According to a small team of physicists from the University of Zagreb in Croatia, we really wouldn't want to be setting our sights on planets with a mass that's any greater than four times that of our Earth's. And that's after no small amount of training.
The scientists arrived at this critical figure after taking into account the compressibility of human bones, the flexion of our muscles, and the swinging nature of our legs as we stride across a planet's surface. Our bones are impressive structures as far as engineering goes. In fact, our tibia could handle something like 90 times Earth's gravity (g) before splintering.
That's an insane amount of force, but things change if we try to take a step on such a supersized world. Dynamic stresses and twisting effects would make short work of our skeleton, lowering the actual limit to something closer to 10 g.
That is until you take into account the fact we'd need to move. Crunching the numbers on the power of human muscle, the researchers determined with rigorous training we just might be able to push against gravity that's no more than around 5 g.
https://www.sciencealert.com/limits-gravity-human-body-endurance-exoplanets
Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Whose cloud is it anyway ?
I really don't understand the most militant climate activists who are also opposed to geoengineering . Or rather, I think I understand t...
-
"To claim that you are being discriminated against because you have lost your right to discriminate against others shows a gross lack o...
-
For all that I know the Universe is under no obligation to make intuitive sense, I still don't like quantum mechanics. Just because some...
-
Hmmm. [The comments below include a prime example of someone claiming they're interested in truth but just want higher standard, where...
I would not have any problems that would have a planet with reduced gravity in the morning (let's say 0.3g) to make getting up easier ;-).
ReplyDelete