- [Kyle] Could Ant-Man defeat Thanos by... Uh, flying into his butt? Dread it. Run from it. The memes still arrive all the same. And now, they are here. Or should I say, "Science is here." The Avengers have proven
they are willing to do whatever it takes to save the universe. So, could Ant-Man defeat
Thanos by flying into his butt? Yeah, we're doin' it. (exhales) You did this to me. Alright, so it's time to
ask the cheeky questions. There's been a meme going
around for months now that the easiest way to defeat
Thanos in Avengers: Endgame is for Ant-Man to fly
up into Thanos' butt, expand to Giant-Man
size, and then I guess, explode him from the inside out. The idea is gaining so much traction that people are actually
asking Paul Rudd about it, and surely he has more
promotional things to do. So in the grand tradition of this program, let's take this ridiculous
situation absolutely seriously and try to figure out
what would really happen in a battle between Scott
Lang and intes-Titan. (laughs)
C'mon, that was pretty good. First, obviously, having
someone or something enter your body and then
expand to human size or greater and explode you would be an absolutely horrible way to die. But Thanos does not have to explode for this Ant-Man move to kill him. If Ant-Man really entered Thanos' colon, I told you we were gonna take
this absolutely seriously, then all he would have to do is perforate the bowel tissue, or tear through it. Bowel perforation is an
extremely serious injury, and that's because many
different species of bacteria live inside your guts alongside of you, doing beneficial, sometimes harmful, and sometimes neutral things. But if they get out into your
surrounding body tissues, they can cause deadly infections. The mortality rate from
this kind of injury is somewhere between, according to the literature, 11 and 81%. So, if Ant-Man just
perforated the colon tissue, that might be enough to defeat Thanos. Our next question is, then, can Ant-Man get into angry Grimace's butt? This is an easy one. If Ant-Man can access with
his suit the so-called quantum realm, which is the universe on the very smallest scales, he should be able to easily
move between the spaces of, say, clothing fibers
on the millimeter scale, and even skin cells of organisms
on the micrometer scale. The Ant-Man suit has
allowed the user to pass in between the metal atoms
of a missile's casing, so I think Ant-Man could
surely get into that boo-- Alright, so now Ant-Man
is inside Thanos' butt. Now what? If we think about this
question more deeply because I guess we have
to now because internet, it can't be as simple as
Ant-Man just expanding and that's it for Thanos. And that's because when
Ant-Man is usually expanding he's only pressing outwardly
on the air around him, and we can do that right now, air isn't very heavy,
and so it doesn't provide much resistance to outward motion. This though, this is Titan colon. Surely, Titan colon from
an alien, superstrong, supervillain, ultimate-being
person must provide more resistive force to
the expansion of Ant-Man than air would. How strong, though, is purple butt? These, these are the
questions we must answer. Now, we have to
approximate just how strong Thanos' colon is and how
hard Ant-Man can push on it to complete this anal-ysis. What a quantum-mechanically-powered thief can do to a reality-wielding alien's butt is an extremely complicated question, but I think that we can still roughly approximate what's going on. Imagine that we have a section of the colon in question here that Ant-Man will be expanding in. What we really wanna know is what will the forces and the stresses be as Ant-Man expands in this colon tissue, and will that stress
overcome the so-called ultimate tensile strength of this tissue? We are doing very important
butt science here, so of course, as you
know, we will be using the Young-Laplace equation for estimating the hoop stress created by the pressure in a cylindrical pressure
vessel with thin walls, with the colon being the pressure vessel and Ant-Man supplying the pressure. (laughs) Duh. If you look at the equation, the tensile forces involve
what we're looking for on the colon tissue will be
dependent on the pressure that we have to find for Ant-Man, what he's pressing on with, the radius of the colon and the thickness of the colon's walls. We will get back to this equation once we have all the numbers that we need to compare to the
ultimate tensile strength of colon tissue. One interesting thing
to note while we're here is that according to these equations, it is much easier to inflate
a section that is spherical than it is to inflate a
section that is cylindrical, which is why (blows) it's much
harder to inflate a balloon at the beginning and it
gets easier as it gets, ya know, bigger.
(squeaks balloon) If the tension created in
the walls of Thanos' colon by Ant-Man's expansion exceed
the ultimate tensile strength of colon tissue, then obviously
the colon will rupture and this Ant-Man move
will work as per the meme. According to actual scientific studies on the strength of human colon tissue, yep, we found that study, human colon tissue and it's
ultimate tensile strength sits somewhere between the
ultimate tensile strengths of human muscle and human
skin, at .9 megapascals, or .9 million newtons per square meter, to rupture this colon material. Now what's important for
us is that .9 megapascals isn't all that much in the scheme of ultimate tensile strengths. For example, a balloon has mor-- (balloon deflates) A balloon's rubber has more. Okay, so now we have an equation to calculate the stress
in up past Thanos'... Th-anus, and we have the
ultimate tensile strength of human colon material,
which we can compare to Titan colon material. Now though, we butt up
against our biggest problem. How much pressure does Ant-Man push on the surrounding material
with when he enlarges? Is it so much that he forces
material out of the way, or is it not enough so he just conforms to the surrounding material? This is very important. We have to solve this, butts depend on it! This is where we have to start making some serious ass-umptions
because the movies aren't very clear on exactly
how Scott Lang's powers work. Does Ant-Man actually push
on stuff when he enlarges? That makes or breaks this meme, and the movies aren't very clear on this. For example, sometimes
Ant-Man is enlarging through the dirt, forcing
that dirt out of the way, which is obviously some amount of force. Other times though, he
gets caught expanding inside of a room, like the room itself is keeping him from expanding further, like our Thanos colon might. Other times, whole buildings are expanding with Pym particles,
obviously pushing stuff out of the way with some force, but then other times Ant-Man is expanding into a punch like he's providing no force of his own at all. Paul Rudd doesn't even know
how to approach this question, and he's Ant-Man. - I don't know!
I don't know. - I surveyed every single
shrinking or enlarging of Ant-Man or The Wasp in
the entirety of the MCU and found that, more often
than not, it is implied that enlarging provides
some kind of force. Okay, but how much force? I think the best example
and most straightforward one might be this, when The Wasp uses her car and Pym particles to launch an SUV. In that scene, the SUV
looks like it's launched at around a 45-degree angle and spends a full two seconds flying through the air. Now in that scene, the car specifically is a 2000 GMC Yukon XL. Yes, we must get this specific. If we assume that this car gets a rough parabolic trajectory
during this launch, which I think is a reasonable assumption, then we can use the equations
for parabolic trajectories to solve for the initial velocity needed to give this car this kind of motion. Then, we can plug that
initial velocity value into the work-energy equation to see just how much force
applied over what distance it will take to move the
car from zero velocity in the direction of launch
to the initial velocity we just calculated for the parabol-- just a second. Do all of this and we get a force imparted to the SUV from The Wasp's
car of a little over 100,000 newtons, almost done, butt math! The Wasp's car in this scene, I checked, is a 2010 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter, the dimensions of which
you are seeing right now. I think it is a reasonable
assumption to think that this force is being applied over every square inch
of the roof of the car, because that is what
is pushing on the SUV, and if you do that, divide the force value by the dimensions of this 2010
Mercedes-Benz Sprinter roof, then you get a pressure value
of 2.5 pounds per square inch that Pym particles are
allowing that Sprinter to push on the SUV with. Because Ant-Man is using the same Pym particle pushing power, I think that this, this
is our pressure value. Whew, okay so now we have
everything we should need to take this meme way too seriously. So, Ant-Man shrinks. He moves past fabric, past skin cells, and into Thanos' colon. He then enlarges with Pym particles with 2.5 pounds of force
acting across every square inch of his body, and therefore
against the colon walls. Using even more butt studies to get a range of dimensions for colon radii and colon thickness, and we get a tension in the walls of Thanos' colon of... 0.2 megapascals, or... over four times less than the ultimate tensile strength
of human colon tissue. Now, before we conclude,
let's just check our numbers with a different source. According to another butt
study from 2016, entitled Rupture of the Sigmoid Colon
Caused by Compressed Air, I quote, "The average
pressure needed to cause "full thickness tearing of
the human gastrointestinal "tract is 0.29 kilograms
per square centimeter." Can you do the conversion in your head? That's okay, I can. The average PSI needed to
rupture the human colon is 4.12, or a full 60%
more pounds per square inch than we calculated
Ant-Man would be pressing on Thanos' colon with. And so, if our assumptions,
estimations, and calculations are reasonable, no,
Ant-Man would not be able to just fly into Thanos'
colon, expand, and defeat him from the inside out. Thanos' colon would be
strong enough to resist the continued expansion of Ant-Man, and so this meme wouldn't work. And this is especially
true if Thanos' colon is much stronger than human butt, which surely, it must be. This meme now has to be done and dusted. So, could Ant-Man fly into
Thanos' butt and expand as a way of finally
defeating the Mad Titan? Well, if our assumptions and calculations are close to correct, no,
he wouldn't be able to. The movies don't really
give any good indications that Pym particle expansion comes along with any real amount of force. The most straightforward
example that I could find in the films does throw a car, sure, but if you take that
force and distribute it across the surface area of Scott Lang's relatively smaller
body, it doesn't produce butt-bursting pressures. In reality, if Ant-Man tried this meme, he would be stuck inside Thanos' colon, the size of Thanos' colon, and this surely has to be worse than being
stranded in the Soul Stone. Let's turn that into a
meme, butt-cause, science. Oh, I guess you could say that Ant-Man wouldn't have rekt-um. You know, I have more butt puns, if you want them, here's another one. (electronic music) I know on the face of it, it sounds maybe a little ridiculous that
a human wouldn't be able to enlarge past and get out of something that has a rubbery tensile strength, like you wouldn't be able
to get out of a balloon. However, look at people actually trying to get out of balloons after they do a dumb internet challenge. You can be easily constrained and trapped inside something that has
colon-like properties, so I don't think it's as
ridiculous as it seems on its face. Thank you so much for watching, Christina, if you want more of me
and you want to suggest ideas for future episodes, please follow us here at
these handles on social media. Also, the fourth episode of
The Science of Mortal Kombat is now live, we are nearing to a close, and whoa, that last one, hey, we really made that
guy get over here, huh? If you haven't seen it, you're
gonna wanna check it out. Thanks. (electronic music)
Ok. Ant-Man brings a knife.
Ok. Ant-man brings a swarm of flesh-eating ants and enlarges them. Or centipedes.
I mean, can't ant man just throw a moab into thanos's ear? seems much less messier and easier.