Today I put up the last page in AI Impacts’ (primarily Ronny Fernandez’s) investigation into how human-made flying machines compare to evolved ones. (Relevant to how we expect human efforts to build minds to compare to evolved minds.) Evolution mostly won.
Some other interesting things I learned in the process of editing this:
Monarch butterflies can probably fly at least 100km on the energy in about a quarter of a raspberry (not counting the energy they get from the wind, which seems to be central to their flying methods. And not to suggest that they eat raspberries, I am just more familiar with those than flower nectar).
People who estimate monarch butterfly ‘performance parameters’ sometimes do so by attaching plasticine to dead butterflies to get them to the right weight and balance, and then hand-throwing them across the room and noting measurements for those “in which no obvious pitching up or stalling occurred after release” (or at least they did in 1979).
Paramotors are a thing. They are like a giant fan you wear on your back to turn your paraglider into a powered vehicle.
Flights of wonder
Link post
Today I put up the last page in AI Impacts’ (primarily Ronny Fernandez’s) investigation into how human-made flying machines compare to evolved ones. (Relevant to how we expect human efforts to build minds to compare to evolved minds.) Evolution mostly won.
Some other interesting things I learned in the process of editing this:
Monarch butterflies can probably fly at least 100km on the energy in about a quarter of a raspberry (not counting the energy they get from the wind, which seems to be central to their flying methods. And not to suggest that they eat raspberries, I am just more familiar with those than flower nectar).
People who estimate monarch butterfly ‘performance parameters’ sometimes do so by attaching plasticine to dead butterflies to get them to the right weight and balance, and then hand-throwing them across the room and noting measurements for those “in which no obvious pitching up or stalling occurred after release” (or at least they did in 1979).
Paramotors are a thing. They are like a giant fan you wear on your back to turn your paraglider into a powered vehicle.
A model airplane crossed the Atlantic on a gallon of fuel (this was the furthest per Joule of the machines in our collection).
This pedal-powered flying machine crossed the English Channel.
This might be a slightly different one: