For example, why can you slap a fly mid-air and it’ll probably survive just fine, but if you scaled the same amount of force to the size of a human’s size/weight, they’d probably die?
In: 14
It’s a thing called the square cube law.
Imagine a cube of water 1cm by 1cm by 1cm. If it’s resting on the ground, it has an area of 1cm^2 to rest on, and it has a volume of 1cm^(3).
If you take that same cube and scale it up in all directions so that it is 10x10x10cm, then it will have an area of 100cm^2 but a volume of 1000cm^(3). There is 10x as much volume for the given surface area.
Another way of thinking of this is that in a 1cm^2 area, there is now a 10cm column of water instead of a 1cm column.
How does this apply to insects? All sorts of ways. So many things dealing with motion and force transfer and so many other things care about both the surface area and the mass, and the ratio of mass to surface area is wildly different at that scale, meaning our preconceptions based on what happens at our scale are completely wrong.
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