[bobbyprograms]

Birds safely do VTOL. Humans still haven’t figured that out yet (helicopters are so dangerous).

I think that it is necessary we try all things because LLMs as we know them take too much energy.

[falcor84]

Just regarding VTOL, we absolutely have figured out how to do it with quadcopter drones safely handling weights comparable to the largest birds, and it seems to me that scaling these up to carry humans will be relatively straightforward [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_drone

[bobbyprograms]

As long as you have rapidly spinning BLADES it’s not safe

[moffkalast]

We can absolutely do VTOL reliably at bird scale, look at acrobatic RC planes and quad drones. Even the smallest helicopters are massive and the square cube rule will always make that dangerous in this gravity. But also like, harrier, F-35, osprey, etc.

[toxik]

Uh, this is a strange thing to ask, but have you seen birds fly? It is most certainly not vertical take off (or landing.)

[deepanwadhwa]

It doesn't sound strange at all. Good question.

[fragmede]

hummingbirds would seem to be the exception tho