Do the Math

Bill McKibben, I’m with you 100%. Together we play (with light hearts where possible) at a game of cross continental jump rope, all connected by the cord of concern for the future that propels us through our daily lives. With each up and down motion, we send our tiny shockwaves through the US economy, waves which grow stronger as more of us grab hold of the rope. The divestment movement must gain traction now and build momentum of its own. It should be easy work. I look forward to doing my part.
Among other approaches, we must now also seek a successor to the automobile, difficult as that may be to imagine. Doing the math, I find that in 2004, the average weight of a car in the US was over 4,000 pounds. The world evidently has over 1 billion cars on it right now. Even with widespread implementation of wind, solar and geothermal energy production, the infrastructure and energy required to produce these cars and maintain their requisite roadways is a significant contributor to climate altering emissions. Ample evidence suggests that we are actively evolving the ability to fly as individuals in the efficient manner of birds. As technology continues to expand exponentially, so does our ability to mimic wild nature with engineered ‘symbionts’. FESTO has Smartbird now. Several distinct teams work at refining Paul MacCready’s approach to human powered flight and many others have provided portions of plans to create large-mass (100 kg) flapping fliers. Really all that is needed now is an investor with sufficient boldness and an abiding love of this green earth. While the car persists as a dominant mode of transit, it’s inherent inefficiency spells doom for us all. The birds, bats and insects we share this garden with, long ago evolved the ability to fly and to fly safely in a manner that mailed their genes through the millennia. We must solve this grand challenge, of personal, agile, and sustained flight for humans and soar headlong into an entirely different future.
John Bailey is the editor of Flapping Wings, the UK based newsletter dedicated to this proposition and a good person to talk with. While it may be safe to say that this proposal is well outside the norm of your day to day experience in the fight against rising CO2 levels, innovation is what we desperately need, and these many years spent outside watching the birds have revealed something about efficiency, something about how to run where the brave dare not go.

“Without this economizing property of wing beats, many feats performed by birds could not be rationally explained. This thorough utilization of the inertia of air by the beating movements of the wings is of the very greatest advantage to flying creatures.
It is an advantage inherent to the principle of birdflight, which we lose as soon as we depart from this principle – as, e.g. by employing rotating propellers, which under all circumstances consume more energy than the beating bird’s wing.”

Exerpted from Birdflight As The Basis Of Aviation

Compiled from the Results of Numerous Experiments made
By O. and G. Lilienthal

Butterflies change their distribution of mass in flight

Follow up to Feb. 26 post

UCLA researchers develop new technique to scale up production of graphene micro-supercapacitors
By Davin Malasarn February 19, 2013

NSF Research Assistantships for High School Students (RAHSS)

I wrote Professor Soon Jo Chung at UIUC last week to continue moving forward with our shared vision of engaging greater numbers of high school students in the hands-on work of designing and building larger mass bio-inspired flying robots. We will work collaboratively with students to develop this web site and build increasingly sophisticated machines with the assistance of the academic community and private industry. At its core, this work involves art as an intimate partner of science. Crafting these newly capable flying machines will require innovative manufacturing techniques. The wings themselves will form a new and constantly shifting canvas. I have long viewed this effort as a natural alignment of art and science. As such, any funding from sources invested in the arts will certainly be celebrated. Here is where interested students can click to learn more:

Bird’s Eye View Flight from BBC

Glide ratio of 4.5 achieved by Yves Rossy

Festo Masters Dragonfly Flight!

Cornell – Feathers and the Birds of Paradise

Marching forth

Just back from a ride on Clark’s old Bianchi around Sepulveda Basin and feeling pretty inspired from all the love coming my way this birthday.  Thank you everyone!  I’ve been enjoying taking pictures of shorebirds on our beaches this winter. The 70 gram Sanderling foraging at Pismo Beach (below) may be one among those of its’ kind that migrate from the high arctic all the way to southern Chile and back again in one year’s time. It’s little body may vary in mass from a low of 40 grams to a high of 110 grams depending on the time of year. An agile and efficient flier it is, with a brain that may shut-down nearly entirely for intervals during long flights, save for those ‘few’ neurons needed to maintain position and stay aloft. We can model this type of bird right now and create increasingly heavier robotic-mimics.

Sanderling