ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) (09/05/85)
Immanuel Velikovsky believed, David Talbott believes, I believe, and the various contributors and readers of the Kronos Journal believe that, less than 10,000 years ago, there existed on this planet an age of wonder, a true golden age when, as Hesiod and Ovid claimed, Cronos (Saturn) was the king of heaven. This was an age when the inhabitants of this planet, looking into the Northern skies, beheld an dazzling light spectacle, radically unlike anything we have ever seen. It was an age of eternal springtime, with no seasons. It was also an age when the felt effect of the force of gravity on this planet was far less than what we experience now, and when creatures of the earth grew far larger than they possibly could now. That world came crashing down and vanished forever when a stellar blowout within our own solar system triggered the most horrific catastrophe our planet has ever withstood, the Noachian Deluge. David Talbott's book, "The Saturn Myth", Doubleday 1980, describes the mythical symbolism of that world. Articles on the same and similar topics appear regularly in the Kronos Journal, subscriptions available ($15/yr) from: Kronos Subscription Dept. P.O. Box 343 Wynnewood, Pa. 19096 The most obvious proof of the existence of this former world on our planet has to do with the large animals. Scientists studying dinosaurs in the last century determined that the big sauropods could not stand on land, that they were simply too heavy, and must therefore have lived in water where water bouyancy would help carry their huge bodies. In so doing, they (the scientists) ignored the lack of any obvious adaptation for aquatic life amongst the sauropods. More recently, scientists have come to believe that sauropods lived on land, due both to the lack of aquatic adaptation and to tracks found in Texas and other places which clearly show large sauropods having moved on land. However, they are now ignoring the problems of weight. Something is wrong here, one way or another. I claim that the only possible way sauropods could have lived was for the effect of gravity in the ancient world to have been considerably less than what we now experience. This is what one would expect from Velikovsky and Talbott's theory and it solves the sauropods' problem outright. In the traditional view of origins, both for this planet and for the solar system generally, there is absolutely nothing which could account for such a lessening of the felt effect of gravity at any time in this planet's history. Stanley Friesen and several other commentators on the net have replied in numerous articles that they don't really understand the reason why a hundred foot long, three hundred thousand pound ultrasaur would have any insurmountable problems functioning in our gravity. This article is dedicated to them. Generally, whenever an animal doubles it's size, all other factors being equal, it's power to weight ratio gets cut in half. It's weight is proportional to volume, a cubed figure which goes up by three factors of two when size is doubled. It's strength, however, is proportional to cross sections of bones and muscles, a squared figure which only goes up by two factors of two as size doubles. For creatures like the ultrasaur, as well as for large pterasaurs or pteratorns which required being able to fly for survival, this problem of power-to-weight ratios would quickly become critical in our gravity. Books describe the ultrasaur as 100 feet long, 150 tons, about 28 or 30 feet at the shoulders. About 35 or 40 of the 100 foot length is neck, another 25 or 30 feet is body between the shoulders, and another 30 or 35 the tail. The animal is about 18 or 20 feet deep at the front shoulders and slightly less than ten feet wide (collarbones are about 8.5 feet long). By way of contrast, the heaviest of Guderian and Rommel's panzers, the tiger tank, weighed 55 to 65 tons, depending on how it was set up. Even with treads, the tiger often got stuck in wet ground; it was just too heavy. Modern tanks are lighter. An 18 wheeler, fully loaded with all of a typical Harry Homeowner's possessions, goes about 100,000 lbs. By any account, the ultrasaur was heavy. I would like to calculate a minimum muscle mass for the ultrasaur's legs if he were to have any hope of lifting his own weight off the ground. Any animal has to be able to do this. Yet, it is fairly easy to show that this would have been an insurmountable problem for the ultrasaur, given our gravity. The strongest man of our generation, and possibly any generation in recorded history, is Bill Kazmaier. He stands about 6-4, goes about 330 lbs., and is the reigning king of American powerlifters. In heads up tests against the strongest men from other sports and, particularly, men from other branches of weightlifting, Kaz has repeatedly come out on top by considerable margins. Powerlifting is a specialized branch of weightlifting which focuses on the three most difficult lifts from a total body system viewpoint, the benchpress, the deadlift, and the squat. It is this last exercise which we are interested in. This amounts to putting a bar on ones shoulders, coming to squat position, thighs paralell with the floor, and then coming back up with the weight. This is approximately what an elephant or an ultrasaur must do to get up off the ground after lying down for a nap or for whatever reason. The most any man has ever squatted one time is about 1003 lbs. Kaz has managed squats of about 950 lbs. Generally, heavyweight and superheavyweight powerlifters are considered strong when they can squat six or seven hundred pounds. I should point out, however, that if anabolic steroids were to be taken out of the picture, all weightlifting records of every sort would go down at least 20 percent, and possibly 30. Of course, the ultrasaur didn't have access to dianabol. I am going to say that, as a ballpark figure, the best we could hope for from the strongest men alive under natural conditions, would be to squat about 1000 lbs, INCLUDING THEIR OWN WEIGHT. I am also going to say that, as a ballpark figure, they need thighs about 30 to 35 inches around in order to do this. Kaz's thighs are about 35 or 36 inches around; Mark Chaillet's are about 33. Likewise, I am going to use 5 inches as a ballpark figure for the radius of these men's legs at the thigh. The constant of proportionality I spoke of, "K" for short, will thus be given by: 1000 lbs = K * pie * (5 ** 2) using the old Fortran notation in which "*" means "times", and "**" means "raised to the power of". K will thus be taken to be 12.74, both for human heavyweight powerlifters, and for the ultrasaur. The K factor is understood to incorporate the factor of two, for the human's two legs or one pair of the ultrasuar's legs. The fact that I am using radius of thigh rather than radius of any one particular muscle is again ballpark, but it favors neither Kaz and his pals nor the ultrasaur. In all cases being considered here, the thigh consists mostly of muscles used directly for lifting weight straight upwards. This value for K is thus crude, but it gives the ultrasaur two large benefits of doubts. First, the ratio would, in reality, be higher for a maximally trained human athlete than for any herbivore, particularly a laid-back one like an elephant or sauropod which wasn't into sprints or anything amounting to maximum efforts. Secondly, we are talking about what the human can lift just once as a maximum total effort i.e. with no margin for error. In reality, if Kaz or one of his pals were shooting for a squat of 800 lbs at a meet, a practice might consist of four or five repititions with 500 lbs, followed after a fifteen minute rest by two or three reps with 650 or 700, followed by the attempt for a single squat at 800. That is to say, to have any margin for error, you must subtract at least a hundred and fifty lbs. or so from the human athlete's lift and then compute the ratio. All of this being given, let's see what the ultrasaur would need by way of a radius for his thigh muscles in order to lift his 300,000 lb bulk off the ground, first assuming that his front and rear leg-pairs were each lifting 150,000 lbs. Considering the ultrasuar's load on one leg pair to be 150 times that required by the human, the equation becomes: Ultrasaur Heavyweight Powerlifter K * pie * (R ** 2) = K * pie * 150 * (5 ** 2) R ** 2 = 3750 R = 61. Sixty inches is five feet; the ultrasaur would need thighs slightly over ten feet in diameter to have any hope of lifting his own body off the ground! Of course, the fudge factors in the equation heavily favor the ultrasaur. A realistic figure might be more like eleven or eleven and a half feet. Of course, the books do not show the ultrasaur with legs ten feet in diameter; that would make for a funny looking animal indeed, with legs greater in diameter than in length. Just the weight of the legs would bring the poor guy's weight up to 400,000 lbs. But that's not the end of it. They would have to double the animal's width to 20 feet or so (actually wider than it would be deep) to provide a base for two legs which were ten feet in diameter. Of course, such a doubling of width would bring the cauculation for weight up past 600,000 lbs. As you can see, the whole thing gets ridiculous in a hurry. The Avon Field Guide to Dinosaurs shows the ultrasaur with legs about four feet in diameter, judging from the human figure which is in the picture for scale; about what you would expect from a normal feel for animal bodies and certainly the way any artist familiar with animals would draw him. However, such an intuitive view would be dead wrong in the case of the ultrasaur. Using our K figure of 12.74, we can see that the most a pair of even five foot diameter legs could ever hope to lift would be about: 12.74 * pie * (30 inches **2) = 36,003 lbs. Off by quite a bit in the case of what is needed for the ultrasaur. It would thus seem that, given our gravity, there is a threshold for size and weight beyond which no animal could be wide enough to provide a base for the legs it would take to bear it's own weight. An animal beyond that threshold should properly be regarded as a mathematical impossibility in our world, given our gravity. The ultrasaur is beyond that point by a considerable margin. One of the most interesting dinosaur books of recent years is Adrian Desmond's "The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs". The section on flying dinosaurs, roughly from page 178 to page 183, without Desmond seemingly intending it, reads like a catalogue of reasons why pterasaurs could not function or live in our world. On the relatively small (40 lb., 23 ft. wingspan) pteranodon, Desmond writes: "The combination of great size and negligable weight must necessarily have resulted in some fragility. It is easy to imagine that the paper-thin tubular bones supporting the gigantic wings would have made landing dangerous. How could the creature have alighted without shattering all of its bones?" This sounds like Desmond has seen some films of albatross landings. Regarding pteranodon take-offs, Desmond writes: "Many larger birds have to achieve a certain speed by running and flapping before they can take off and others have to produce a wing beat speed approaching hovering in order to rise. To achieve hovering with a twenty three foot wingspread, Pteranodon would have required 220 lbs of flight muscles as efficient as those of hummingbirds. But it had reduced its musculature to about 8 lbs., so it is inconcievable that Pteranodon could have taken off actively." So Desmond sees the pteranodon as a glider, needing a 15 mph wind in order to take off. But any airborne creature which could only glide would have all sorts of problems, not the least of which would be going hungry on windless days. At the mercy of the winds, there would be no place on earth for it to call home; its life would be a continual migration. How then did it raise its young back at the nest? And there is another really terrible problem it would have due to the fact that it must necessarily have been a carrion feeder (a glider simply wouldn't have had much luck trying to catch airborne prey). Desmond puts it this way: "How they could have taken to the air after gorging themselves is something of a puzzle. Wings of such extraordinary size could not have been flapped when the animal was grounded. Since the pterasaurs were unable to run in order to launch themselves, they must have taken off vertically. Pigeons are only able to take off vertically by reclining their bodies and clapping the wings in front of them; as flappers, the Texas pterosaurs would have needed very tall stilt-like legs to raise the body far enough to allow the 24 foot wings to clear the ground. The main objection, however, still rests in the lack of adequate musculature for such an operation. Is the only solution to suppose that, with wings fully extended and elevators raised, they were lifted passively off the ground by the wind? If Lawson is correct and the Texas pterosaurs were carrion feeders, another problem can be envisaged. Dinosaur carcasses imply the presence of dinosaurs. The ungainly, Brobdignagian pterosaurs were vulnerable to attack when grounded, so how did they escape the formidable dinosaurs? Left at the mercy of wind currents, take-off would have been a chancy business." In other words, the nature of the pterosaur's line of work was such that he must have needed to have been capable of quick get-away takeoffs, something a glider couldn't ever count on. Desmond doesn't have anything to say about the 200 lb pterotorn, which was a modern bird rather than a pterosaur, and definitely built for powered flight rather than gliding. On the subject of flight and weight, however, he notes: "With each increase in size, and therefore also weight, a flying animal needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper and hold and maneuver them in a glider), but power is supplied by muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure. The larger a flier becomes, the disproportionately weightier it grows by the addition of its own power supply. There comes a point when the weight is just too great to permit the machine to remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power suggested that the maximum weight which a flying vertibrate can attain is about 50 lbs: Pteranodon and its slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were therefore thought to be the largest flying animals." Sound familiar? Desmond goes on to state that the Texas pterosaur finds were obviously much larger than that without offering any real guess as to a solution to the enigma thus posed, much less to the far worse enigma posed by the pteratorn. I repeat, there is only one solution to the problem of the giant flying animals, even as there is only one solution to the problem of the ultrasaur. These were all creatures of another world, even though that world existed on this planet. And one of the characteristics of that world was that the FELT EFFECT of gravity was far less than what we now experience.