What If Humans Could Fly? | Unveiled

What If Humans Could Fly?

The ability to fly is common throughout the animal kingdom. The majority of birds and insects can, and there are fish, reptiles, and mammals that can fly, or at least glide, as well. But for a number of reasons, it isn’t a gift which stretches to humans, who have long been firmly grounded on Earth. But that could soon change…

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if humans could fly?

In the early twentieth century, after hundreds of years of trying, humans finally achieved flight when the airplane was invented. But the plane has never truly been able to offer the same level of freedom to humans as wings do to birds. Learning to fly a plane is costly, and actually buying one is even more so… commercial flights are pricey too, and they come with tight rules and regulations, as well as rigid timetables and flightpaths. And, even if you are lucky enough to own your own plane, you’re still limited by how much fuel you can carry and what the weather’s like. As exciting and generally crucial to the modern world as airplanes are, then, in a perfect world there’s surely a better way to fly than this?

One of the earliest stories of human flight comes from the Ancient Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus, where Daedalus builds artificial wings and uses them to escape King Minos. The myth’s tragic ending wasn’t because the wings didn’t work, but because the wax in them melted when Icarus famously flew too close to the sun. Thousands of years since the story was first told, however, and we still haven’t managed to build real-world artificial wings capable of lifting a human. If, in prehistoric times, enormous dinosaurs like the quetzalcoatlus – which was the size of a giraffe – could get off the ground, then why can’t we?

The simple answer is because we’re too weak. Far too weak. Birds and insects specifically evolved to fly have incredibly powerful muscles for the task. The humble hummingbird, for example, may be tiny but it can flap its wings as many as eighty times per second in order to hover. You could strap wings to any human being in history, but we’d never, ever match that. Our arms simply aren’t powerful enough for lift off. There’s a little more reason for hope with our legs, though… which is why bicycle-powered flying machines are often seen in science fiction. The Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Challenge - wherein participants have to build a human-powered machine which can fly for at least sixty seconds - was first launched back in 1980… but it wasn’t until 2013 that the AeroVelo Atlas - a vast, winged, pedal-powered apparatus - finally won the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize. The Atlas’ huge size, however, means that it won’t be mass-produced anytime soon. If humans ever want to fly en masse, then, we’ll need something more than just our standard biology, even when it is aided by ingenious inventions.

So, we’re now talking superheroes. Would we ever be able to invent or develop a means for us to fly like Superman, for example? Well, probably not. A fun fact is that even Superman wasn’t meant to fly, originally. His original power was just leaping - being able to jump really, really far - and it was only changed to flight to make it easier for the artists to draw him. In later versions of the DC canon, the explanation for the Man of Steel’s flight is maybe even stranger… where it’s said that Krypton’s powerful gravity means that Kryptonians have natural anti-gravity abilities everywhere else, which enable them to fly on Earth. So, on Superman logic, one way humans could all fly is if we ever developed working anti-gravity… but we’re currently a million miles away from doing that, unfortunately.

Still, not all superheroes are off limits for us. Marvel’s Iron Man generally flies using ion thrusters powered by his arc reactor - and there is hope for the future when it comes to this type of technology. While the exact tech as seen on Tony Stark doesn’t exist yet, there have been various attempts to recreate it - some more successful than others - including an effort by Adam Savage from “Mythbusters”, using small jet engines mounted onto a titanium suit.

This approach essentially amounts to a jetpack, with jetpacks long having been symbolic of what the near future might look like - along with hoverboards and flying cars. And we do actually already have working jetpacks… we have done for years, they just come with a whole host of issues. One of the biggest being that they generally work by strapping either a rocket or a jet engine to a person’s body… which both uses a ton of fuel, and comes with all sorts of safety concerns. In a world where jetpacks were common, though, there’d also be the problem of jetpack laws determining who can fly them, where they can fly them, when and how fast. Everyone would need jetpack lessons to obtain a jetpack licence, and there would be a dedicated arm of the police force to enforce the rules. And yet, although we’re still a long way away from all of that actually happening, we’re much closer to everyday jetpacks than we are to ever being able to actually fly.

Which… is a shame. Because if we could just naturally develop wings or introduce them to the human body like some kind of extreme body modification, then we’d sidestep a lot of the problems that jetpacks bring with them. In this world, flying would be no more or less obstructive or dangerous than walking is now. It wouldn’t require fuel, it wouldn’t need a license, it would just be the norm… with people only colliding into each other mid-air whenever they got distracted. If humans were born with wings, then they’d have to learn to fly in much the same way as we have to learn to walk… but, after that, the mishaps should be at a minimum. Travel in general would certainly be a lot easier for the individual… as we’d no longer be limited to just roads, bridges and airports, but could move freely anywhere we like. For the authorities, however, human flight would make monitoring and regulating travel close to impossible and would turn borders obsolete. Not only would we have a birds-eye view of the planet, then, but it would be an open world, too.

More specifically, we’d see flight incorporated into sport, with the fastest flyer being the this-world-equivalent to Usain Bolt. We’d also see it impact the fashion and clothing industries, with products specifically designed for wings. Perhaps we’d even see the advent of treetop businesses - like bars, shops, restaurants and cinemas - now that everyone could access them easily. At the very least, we’d see purpose-built platforms on high-rise buildings, to provide places to rest. And inside those high-rise buildings, we wouldn’t need stairs or elevators anymore! There would, of course, still be some limits to where we could go, with it being impossible to fly too high without struggling to breathe and experiencing airborne altitude sickness. And we’d still need some sort of flight police to make sure that individual fliers never cross-paths with a jumbo jet - if jumbo jets even still exist in this world. It’s a good bet that they would, though… after all, humans can swim but we still need boats to travel any distance of length.

Finally, though, we might be giving up that ability to swim in this new world. Many biologists believe that humans, as we are, originally evolved from creatures that crawled out of the sea. But it’s long been speculated that there’s a trade-off in the natural world between swimming and flying, one that’s best exemplified by penguins - which can’t fly but use the same muscles and techniques as other birds to be expert swimmers. In a world where the skies were our own, then, would the waters become inaccessible? Would we lack the lung capacity or buoyancy to swim? Or perhaps our wings would simply get in the way? Maybe, in this alternate reality, we’ll have developed a quarter million dollar prize for the first person who could create a human-powered submersible, so we could once again see how the other half lives. And that’s what would happen if humans could fly.