Future Tech – Kingfisher

August 4, 2022

2 min read

Any Calgarian who has walked through the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary might have seen the beautiful Belted Kingfisher. You can identify them by their powder blue head and shaggy crest, but more specifically they have a distinct beak which is long, straight, thick, and pointed. This beak is what makes this bird an amazing hunter of fish, creating minimal splash when it plunges beak first from the air into water, capturing its prey.

Can you believe that an engineer took notice of the humble Kingfisher to solve a problem with the bullet train design?

That’s right, I said bullet train! In Japan, these bullet trains travel more than 300 kilometres per hour, but a problem arises every time these trains exit tunnels. The transition from low to high air resistance causes a sonic boom to form, which greatly disturbs local residents multiple times a day. The insightful Japanese engineer observed that this is exactly what the Kingfisher does multiple times a day, when it plunges from air (low resistance) to water (high resistance) to hunt fish, but it creates minimal splash.

So, the engineers gave the bullet train a beak as well, following the shape of a Kingfisher. And guess what? It worked! It not only reduced the amount of noise the train made but also reduced the amount of electricity the train needed by 15 percent and made the train 10 percent faster!

I think that every evolutionist would agree with me that a bullet train cannot be created by chance; it takes a team of engineers. In the same way, I believe an extremely good designer also made the Kingfisher; it did not evolve by chance. Even the engineers of the Shinkansen bullet train must agree with Romans 1:20, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities– His eternal power and divine nature– have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (NIV)

So, they are without excuse.