What kind of biological characteristic does a human being need to achieve great speeds?
In my book there is a tribe and one of the characteristics I describe is that they can achieve great speeds, something like 80km/h (50 mph) for 2 minutes approximately. How could it be?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/135543. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
What kind of biological characteristic does a human being need to achieve great speeds?
Let's look at a human athlete for comparison. (If you ignore that it's cyclists in this case.)
The best trained top cyclists at the peak of their profession can sprint for about 10 seconds:
Chris Hoy could produce an explosive finish with power figures around 2,500 Watts ! that's 24 Watts/kg at peak power output.
The relevance of that is that in the classical model of muscle fibre heat generation, heat to mechanical power is generated in a ratio of about 3:1 within the fast twitch muscles. (It's about 5:1 for the slow twitch ones, but let's go with the lower figure for now.)
This means for a mechanical output of 2.5KW for 2 minutes:
3*((2.5*10^3)*2*60) joules of heat energy are going to be generated in the muscles.
That's 9 Megajoules.
That's enough to raise the temperature of 100Kg of water (analogous of a human - we're mostly water) by about 20 degrees celsius. At this temperature all the enzymes in the body would cease to function and all life processes would be extinguished.
All I have to say is, your tribe had better have very efficient thermoregulation, a neat solution might be:
Cooling Fins.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads