> for if his height be increased inordinately he will fall and be crushed under his own weight

> scaled-up wooden houses would not support their own roofs

Hmmm this argument fails to mention giraffes, elephants or dinosaurs. (Edit: ooops it does mention elephants and dinosaurs) But clearly, land animals with bones can be quite a bit larger than humans. Similarly the houses comment ignores that large multi-story wooden buildings that support their own roofs exist, and already existed in Galileo’s time.

There might be reasons today’s evolution of human anatomy can’t get any larger than 9 feet tall, but this argument about physics and bones and square vs cube growth rates is pretty unconvincing. The argument skips right past the idea of “giants” that are only 1.5x or 2x or 3x taller, rather than 10x or 100x taller. Sure animals cannot be “inordinately” bigger, but that does not explain why they can’t be twice as big.

Yea, we’ve scaled wooden buildings to 25 stories.

Arguments around bone scaling ignores the impact forces of running. Scaling often means trading margins not just keeping all constraints the same.

> dinosaurs

True for Scientific American today, not true for Galileo.

“Dinosaur” wasn’t a thing we started knowing about until the early 1800s. Benjamin Franklin died not knowing Dinosaurs were a thing.

But Galileo would have certainly known about elephants though.