There was a post in absoluteunits of a giant basketball player (Hamad Fathy) who is 7’5” and alot of people were commenting about the likely sad state of his knees and back.
My question is if he is fully proportional and athletic with no extra weight damaging his joints, are the forces of gravity enough to do more damage to him just because of his exceptional size?
What else could slowly wear away at someone that large’s body?
In: Biology
It’s called the square-cube law. Area scales by the square of width/height, but volume scales by the cube of width/height.
Let’s say you take a person and double their heigh while keeping their proportions the same. That person’s muscles and bones will be four times as strong, because by doubling their height you’ll be multiplying the cross-sectional area of their muscles and bones by four.
But the problem is that they’ll be eight times as heavy, because their weight is based on their volume. So you’ve got eight times as much weight on joints, bones, and muscles that are only four times as strong.
This doesn’t just affect people- it’s a basic engineering principle. It’s why you can build a hut with some sticks, but you need steel beams to build a skyscraper. Both mechanical devices and biological bodies face problems when you try to scale them up/down.
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