- Are Godzilla's flying
monsters big enough? (monster groans) As our imaginations, our appetites for cinematic destruction, and
our CGI budgets get bigger, so, too, do our favorite movie monsters. Since his first appearance in 1954, the king of monsters himself, Godzilla, has increased in times almost
60% on the silver screen, forcing all the other
kaiju that he battles, especially the flyers, to scale with him. But are they big enough? Start the science! (upbeat music) (groans) This may seem like a silly question. Beasts like Rodan, Mothra, and Ghidorah are absolutely enormous in
the latest Godzilla film. Still, thanks to physics,
if there are any kind of realistic constraints on
how big Godzilla can get, there would be similar constraints on how big flying monsters should be. Specifically, can we figure out how big their wings should be? How much power it would take just for them to get off the ground? And how much wing flapping
would all of that take? It might be the case that these creatures need to be even bigger. (missiles explode) First, how do things fly? No matter if you are a tiny fighter jet or a giant flapping winged beast, flight is basically just
overcoming two different forces with some forces of your own. Everything on a planet has weight, and so if you just want
to get off the ground with wings or engines or what have you, you need to supply a lift force that either cancels out, equals, this weight force in
the opposite direction, or it exceeds it, or else
you will be grounded. The second force you need
to overcome is a drag force, which depends on the shape of the object moving through the air,
the density of the air, the velocity you're going at, et cetera. It's kind of like a pulling force acting in the opposite
direction that you want to go. What you want to do then is
supply some kind of thrust force to cancel out this drag or exceed it, or else you're just gonna
stay motionless in the air and not go forward or in any direction. What's critical here is
that the larger the creature or flying thing, the
more mass it will have, and the more drag it will experience. And on Earth, with specific gravity and specific air density, this puts a real biological limit on even our best flyers. (missiles explode) The beautiful thing about evolution is that even though there
are innumerable variables that force animals on Earth to look and act the way that they do, there seems to still be an infinite number of solutions to the problem that is life. Take flight, for example. Flight did not come
from a common ancestor, it evolved independently
four separate times, in birds, in bats, in
insects, and in pterosaurs. These animals are
obviously very different, but they all converged
on a similar solution. For example, they all have
wings, and yet bird wings and dragonfly wings
operate very differently. Thanks to the variety of evolution, there is a huge range in
the size of our flyers. The smallest, a parasitic wasp
of the genus Dicopomorpha, I cannot even show you on this scale that you're seeing me
on, because it's wingspan is literally the width
of a sheet of paper. Though if you were to zoom in, it would look something like this. Adorable and parasitic, wow. I would also have a hard
time showing you the largest flyer that we know of, a pterosaur from the late Cretaceous Period of the name Quetzalcoatlus northropi. It had an amazingly wide
wingspan, 11 meters 36 feet, just 65,000 times wider than
the parasitic wasp's wingspan. These two animals seem so very different and yet they converge. And so we can use the relationships between flyers like this
to make real conclusions about, yes, even fictional monsters. (laughs) Huge again. Obviously, the ginormous flyers in the monsterverse, like Ghidorah, are much larger than the
largest flyers to ever live. I like that three head look. Pulling very generously from all the Godzilla canon over the years, we know that these beasts
are absolutely ginormous. In the new film, Mothra, for example, has a wingspan over 800 feet wide. And Rodan is half the
weight of the dang Titanic. The question we want to ask,
though, is is this big enough? If we applied the relationships between flyers on Earth,
how would Mother Nature actually scale these monsters
if they were real creatures? (Godzilla moans)
What? Yes, you can still be the king. (Ghidorah growls)
Yes, I know that three heads would be wearing multiple crowns and that would be better.
(Mothra whines) Yes, pollen is good, very n--
(Rodan growls) Like 2:30.
(Godzilla moans) I don't know where Bryan Cranston is! I don't know any of these questions! If Godzilla's titans had wings that scaled like all the flyers on Earth, the monsterverse would get even bigger. If we were evaluating planes, everything would be a lot simpler. Planes, like fighter jets,
have engines for thrust and fixed wings to provide lift. A flappy-flap real animal though, with each flap changes a number of variables, from wingspan to wing area to just the angle of attack of the wings. So things are gonna be more complicated than just a simple equation
that solves everything. I do not have one of those. What I do have, though, is research. Research like flight and the
scaling of flyers in nature. Research like this looks at
all the flyers that we know of and tries to relate them to one another and then come up with some
kind of empirical relationship to say if one bird was this size, then it should have x
variable, or x wingspan. So that's what we're gonna do. We are gonna use this real research to resize our monsters to
see what actually fits. Let's start with Ghidorah. From observing vertebrate flyers, we know that there is a relationship between the mass of
flyer and how much power is required from their flight muscles just to get their bodies
off of the ground. And that relationship looks like this. So for example, if you
had a very small bird of just 1/10th of a kilogram, it would take a little less than one watt for it to get off the
ground in terms of power. And if you had a much, much
larger bird at 10 kilograms, it would take around 100 watts of power. 100 watts is around what
a light bulb puts out. It doesn't sound like that much, unless you've ever tried
to power one by riding on one of those bicycles
that makes you really tired. From empirical observation
of many different kinds of flyers, when we plot
it all out like this and try to draw some kind of line that best fits all of our observations, we actually do get a
mathematical relationship that relates all of them. So, power required from flight muscles is proportional to how many
times more massive a bird is to the power of 7/6ths. That's just how the math works out. So for example, if a
bird was twice as heavy as another bird, it would require two to the 7/6ths times more flight power. Ghidorah, though, is a lot more than twice as heavy as anything. If we apply this scaling relationship to Ghidorah's tens of thousands of tons, we get a power requirement
for its flight muscles just to get off the ground
of 12 billion watts. 12 gigawatts, which is just
about the same as how much power it takes for a dang space
shuttle to get into space. So this is just spectacular-sounding
enough to make sense. However, rockets and space
shuttles use chemical fuel. What would Ghidorah's
wings really have to do-- (gags) The minimum number of flaps a
flyer has to make per second in order to stay in the
air also scales with mass. For example, a small hummingbird
with a very small mass has to flap its wings
a lot more frequently than a much larger bird
with much larger wing area. Makes sense. Applying another scaling
relationship to Ghidorah and you find that the minimum frequency that the wings have to
flap at is .22 Hertz, which equates to one wing flap every four and a half seconds or so. Which I guess fits with what we see in Godzilla movies, and
kind of makes sense. However, our last scaling relationship is gonna change Ghidorah a lot. (Ghidorah whines)
No, not the heads thing. You can keep the heads.
(Ghidorah growls) Yes!
(Ghidorah whines) Yes, I promise, dang! I think that we can say
that Ghidorah is closer to a pterosaur than it is to a bird, so we are gonna scale its wingspan according to those ancient flyers. Going back to our research one more time and getting another scaling relationship for wingspan versus mass, and
applying that to Ghidorah, assuming that it is like a
vertebrate flyer on Earth, which is a big if, but hey,
this is a science show. Ghidorah's wingspan
shouldn't be 175 meters. It should be 3,000 meters. Three kilometers wide. Now remember that
Ghidorah is supposed to be a little less than 200 meters tall. This is absolutely enormous,
and possibly ridiculous. So let's visualize that. If we apply the wingspan scaling to Godzilla's airborne monstrosities, the king of monsters goes
from terrifying to tiny. (hisses)
I'm a monster! Here is our scaling graph
in 100 meter increments and here is our movie-sized Ghidorah. Now let's see what happens,
I think you can guess, when we apply our scaling
relationships to it. If we kept Ghidorah's height
and body mass the same, this is how its wings,
realistically, should scale up. (chuckles)
Yeah. And this is Godzilla on the same scale. Doesn't really look like a
fair fight anymore, does it? If Godzilla were to roar on one end of Ghidorah's wings here, one wingtip, it would take nine seconds for someone on the other side of Ghidorah to hear it. (missiles explode)
Ah, oh, my only weakness! Ugh. Let's do the same wingspan
math for both Mothra and Rodan. Using our same scaling equations, Mothra's wings go from
this wide, to this wide, over a kilometer and a half wide. And Rodan's wings go from
this, to 2,000 meters across. Now is this more accurate scaling better? Is it cooler? Well, I happen to think
that this portrayal is incredibly imposing and
also incredibly awesome. But we haven't asked the most important question here for our purposes. Is any of this possible? Remember those two graphs
of wing flap frequency and minimum power required
from flight muscles that we looked at before? Well, I left something out of those. What I didn't tell you is that not only do we have scaling relationships for the minimum wing beat frequency and the minimum power
required for flight muscles, we have the maximums
for both of those, too. There are outliers, like
the ancient Queztalcoatlus, but beyond every single
point on these graphs where these two lines meet, is a maximum. Flyers cannot provide enough energy from their flight muscles,
nor can they flap their wings fast enough just to stay off
of the ground and actually fly. And that maximum is around 10 kilograms. Almost all of the flyers
on Earth that we know of fit within these small ranges. And in Ghidorah's case, it
wouldn't be able to provide a thousandth of the power necessary or 1/10th of the frequency necessary. It is way outside of the
range on both of these graphs. So for big movie monsters to fly around, they would need otherworldly muscles that are extraordinarily efficient. Is that possible for them to have? Well, not really for
biology as we know it. But is it possible for ancient
titan monster beasts to have? Uh, sure, maybe. What do you think?
(Ghidorah roars) So, are Godzilla's flying
monsters big enough? I don't think they're even close. Even if they had
absolutely amazing muscles with a performance and
efficiency unknown to science, their wings would still
feasibly have to be bigger than we've ever seen on any screen. And I'm not even
criticizing Godzilla here. Just like I need to see feathers on my velociraptors in movies, I need to see monsters with wings so wide that they would literally cast shadows that would cover cities. I say, make the monsters bigger and then let them fight, because science. (missiles explode) (Kyle roars) I'm a monster! (upbeat music) And there's a bigger problem
with this whole thing that if you do not assume that the muscles of these flying monsters are already absolutely amazing and
like nothing on Earth, they're still not gonna
get off the ground, because if you add more muscle
to shrink their wing size or what have you, that adds more weight, which means they need a bigger wing size, which adds more weight,
which means more muscle, which means more wing size, which means. So it's kind of a loop. And rockets deal with the same thing. How much fuel do you
need to add per thrust? Well, that adds more weight, which means you need more thrust,
which means more fuel. So there's an equation
that forces these animals to become absolutely
huge unless their muscles are something amazing or, I don't know, they're from space or something. Thank you so much for watching. If you want more of me or
if you want to suggest ideas for future episodes, you can go here to these handles and do just that. Also, our first expansion
show, Because Space, has the first two episodes now live. One with Archer himself in it. Yeah, you're gonna wanna check those out. Thanks again. (energetic music)
