Would humans have developed flight without flying creatures for inspiration?

Look at the communication field. we took what was a conversation between two people in the same room and made it something that can be done without speaking a single word. Like another person already stated I doubt that it would of happened so soon with out flying creatures. I am sure that seeing things blowing in the wind would have inspired it eventually

I am pretty positive that if it wasn't for flying creatures then humans would not have invented methods of flight. Sometimes we don't realize it and just take these things for granted, but almost all inventions are based off of the ideas found in creation all around us (animals, plants, etc.) Even if one was to come up with the idea to fly, I would bet that what would be created would not be nearly as effective as what we have with the aid of inspiration.

Remarkably good question. And a tough one to speculate on in one day. I think it's our general nature to come up with better ways of just living that drives us to invent the things we have striven to this far, technologically, despite the inspiration from our surroundings (Nature) from which we draw design toward those solutions. If Tuna were the inspiration for travel beyond use of a wheel, I suppose we may have International Seaports and a lot of drownings before safety kicked in. As for inspiration drawn from what we see, it's hard to tell if flying would be part of our lifestyle had we no visible inspiration toward it. Even our dreams are influenced by our surroundings to a great extent, so it would be difficult to speculate imagination from the inside devising flying. But then the mind is a deep deep place we know so little about still, and imagination is such and endless space we likely will never fully understand it. Look what Roddenberry thought up with Star Trek. If birds and clouds didn't do it for him, where did the inspiration for "beaming people up" come from? There is nothing in our natural or man-made surroundings from which to draw that bit of interest, yet people in Switzerland are working on the reality of it right now.

Hi!

What a fun question!

Most definitely we would have wanted to fly even if we had never seen flying animals.

We invented (or experienced intuitively) God without seeing Him, unless you believe that Adam and Eve or someone else had seen an embodied God or at least spoke to Him.

We invented computers and the internet without a guide although, yes, the knowledge was a stepping-stone process. We invented radio to catch frequencies of waves. We imagined electricity from lightening, but that's something of a leap. We invented Time, Math, and hosts of other things without the inspiration coming from other creatures (maybe - there are theories that say many animals can count to 0, 1, 2, and "many" - maybe early man watched counting mammoths before they learned themselves :) ... )

We want to fly for the same reason the Chinese and Japanese invented kites. The kite in Chinese and Japanese myth is a symbol for both the desire of freedom (as seen through the flying in the sky) and the security of a tether (the string held firmly).

http://www.kiteman.co.uk/JAPANESE%20HISTORY4.html - History

http://subvision.net/sky/planetkite/asia/cambodia/... - Cambodian symbol of freedom and security

Our human heart desires to soar. Our endorphins, if I want to make a more scientific argument, makes us feel as if we could fly - as if we are flying in our minds. It is natural for us to want to soar the skies, plummet the oceans, and explore what once was considered a flat land mass until we did not fall off the face of the earth. Although, if you read "Julie of the Wolves" by Jean Craighead George, there is some trivia in the story that says that the indigenous people of Alaska always knew that the earth was round by observing the curve of the horizon from their perspective....

Thanks for asking this fun question!

2 possibilities.

1. Yes, becuase eventually people might think, "There must be a way to get somewhere fatser!"

2. No, because the first airplane was made because people wanted to fly like birds. They tried to figure out how birds could fly, and how to copy them. Originally people didn't know they could get places much faster using airplanes, they just thought it would be interesting to fly like birds. Soon though, as more cars were invented and as people got smarter and more advanced I'm sure something like it would be invented. I mean where do you think a rocket ship came from? Not copying a bird. that's for sure!

Awesome question! I don't think we would have been inspired to fly without flying creatures. Then again look how computers have evolved and there was nothing in the environment other than our brains to stimulate the prototype of a computer.

I would say yes; although, the inspiration for flight in the airplane sense does come from avian observation. The hot air balloon and kites, not technically flight, was not inspired by birds. If I knew my history better, I could tell you which was was invented first, but I do remember the inspiration for the hot air balloon.

I would speculate that, eventually given motorized vehicles, that humans would have figured this out eventually, but it may have taken longer for us to have airplanes in the air. The engineering would have been developed eventually, but a delay in time might have happened.

I think humans would have developed flight faster without flying animals. First of all, some of our earliest technology involved transporting objects (stones and arrows) through the air. Clearly our ancestors developed some concept of the utility in air travel independent of birds. As they worked to develop a technology that would allow their arrows to go farther, they began discovery of the basic mechanics of flight. The attempted imitation of avian flight in early aeronautics proved to be a distraction from the actual science behind the concept. Once the Wright brothers got down to the science of creating lift through Bernoulli's principle things really took off.

Man's desire to break earthly binds would be achieved without the quick glide of the sparrow or the effortless travel of the albatross. The transition from balloon flight to fixed winged aircraft is evolutionary..and in the absence of avia we still have to deal with flying squirrels, flying fish, lepidoptera....

Without a doubt, we would have pushed the limits even without inspiration.

We now are imagining theories that we cannot prove but can only imagine.

Like quantam computing, and a single theory to bind all laws of physics together. This is just with mans ingenuity.

The creative powers we were giving borders on a miracle.