If a man would've been a flying bird, what size of wings would a 70 kg male have?

Answer 1

This is a complicated answer. First, we need to add flight muscles, support structures, and other associated physiology to help the wings work. We also need to increase the size of the chest, the lungs, and the heart to power the new structures. Now our human is bigger so we also need to include that mass in our calculations. We'll also need to estimate the mass of the wings to include in our calculations.

In birds, flight muscles can be more than a third of their body weight. Let's round the total added anatomy to 40% of the body weight. So our human is now 70 + 0.4*70 = 98kg. Wing size in birds is complicated, because different shapes for different flight patterns also contribute to wing size. But for example, an albatross has a wingspan of 3.7m for a body size of 12kg. If we extrapolate out based on birds, we are at a wing size of 12.5m. Considering our human is probably average height (let's be generous and say 2m), these are huge wings! And we haven't even considered the fact that the wing/mass ratio we're using is for birds, not humans, and we haven't added the wing weight yet. Woah. Good luck folding those to get in your house, buddy!