Name: How Big Can a Person Get?
Uploaded: 2016-09-15T19:48:07.000Z
Duration: 15 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

years ago. Better nutrition and medical care

early in life has allowed us to better take advantage of the blueprints

within our genes. Blueprints that carry plans for just how

an optimal environment. In terms of height, those plans

But individuals with endocrine disorders, for instance a tumour,

near the pituitary gland in the brain can experience growth that occurs more

than usual. For instance, Igor Vovkovinskiy,

who at 7 foot 8 inches is the tallest man currently living

in America. The tallest living person anywhere on Earth

is Sultan Kösen, who at 8 foot 3 inches tall

also holds the Guinness world record for largest hands

ever officially recorded was Robert Wadlow.

He was the size of an average adult male when he entered

kindergarten at the age of 5. When he died

Here's Andre doing the same. Human size variation

is fascinating, but what's the maximum, biologically

how big can a human get? And more importantly,

limit. By manipulating the very genes responsible for height,

we may be able to add an extra 15 centimeters or so to that

average, but beyond that we are likely to hit

As a shape grows, say, taller, its volume increases at a greater rate.

Take a look at this cube. If we make it 10 times larger,

well, sure, it's 10 times as tall, but the area covered by its faces

the space within it, is 1000 times larger.

Now, since weight is connected to volume, this cube

only has one hundred times the cross-sectional area to support itself,

but one thousand times the weight to support.

and still shaped like a person, that is your proportions were the same as they

you would need to either have a skeleton made out of something stronger than bone

or bones that were monstrously thick, like way out of proportion.

But even if you solved the bone and muscle strength problem,

there would still be a whole host of other issues. For instance, your heart

wouldn't scale up fast enough to keep blood pumping throughout a body

because their proportions and organs are quite different.

Chris Howard from Earth Unplugged  tipped me off to the

of the largest land animal ever known to have existed with

Discovered in Tanzania and now mounted in Berlin's Humboldt museum

it probably weighed 20 to 30 thousand kilograms.

The Bruhathkayosaurus may have been even larger,

but this is controversial because we only have a few of its bones.

and in order to survive long enough to reproduce,

an animal would need more buoyancy to counteract its weight

than air can provide. This is one of the reasons

The heaviest blue whale ever measured by NMML

making it the heaviest animal we are aware of

that has ever existed. It might be the heaviest

possible, because animal size is limited by simple geometry

Theoretically, humans born on Mars could grow a few inches taller,

because gravity there is only one third of what it is on earth.

The trade off of course being that their bones and muscles wouldn't grow strong

enjoy it. The point is, in order to have the same shape and proportions that we

Some of the higher estimates of the upper limit up

average human height are around 7 feet tall.

A person who is more than 9 feet tall would struggle to move around.

aAd up in the 12- to 15-foot range, it would be

and end? So far we have been measuring people using

their rigid boundaries. It's a good one to use,

it's very common, but of course, when I speak

I can fill an entire room and when I shout

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How Big Can a Person Get?

individual

average

person

field