h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What would chairs look like?

And what would humans look like when we walked, if it was indeed possible?

Simple analogies please. I've been pondering this one for some time, but I still can't quite visualise it...

Presumably chairs would be like a stool - with spaces for our legs to go down the sides. Imagine a dog sat down.

And, doubtless, we would walk on all fours.

B

<>

MB, I'm struggling to understand your understanding of my silly question.

Surely if I was sitting on a stool and my legs were pointing skywards, I wouldn't need any spaces for my legs to go down the sides?

Agreed about all fours, but then I'd not really considered that aspect. I was more thinking that I'd still be using my arms to operate my mobile phone, machinery, drink a pint etc. My thinking is that the legs would still need to provide exclusive walking equipment whilst bending the wrong way at the knees.

What appears to be a dog's knee is actually their ankle; hence the reason it appears backwards. On a dog's hind legs, their knee is actually the joint above that one, and is facing the same way a human's does.

Can I invite you all to feel the inside of your thighs...

Enjoying it?

Now flex your leg at the knee - feel that quad tighten. If your knees bent the other way, it wouldn't do that.

Know how it's really quite painful to do the splits? If your knee bent the other way, that problem would be removed, so you'd be quite happy to drape your legs down the side of chairs. In fact, having your legs neatly together in front of you would be quite painful, so you'd better make sure you've got a dining table, as well.

B

Traveller in Time on a perch (also with extended ankles)
"Chairs would be closer to the ground, the 'middle' (lower) leg could fit under the seat so the ankle is still nearly flat. "

if my legs bent the other way I'd have a front bum.

I might still be drunk, but that makes me giggle...

I now have the picture of a human torso on flamingo legs stuck in my head--and I can't get the figure to sit in a chair. Closest I can get is a squat, which would take some hefty thigh muscles...

Not sure I understand the question...

On the one hand, having a main leg joint hinge oppositely makes me think ostrich or velociraptor, so some sort of stool arrangement would make sense.

Then again, are those not cases of what is basically the ankle joint being that far up the leg, much like the aforementioned dog?

Ultimately I think you can't tinker with something as fundamental as a knee joint direction without affecting practically everything else about how the biomechanics of the rest of the system works - bend the knees the other way and we start looking more balanced with our torsos carried more horizontally and needing a tail, or similar.

It's a bit like saying what if a car had only three wheels? You can't just take one wheel off a four wheeled car and leave everything else the same, you have to mess with the whole steering geometry to get a Reliant Robin, or, preferably, a Grinnall Scorpion.

SoRB

To avoid damage to us blokes' "equipment", we'd have to rest on our lower stomachs, with the pelvis and legs hanging out the back, I would have thought.
As has been said, it really does need a complete re-engineering of the entire motive apparatus if it's going to work. Having said that, we can see that it works in some animals so it wouldn't be completely impractical.