin of the
brachiosaur,
Tom: No it isn't. The ultrasaur is thought to be a diplocid.
if not simply a very large specimen of brachiosaur. The technique,
then is to measure the volume of water which the sauropod's neck
(severed at the shoulders and filled with bondo (auto-body putty)
displaces,
Crow: Because everyone knows that the ultrasaur was filled with auto-body
putty.
versus the volume which the entire brachiosaur displaces, and simply
extrapolate to the 360,000 lb figure for the ultrasaur.
Tom: Again with the old weight estimates!
The author did this using a Larami Corp. model of a brachiosaur,
which is to scale.
Crow: Good thing I didn't take that bet.
Mike: Isn't this like figuring out how much Stallone weighs be using a
Rambo action figure?
To make a long story short,
Mike: A little too late for that, buddy.
the neck from the shoulders outward weighs 28,656 lbs, and the center
of gravity of that neck is 15' from the shoulders, the neck itself
being 38' long.
Tom: Assuming this model is accurate.
This equates to 429,850 foot pounds of torque.
The muscles in the creatures neck (and in our necks as well) are
working simply to close the ends of a 'V',
Crow: He isn't going to model a complex structure like the neck as a simple
lever, is he?
the processes of the adjoining vertebrae. It is clearly seen that we
have force on one end of this equation, and torque on the other;
Mike: I'm afraid he is.
the two must be proportional.
Tom: What?!? Torque must be proportional to force? They don't even use
the same units.
If we assume that the saur must have been able to lift its head at
least as easily as a human
Crow: We'd be morons.
withy an 18" neck can move his against a neck-exercise machine set to
130 lbs,
Tom: This seems a bit arbitrary.
then we see that the saur would require the muscular strength of a
neck 17.4' in diameter.
Mike: Huh? He came to a conclusion well within the bounds of what is
possible. He must have done something wrong.
The much more reasonable assumption of effort being equivalant to the
human using a 50 lb. setting
Crow: Yep, when you get an acceptable answer, change the calculations.
requires a neck of over 20' for the saur.
Tom: Wait a minute. Just because the muscle controls the neck doesn't mean
it is *in* the neck.
This assumes something like one foot from shoulders to the back of
the head for the human athlete and, of course, that force is
proportional to cross-section, as is well known.
Mike: And the assumption humans have the same neck as a sauropod.
The saur's neck, however, from the model, appears to have been
something like 10'x7' at the widest point at its base, and to have
rapidly narrowed down to around 6-7' in diameter.
Tom: Still plenty of space for a ligament.
Therefore, in our gravity at least, holding its neck out horizontally
would not be an option for the sauropod.
Crow: You may have one item from column A and two items from column B.
McGowan and others claim that the head and neck were supported by a
dorsal ligament and not muscles,
Tom: Pretty reasonable considering the vertebrae had a grove for a nuchal
ligament.
but real-life experience does not show us any example of a living
creature using ligaments to support a body structure which its
available musculature was many-to-one out of ballpark for dealing
with.
Crow: So there are examples of creatures using ligaments to support body
structures, but those structures were always just mildly more than it
could deal with?
Mike: This guy is definitely not dealing with a full deck.
Tom: He's a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
Crow: He's a few dollars short of a paycheck.
Mike: He's a few bytes short of a ram chip.
Crow & Tom: Mmmm, ram chips.
It isn't difficult to think of things which would go wrong with such
a scheme, after about the first five seconds.
Tom: Ted's scheme? No, I don't suppose it is.
And so, sauropods (in our gravity) couldn't hold their heads up, and
they couldn't hold them out either. That doesn't leave much. And I
haven't even mentioned the dilemma involving their tails.
Mike: Wait a minute, why did they have to eat with their tails?
Tom: Come on mike, let's get out of here.
Mike: Okay. (picks up Tom and leaves)
6...5...4...3...2...1...*
(Tom is mumbling to himself surrounded by piles of paper. Don't ask me how
he wrote on them, but he did. Mike and Crow enter.)
Mike: Tom, what are you doing?
Tom: Well, today's rant made me think about that two-thirds power scaling
rule.
Crow: What about it?
Tom: Well, why just use people, elephants, and dinosaurs? Why not go all
the way?
Mike: What do you mean?
Tom: Well, consider the ant. It can lift about fifty times it's own
weight.
Mike: Wow, that's a lot.
Tom: You would think so. But using the two thirds power rule that
corresponds to you lifting about 27 pounds.
Crow: Hey, that's still quite a feat for marshmallow man here.
Mike: I'm in great shape. I exercise every . . . once in a while.
Tom: That's not all. Using the ant as a basis the largest any animal could
ever be is 291 pounds. That means Roseanne Arnold is the biggest
animal alive.
Crow: No argument here.
Mike: Boy, we have to do something about that attitude of yours.
Tom: But, wait, we can also approach this from the other direction.
Mike: What other direction?
Tom: Blue whales have been known to lift rafts out of the water. Let's be
generous, and assume a raft with an engine and people in it only
weighs, say, 500 pounds.
Mike: Okay, but 500 pounds to a whale that weighs, what, like 100 tons, is
nothing.
Tom: Au contraire, mon ami. A 100 ton whale lifting a 500 pound raft out
of the water is like you doing the same with 1,805 pounds. And if the
whale is larger it gets worse, not better.
Crow: I bet he could do it if it were a 1,805 pound hot dog.
Mike: Crow, I think we need to have a little talk. (light starts flashing)
Your attitude lately has been worse than rant sign . . .
All: Rant sign? Ahhhh . . .
--
Warren Kurt | By virtue of being correct, the opinions expressed
vonRoeschlaub | above could not conceivably be those of ISU.