From: news@fedfil.UUCP (news)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Kazmaier at 200,000 lbs vs the 200,000 lb sauropod
Date: 6 Oct 92 22:26:57 GMT
Organization: HTE


As creatures get larger, efficiency goes down.  Weight goes up in proportion
to volume, a cubed figure, strength goes up only in proportion to cross
section of bone and muscle in the various body parts, basically a squared
figure:  what is called the square-cube problem.

The ability to lift weights in the neighborhood of your own or larger
decreases.  Throop and the other nitpickers can use their own term for
this.

Two thirds power of body weight is an inverse function to the square-cube
operator, or whatever you want to call it.  It is the normal scaling factor
for all competitive lifting events.

Bwtween some point above your lightest athletes, say maybe 160 lbs or so, and
some point below your superheavyweights like Kazmaier, say 230 or so, most
of these athletes are of very similar build, scaling being the main 
difference between them (olympic lifters).  Therefore, 2/3 power of weight
serves very well as a means of determining an overall strongest man;  the
numbers for each event nearly line up when divided by 2/3 power of the 
athletes' weights.

This scaling indicates that at 200,000 lbs, Kazmaier, the strongest man
we know of in our age, would not be able to squat even half his weight;
he'd be pinned to the ground by our present gravitational system.

This comes as a simple algebra equation:  1350/350^(2/3) = x/200000^(2/3).
Just solve for x.

I posted this the other night and I'm hearing a whole lot of silence
on the subject.  It's unanswerable. Nor does figuring in total lifts
for legs/back (squat) + arms (benchpress), i.e. substituting 2000 lbs for
the 1350 (Kaz + bar) help.  That brings the 200,000 lb Kaz' lifting ability
up to around 140,000 lbs.  He's still pinned to the ground.

Which presents a problem;  we know that sauropods lived which weighed more
than 200,000.  McGowan and others give out a figure of 180 tons for the 
ultrasaur at 100', and we now know of at least two creatures which were
a great deal larger than that.  But let's limit ourselves to 200,000
sauropods and consider how they lived.

If Kaz couldn't get off the ground at 200,000, what might allow a sauropod
to?

Sue Bishop once called me an idiot for not realizing that animal muscle was
"stronger" than human muscle.  I posted the following quote in reply:


............... 
 
 
From Knutg Nielson, "Scaling, Why is Animal size So Important",
Cambridge Univ Press, 1984, page 163
 
It appears that the maximum force or stress that can be exerted by any
muscle is inherent in the structure of the muscle filaments.  The
maximum force is roughly 4 to 4 kgf/cm^2 cross section of muscle
(300/400 kN/m^2).  This force is body-size independant and is the same
for mouse and elephant muscle.  The reason for this uniformity is that
the dimensions of the thick and thin muscle filaments, and also the
number of cross-bridges between them are the same.  In fact the
structure of mouse muscle and elephant muscle is so similar that a
microscopist would have difficulty identifying them except for a larger
number of mitrochondria in the smaller animal.  This uniformity in
maximum force holds not only for higher vertibrates, but for many other
organisms, including at least some, but not all invertibrates.
 
............. 
 
which sort of settles that possibility.

Could the saur have been more muscular than Kaz?  the answer isn't no, 
it's HELL no.  Kaz is mostly muscle.  The vast bulk of the saur's weight
was the vast mechanism for digesting leaves and other low value food stuffs,
along with other wasted weight such as neck and tail.  A saur Kaz' size
would figure to be far less strong than Kaz.

Wayne Throop and others claim that the saurs derived far greater efficiency
than a human was due to the leverage of their larger joints or some
such mumbo jumbo.

Look at a picture of Kazmaier, or any other super heavy competitive power
lifter, and then look at a picture of a sauropod.  Kaz is built like a
barrel;  the saur was lean, svelte, and graceful by comparison.  Leverage,
to the extent that it favored anything, would favor Kaz.

I honestly cannot think of any other possibility, other than for one.

The felt effect of gravity in the age of dinosaurs was heavily attenuated
by gravitational pull from some other, very close,  cosmic body.


-- 
Ted Holden
HTE

Newsgroups: talk.origins