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So, President Obama went onto Reddit yesterday (yesterday? I dunno -- I lose track of these things) in order to do an Ask Me Anything thread.
But he ducked some of the tough questions thrown at him. One of the questions he ducked was the vitally important one, "Which would you rather fight: a hundred duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck?"
Now, since that time, I've been thinking about that question myself, and I feel that you just need to be a lot clearer about the parameters in order to give a reasonable answer.
First: how is the scaling up/scaling down done? By weight? A duck is about 3.5 pounds, so, by weight, you'd be fighting about 350 pounds of horses. While a horse is 1000 to 1500 pounds, so you could be fighting a half ton, three quarter ton of duck.
On the other hand, if you're just scaling up in all dimensions, then the square-cube ratio works in your favor, and that duck, with its hollow bones, is just going to collapse under its own weight.
Or are you talking about Bullockornis or Dromornis stirtoni as the horse-sized duck -- the Australian 8-foot-tall carnivorous ducks, which weighed a quarter ton?
Eohippus was approximately the size of a large duck. Dromornis stirtoni was approximately the weight of a pony.
One hundred shy, tiny herbivores who had about the same ecological niche as a bunny and whose reaction to a human would have to be to run and hide, or one carnivorous top predator with a bite that could snap coconuts in half, run at thirty miles an hour, and was three times your weight and half again your height and reach?
So, clearly, the answer is obvious -- but depends on what the question means. I'd much rather fight 100 eohippuses than a dromornis stirtoni, but, if we're talking about scaling a normal mallard up to the size of a quarter horse, well, I wouldn't be fighting it -- I'd be doing a mercy killing to put it out of its misery as its own bones crushed under its own weight.
But he ducked some of the tough questions thrown at him. One of the questions he ducked was the vitally important one, "Which would you rather fight: a hundred duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck?"
Now, since that time, I've been thinking about that question myself, and I feel that you just need to be a lot clearer about the parameters in order to give a reasonable answer.
First: how is the scaling up/scaling down done? By weight? A duck is about 3.5 pounds, so, by weight, you'd be fighting about 350 pounds of horses. While a horse is 1000 to 1500 pounds, so you could be fighting a half ton, three quarter ton of duck.
On the other hand, if you're just scaling up in all dimensions, then the square-cube ratio works in your favor, and that duck, with its hollow bones, is just going to collapse under its own weight.
Or are you talking about Bullockornis or Dromornis stirtoni as the horse-sized duck -- the Australian 8-foot-tall carnivorous ducks, which weighed a quarter ton?
Eohippus was approximately the size of a large duck. Dromornis stirtoni was approximately the weight of a pony.
One hundred shy, tiny herbivores who had about the same ecological niche as a bunny and whose reaction to a human would have to be to run and hide, or one carnivorous top predator with a bite that could snap coconuts in half, run at thirty miles an hour, and was three times your weight and half again your height and reach?
So, clearly, the answer is obvious -- but depends on what the question means. I'd much rather fight 100 eohippuses than a dromornis stirtoni, but, if we're talking about scaling a normal mallard up to the size of a quarter horse, well, I wouldn't be fighting it -- I'd be doing a mercy killing to put it out of its misery as its own bones crushed under its own weight.