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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

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

Why? Planes also have rapidly spinning blades, but the actual risk from getting hurt by the blades is probably two full orders of magnitude lower than the risk from the whole thing crashing into something at speed, which is an inherent risk when you have massive objects moving quickly, regardless of mechanism.

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.

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

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

hummingbirds would seem to be the exception tho