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
If he’s fully proportional, then he’s getting hit by the square-cube law, which means that volume of his body parts increases much faster than surface. It’s bad, because your needs are usually cubed, but your providing capability is only squared. That means that if you were suddenly 2x bigger, you’d weight 8x as much, but your muscle cross-section would only be 4x as big, so now you’re only relatively half as strong as you used to be. Same thing with body heat – you are 8x bigger, but you give off heat through the surface of your skin, which is only 4x bigger, so the disproportion strikes once again.
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