• Question: is it possible to fly

    Asked by crazysausage to Emma, Jen, Joseph, Michael, Mona on 22 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by submarine3.
    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      It depends on what you mean by this. Humans fly all the time in planes and I think you can get jetpacks but they’re super expensive. If you’re asking whether humans will ever be able to fly without anything external helping them then I guess it’s possible but unlikely that we could eventually evolve to have wings or something but I have no idea!

    • Photo: Emma Bennett

      Emma Bennett answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Well without something to keep you in the air I’ve never known a person to actually fly – we seem to fall with style instead.

      Check out wingsuit flying because it looks totally awesome, people wear a jumpsuit with fabric between the arms and legs and this increases their surface area so they can glide through the air. This is probably the closest we have got to flying unaided just yet.

    • Photo: Michael Taggart

      Michael Taggart answered on 22 Jun 2011:

      As the others have said, in a machine or with some instrumental help (hand gliders for example) then yes. But not not unaided, so don’t try it at home! YOu can, however, let your imagination fly and that is sometimes useful in science….

Comments

  • Photo: submarine3

    submarine3 commented on :

    Hi crazy sausage I really like your questiion- Jen could someone fly with some kind of electrics or machinary excluding a jet pack or plane?

  • Photo: Jen

    Jen commented on :

    Oooh well I guess we’re excluding sticking rockets to our backs as well because that probably wouldn’t end well! I was thinking about this last night and thought maybe we could use powerful magnets to levitate ourselves off the ground but I don’t know if we could then move around. One of the professors here at the University of Manchester called Andre Gein who won the physics Nobel Prize this year has also won an Ig Nobel Prize (http://improbable.com/ig/) for levitating frogs using magnets! You can read more about levitating frogs here http://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation/diamagnetic/

    There must be other ways to do this, anybody else got a suggestion?