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Q&A

Reasonably tougher humans against falls, concussions etc

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My question is, how do we make humans more able to resist falls(not just free falls, also normal ones and from a "medium" height, 2-10 meters) and be able to move afterwards, at least for the jumps on the lower end. So "action movies"-like jumps should be possible and leave the jumper not stuck on the ground like a sponge.

Some ideas I've gathered from previous answers or elsewhere:

  • Lighter humans, this old essay here is pretty famous and talks about how smaller animals have it easier in terms of falls given the square-cube law, obviously if we keep humans the same size we have to make them lighter. This is an easy solution, although I'm not sure about the details of such a change, if humans weighted roughly 2 times less, what kind of falls would they be able to survive? As far as I can see, human femurs can resist 30 times the human weight and the terminal velocity is 66m/s for real humans, obviously if humans weight 2 times less the second values will be lower but what would it translate to? It seems to me the bones would still break.

  • Stronger bones, bones not breaking would help a lot, obviously bones that are too stiff and let the rest of the body take all the force is bad, but I imagine this shouldn't be a unsolvable dilemma, can't bones be stronger while retaining their relative elasticity?

  • More cartilage, I'm not sure where there is space to place it while not impeding normal function but I imagine if you can afford some, it wouldn't hurt AFAIK. Also if cartillage can fully regrow it would allow people to rationally risk bad falls to do whatever they need to do at the moment.

  • More internal organ cushions, if we remove some vestigials or semi-vestigials organs and use their space to put some cushions or well placed fat, can it help organs to not become a soup in the process? What is the most worth protecting?

  • Better internal structure, maybe placing vital veins,arteries and nerves in places less likely to be perforated or broke by moving organs/force. I'm not an expert at all. I know the human bodies has some bad designs for some pathways but other than that I'm not sure how much room for expansion there is.

  • Better feet, the video here and the scientist behind the idea say that human feet are especially well made for walking, regardless of that discussion can human feet be tweaked to absorb more force in such falls? Maybe fusing some bones that don't move or putting cartilage or fat everywhere, I'm out of ideas on this front, lol.

I'm looking for some general but concrete ideas, I want humans to look as much as possible like humans on the outside but you can go relatively wild with internal organ layout and so on.

Thanks in advance!

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/175856. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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