If there were no flying life forms would humans have taken much longer to discover flight?

Haha, great question! If not for birds or flying insects I don’t know of we would have ever come up with the concept of flying. I think it might be impossible to answer with any certainty but hypothetically it is an intriguing question to ponder.
Would we still be able to fly in our dreams if we never witnessed a flying creature?

This is really interesting, I shall stay tuned.

The thought that comes to mind is in a world with no flying creatures, how does a man consider the movement of a leaf in the wind? How to perceive the movement of smoke in the breeze? And would that be the impetus to see if things thrown through the air would move differently based on design?

The bird paradigm sure took a long time for man to mimic, men have pondrred winged flight for millennia.

Only standard leaves are allowed no helicopter wings!

I think rock throwing would have started the design.

What about the boomerang? That is an early man made wing, isn’t it?

This is a damned good question, for which I cannot think of a good answer.

Boomerang gets honorable mention, but there are birds down under to spark the maiden flight ideas.

Have you ever flown one? it’s a skill.

The fact that lighter than air balloons preceded airplanes tells me that the example of flying creatures plays a much smaller role in our progress with flight than we prefer to believe. Even with those creatures soaring in front of us through 10,000 years, we arrived very late to an understanding of how it is they are able to pull it off. The sophisticated subtleties of a bird’s wing required considerable advancement in scientifific understanding to arrive at the Bernoulli effect.

If they got as far as fletched arrows without winged animals, that would mean they had discovered aerodynamics some other way. It would only be a matter of time before they would develop human flight..

It most certainly would have happened and probably in about the same timeframe. I don’t see any animals in orbit yet we are there now.

And don’t forget the power of the combustion engine to reach the forward thrust needed. That needed to happen but wasn’t reliant on seeing birds fly. And helicopters are rather unbirdlike.

It might have taken longer, but I still think it would have happened. People may have first thought of ways of jumping longer distances and then stumbled on the ideas of aerodynamics.

I think it might have actually happened sooner! Things did not end well for the poor shlubs who tried to mimic bird flight. They went down the wrong rabbit hole for centuries before figuring it out. See Ornithopter
Had they started with a clean sheet of paper they might have come up with a workable solution quicker.

maybe, maybe not.
You have not seen any spaceborne life forms, yet you still wanted to go to space.

Initially I too thought the primary obstacle to a successful flying machine was the lack of an efficient engine, until I realized that no gliders had been invented. The missing gliders convince me that the real hitch in flight development was in not understanding the critical shape of a wing.

Love this question.

Well. I mean the Write brothers also used a plant that could be wound up and would fly kind of like a helicopter. AND hot air balloons might still have been invented….

I’m going to think about this for a while.

Maybe observing fish, and then adapting the principle to wind and air.

If there aren’t any birds, how are you going to fletch an arrow?

^Dinosaurs had feathers. Maybe their ancestors would still be around, but not capable of flight. In this hypothetical world….

George Cayley invented the glider in 1804 and invented the cambered wing. The godfather of aeronautical engineering. If you read his biography we might get an idea of what inspired his discovery for real.

Probably not, as stated already there are a bunch of things people have created that were not based on anything other life forms have done or can do. Even king fu has a style based on the dragon, an animal which does not even exist.

@Berserker Ok, but dragons were based on faulty observations of existing creatures.

@YARNLADY
Naw, dragons where hybrid creatures created by extraterrestrials. #ancientaliens

This is really interesting. Part of me is doubtful, thinking perhaps everything we have is, however creative, some manipulated derivative of the known world. But then part of me wonders if we may very well have anyway, no matter a living example.

Dragons help me to articulate the half of me that thinks we may well have anyway—these fantastic beasts that breathe fire—the dragon-lore is based on fossils of dinosaurs (very much inanimate and undemonstrative,) and there is no other creature we have ever observed that does anything close to breathing fire (at least I don’t think there is…). Even if it was inspired abstractly by something—the heat on our own breaths, or some visual trick of a leaping flame at night that looked like a puff of breath—it required some more obvious novelty on our part, I think? So maybe we would have been able to imagine flight from some similarly abstract inspiration. But it’s hard for me to think of a world in which humans don’t imagine flying, so I think I’m leaning in that direction.

At the very least, I imagine issues regarding falling would have lead to some form of parachute, and with it a growing understanding of aerodynamics—so, perhaps, to the idea of steering the fall—and then, perhaps, to trying to lengthen the fall or keep a person airborne? Not sure, but seems like that could potentially be a natural progression with or without examples of flight surrounding us.

Of course, if we live in a world where there are not flying life forms, I would wonder if that has something to do with the difficulty of flight on that world (our world has an abundance of flying life forms!)—in which case, it might be much harder.

@YARNLADY By the Chinese as they were developing their marial arts, you mean?

I think the question of whether or not man would have thought of flight as an opition is, were there no flying animals, is a good one. Suppose man had dreamed of flight—with no flying animals, how long would it have taken and upon what basis would anyone have come up with the idea of wings. Hot air balloons, maybe. Winged craft I find doubtful. Even with inspiration to find a way to fly, it was a very long time until heavier-that-air machines were even attempted. There’s the additional problem of recognizing the value of an idea and actually implementing it. Leonardo da Vinci dreamed up flying machines. But his initial idea was an ornithopter, which is an attempt to imitate birds—no birds in this hypothetical. He later developed an idea for a machine vaguely reminiscent of a helicopter, but his design was impractical. Even in a world with flying animals, that was the late 15th century—more than 400 years before anything practical was developed.

Additionally, we did get to space. No other animals leave the planet.

We dreamed that one up with no inspiration.