3 ms·
> Wheels are far more efficient Wheels are far more efficient if you have a very specific type of terrain to deal with. It's not immediately obvious to me tha
by kbenson 7y ago
> Wheels are far more efficient
Wheels are far more efficient if you have a very specific type of terrain to deal with. It's not immediately obvious to me that a wheel is more efficient overall on naturally occurring terrain. For example, wheels don't work well on steep and rough terrain, or in water (as opposed to under water). The trade-off might be better stated as wheels are very efficient for very select terrain types, and that efficiency tapers off fairly sharply for some terrains, reaching 0% in some cases, while legs are less efficient overall, but achieve some level of usefulness on almost all terrains (making them a better choice for organisms that have disparate terrain types to deal with).
Similarly, a computer may be much faster in some types of operations, but we can't even get it to do some stuff that's fairly trivial for many animal brains, so that may also be a trade-off in efficiency somewhere (possibly in an area we don't sufficiently understand yet).
- perl4ever 7y agoPossibly walking recaptures energy that a simple wheel mechanism wouldn't? I vaguely think I read something about how humans are fairly efficient at recycling the energy produced as you stride and gravity pulls you down.
- Gibbon1 7y ago> fairly efficient at recycling the energy produced as you stride and gravity pulls you down Ever walk on dry loose sand at the beach? Plod plod plod.
- clairity 7y agoyes, tendons, ligaments and even muscles are used to recapture energy as animals locomote. about 30% for walking is what i seem to remember from my grad school days. ggreer above shows some real hubris and a deep ignorance of the ingeniousness of biological systems compared to human-created ones. a brain (and nervous system) is miraculous in its ability to gather, assess, store and discard ambiguous and contradictory information at astonishing rates.