Can The Hulk Jump into Space?

in the Hulk jump into space The Incredible Hulk is a hero defined by his incredible feats of strength Bruce banners gamma-ray altered ego has done everything from lip war whirring in half to stop an earthquake with his bare hands but that kind of strength is so terrestrial in the Hulk strong enough to do something truly otherworldly is he strong enough to jump into space if you only know the Hulk from the MCU you might think that the extent of his powers are smashing and jumping but his feats in the comics over the decades are downright ridiculous this dude routinely causes earthquakes and almost sunk Manhattan with a single step he punched time once he punched time and important for our purposes the Hulk has even jumped into the upper atmosphere but didn't make it much further than that is there a way using science to take all this strength and see just how far Banner could bound I think so but first what speed Hulk need no don't my scepter work hard sorry first what speed does the Hulk need in order to get into space well this is just another way of asking what the escape velocity of Earth is and I know you've all heard of this term before but I want to go step by step with you and discover and mathematically so that we all really understand it and we're gonna do this without all Bruce banners seven phd's I'm a doctor as we went through in our Death Star recoil episode it takes some amount of big work energy to move an object away from a source of gravity and that amount of energy is going to be equal to the force of gravitation multiplied by the distance you want to move that thing away which gives us this expression this equation describes a tangible amount of work that you have to do except there's a negative sign in there that can be confusing but it makes sense the only way to make the gravitational potential energy equal to zero such that you do not fall back into a source of gravity you go beyond this imaginary line here is to set the distance you are away equal to literal infinity and so this equation actually says that any object that wants to escape another's gravity has to have some positive amount of energy all of this math is where the metaphorical gravity well concept comes from that you've heard scientists and sci-fi authors talk about forever now the size of this metaphorical well is going to depend on the size of the object that is creating it and the mass of that object but what is important is that if you do not have enough positive energy to escape the well you will inevitably tumble back down the exact amount of energy that the Hulk would need to jump out of this gravity well and stand up on the lift the amount of energy you would need to bring himself out an infinite distance away from some planet or another object with mass is going to be the energy required to make this equation equal to zero if the positive energy that we are going to add is kinetic because the Hulk is jumping and moving then all we have to do is set these two expressions equal to each other if we do that and then solve for velocity we just discovered the equation for escape velocity all by ourselves and so if the Hulk jumped with escape velocity away from some object then theoretically his kinetic energy alone would bring him out to an infinite distance away from that object with this kinetic energy and his gravitational potential energy always approaching zero but never quite getting there he would never fall back to that object all of his energy all this velocity would just keep getting real low it's getting real little bit guy it's good didn't think you didn't need to see that the escape velocity for Earth is a blistering eleven point two kilometers per second but is the Hulk strong enough to generate this kind of speed it is really hard to say with any sort of precision exactly how strong any comic book character is especially one like the Hulk that has been around for decades in my comic dude even said his strength was incalculable and that dude was a genius so it's all gonna come down to the estimations that we use in the examples so let's try one if you multiply the ultimate tensile strength of some material by the cross-sectional area of the object that material is making then you get the force you need to rip that thing apart let's say that we give I don't know Wolverine spine a few square centimeters in cross-sectional area and give the ultimate tensile strength of adamantium the tensile strength of graphene because it's the material we know of with the most if we do that then the forces that the Hulk may have generated when he left Wolverine in half could be equivalent to 25 times the force in thrust that the Space Shuttle put out upon liftoff I mean that's one number that we could use but what number would you put to punching time you see that's the Hulk's secret his powers are always confusing I mean where he even get that day's thankfully there's a more straightforward approach we know what the Hulk's legs can do if dude can sink the eastern seaboard of the United States with a single step potentially that we are talking about him creating seriously large earthquakes and earthquakes have energies that we can estimate the most widely used scale for measuring the power of large earthquakes is not the Richter scale it is the magnitude moment scale developed by smart boys and geophysicists hero con amore Tom Hanks no not that Tom Hanks but I could not find a picture of the scientist now Henson con amore related the energy that an earthquake could put out to the mechanical work that the earthquake does when it moves some section of rock some large distance to capture the full range of energies that large earthquakes could put out Hank's encounter more a related the Energy's log rhythmically so that one full magnitude increase would equate to about 32 times the increase in energy so go from a five to a six and to increase an energy of 32 times up to 15 million kilograms of TNT but go from five to eight and it's an increase of 32,000 up to 15 billion kilograms of TNT equivalent since the magnitude moment scale describes big work energy what if we just assume that the Hulk can generate the equivalent amount of work in his legs that a large earthquake can do to rock and we assume that instead of all going into a stop it all goes into a jump I know it's comic book logic but my man brew band punched time since work and kinetic energy are related let's go through more or less the same process we did to find escape velocity except this time we're gonna find final velocity after the Hulk puts all that earthquake energy into his legs if we further assume that the Hulk is a thousand kilograms and he puts a magnitude eight earthquakes were thav energy into his legs then we find a velocity of eleven point two nope that's not that's better eleven thousand two hundred kilometers per second five percent the speed of light a thousand times the escape velocity for Earth but would it really be enough every time we've mentioned escape velocity so far we've emitted something very very important no not you nobody wants you around no the atmosphere the basic equation for escape velocity that we always considers an object in a vacuum it never includes an atmosphere around an object and so even if something has escape velocity it might not escape for example if you threw a baseball straight up at the speed of light it would immediately experience incredible drag forces because the force of drag squares with velocity all of the air molecules in the baseball's way even going that fast would put so much force and so much heat on it that something really bad would happen because of these forces in the hit involves throw a baseball at the speed of light and it would immediately destroy itself and everything around it in a nuclear like explosion of course objects do pass through our atmosphere at faster than escape velocities meteors do this but only the biggest meteors do and by the time they make it to the Earth's surface they have been robbed by our atmosphere of most of their mass and cosmic velocity so how can we determine if the Hulk could make it into space even if he had escape velocity well maybe the most controversial underground nuclear tests in US history can help on August 27th 1957 the US government as a part of Operation plumb-bob put a 300-ton yield nuclear weapon at the bottom of an a hundred and fifty meter shaft they sealed the bomb in with a concrete plug and they sealed the shaft with a steel cap weighing many hundreds of kilograms when they detonated the bomb it instantaneously turned the concrete plug into superheated gas that turned the entire shaft into a 500 foot long nuclear power gun pointed at space when the concrete gas met the steel cap scientist Bob Brownlee who helped develop the experiment estimated that the steel cap was accelerated to 60 kilometers per second six times escape velocity now under this nuclear force and fire the steel cap was probably vaporized but Brownlee and numerous articles you can find have their doubts as to what really happened in theory this steel cap could have made it into space despite the Earth's atmosphere in the way and it just so happens that this value around sixty kilometers per second is the fastest I mean slowest that the Hulk could go in our calculations just wore my pants ripped off unlike meteors and unlike the steel cap in operation plumb-bob we can consider the Incredible Hulk to be indestructible I mean in one comic he already survived a fall from space like a medium so if we give him the incredible velocity that we calculated a velocity many many times greater than what could have propelled a similarly weighted steel cap into space if it were indestructible and I think that absolutely the Hulk could jump into space but that's the boring part the moment that the Hulk started his jump the material directly underneath his giant feet would be compressed like it was inside the core of a star and when the Hulk lifted off from the ground in that instant the pressure would be released and so it would create a nuclear like explosion now if you could see the Hulk lift off from this explosion your eyes weren't turned into dust it would look like a shooting star in Reverse a brilliant burning banner blowing from heat with a beam of plasma shooting up into the sky in under a second banner would leave the earth in under a minute he would pass the moon there's a scenario here given all of our assumptions and estimations and calculations where not only does the Hulk jump hard enough to leave the earth behind and the moon he jumps hard enough to leave the solar system behind and maybe even the entire Milky Way just a big green guy floating forever through space naked because his pants enough beautiful so is the Hulk strong enough to jump into space well given all the other amazing feats of strength that he has accomplished I'd say yes it is very possible that banner could bound beyond the pull of Earth's gravity of course once he got into space he wouldn't be able to breathe and he was asphyxiate and he wouldn't be able to change his direction and he would just be a big green meat popsicle floating out in space and if you were anywhere near him when he jumped you would be vaporized by a nuclear fire but hey he says this all the time Hulk smash because sites [Music] obviously there's a lot of wiggle room with numbers for the Hulk because he's done so many crazy things in terms of strength there's one panel where someone says that he caused a hundred and twenty three Richter scale in magnitude earthquake that would be because of the logarithmic energy increase that we talked about in the episode that would be ten million trillion times the mass energy of the entire universe times a googol so I think he could make it into space if he could hit something so hard that it would have more energy than the entire universe which is dumb but awesome thank you so much for watching today's episode and a big thanks over to the nerds at tough SF the blog and the discord especially matter beam and Kerr for their help on this episode as you can see it was pretty complicated if you want more of me you can go back to Nerdist com or you can go to alpha at project alpha comm or if you sign up now for a free trial you can get this show two days earlier than anyone else and you can get other premium content from this channel Nerdist and geek and sundry like natural selection which is a debate show that I do with my good friend and colleague Dan Casey which is a lot of fun we argue things like ant-man vs. wasps it's ridiculous if you want more because science hit that like button hit that notification bell subscribe and follow us on social media here [Music]

Channel: Because Science

Views: 707,096

Rating: 4.9525518 out of 5

Keywords: Nerdist, Fvid, Because Science, Kyle Hill, the incredible hulk, marvel, comics, mcu, super strength, avengers infinity war, physics, escape velocity, space, science

Id: u2pyacsPcdY

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/alblaster]

I've had a similar question for a while. Can the flash run into space? Like off a ramp or something?