Dissecting Monsters! Could Giant Beasts ACTUALLY Exist? | The SCIENCE of... Dauntless

dear Phoenix labs hi it's me Austin the science uh okay I don't want to get sued also guy does not rhyme with Austin Austin the science Boston Terrier okay you know we'll table that for now so I've been playing this game called dauntless a lot lately and I mean like way too much it's this game where you hunt giant monsters called behemoths and so I spent so much time slaying these creatures that I became curious about their biology Phoenix labs the studio behind dauntless was in like hey do you wanna do a video with us and I was like me do a video on your game they were like yeah and I was like hell yes and then they were like awesome and then I said because I've really been wondering about the biological feasibility of the behemoths in your game and whether or not the only reason they're antagonistic toward humans is because of the unsustainable human expansions their territories and the various competitions thanks to dauntless for sponsoring this episode of the swords countless is a game about the ragged remains of human society hunting down and killing giant monsters that threatened the frontier as they work to rebuild themselves from a calamity that destroyed the planet humans and these giant behemoths are surviving on these levitating islands that make up the remains of the planet the lore of the game states that the islands are supported by a magical energy substance called ether and it's also this Etha that powers the various technologies in game and it turns out allows behemoths to exist in the first place anyway simple thesis simple video we can do this our giant-monster animals like behemoths even possible the answer is surprisingly complex deviously interesting and involves genetics dinosaurs big old insects Islands evolution and coolest of all respiration ok maybe I should have ended on respiration but it actually is the coolest part even though it doesn't sound thankfully for dauntless the monsters in the game are actually not nearly as outlandish as they are and like say Shadow of the Colossus walking buildings or else we would be in a lot of trouble but there are still quite a few things to be concerned about it's hard to get an exact size for the behemoths and dauntless but even the smallest ones like this is it a beaver platypus anyway they're the size of like a rhinoceros while the Scarn is clearly bigger than the largest terrestrial animal on earth the African elephant and it's worth comparing behemoths and dauntless to terrestrial earth animals because most of the behemoths seem to be scaled up versions of animals that exist in the real world the Nasher is a platypus the quill Shot is a wild boar the Shrike is an owl the cherub is a that a turtle that looks like a turtle to you these are clearly evolutions and lineage from the current fauna on earth but bigger and way more aggressive they have become megafauna this is an important starting point because these animals are going to have to overcome specific challenges when it comes to surviving in the wild three major problems in fact heat weight and energy consumption and let's look at each of these in kind and then begin to address them you may not realize this but being alive for most creatures and definitely for mammals creates heat moving muscles pumping hearts all of this requires and releases a tremendous amount of energy and given that most of the behemoths appear to be descended from mammals this is kind of a problem why because of geometry you see mammals regulate heat in several different ways but the largest by far is by blood and sweat that's a D monetization right there thanks for covering my career talks and if you want to play by the way you could actually help our channel and me out quite a bit by clicking the link in the description the game is free to play on PC ps4 and Xbox and it's even gonna be on the switch later this year where was I oh right sweating blood water is the primary ingredient in both sweat and blood which is great because water has a very high capacity to hold and transfer heat energy what's known as a high heat capacity in order to regulate your body temperature and dispose of unneeded heat energy hot blood carries itself to the surface of your skin transfers the heat to your skin which in turn transfers the heat to your sweat which then evaporates taking the heat energy away with it this is why you feel cooler when a fan blows on you in summer it's literally evaporating water off of your skin and that water which has a much higher heat capacity than your skin pulls the heat away your skin is literally a giant heat sink which is pretty frickin cool the problems begin as you get larger and it's best to symbolize this with a paul pretend that this ball of skin a hit that is really gross pretty fine whatever pretend is this ball of skin is an organism this ball organism that's 1 meter wide has an internal volume of 0.5 cubic meters and a surface area of little over 3 let's double the radius to 2 surface area is 12 internal volume is 4 this does not sound like they are outpacing each other but with this tiny increase in size the surface area quadrupled but the volume increased by 8 this means as organisms get larger they start to have less surface area on the outside in which to evaporate heat while the parts that are on inside the parts that make the heat increase at twice this rate this is why larger animals spend most of their time regulating their temperature elephants evolved these giant ears not so they can hear better but so they can just like increase their surface area it's like if you slap - CRA teh ice pipes on top of their head just in order to release more heat into the surrounding air they also evolved highly wrinkled skin which increases their skins contact with the air and they spend a ton of hours a day drinking water and dousing their backs with it the next problem is a big one wait get it big one cuz ur cuz cuz cuz they're big I go God just never mind this one's actually super simple to understand but really difficult to fix basically as organisms get bigger you need more and thicker bones to support their organs but as they have bigger bones they need more muscle to move them which increases their weight which means they need more bones to support that weight which means any more muscles to move it oh my god this problem never stops anybody who has played Kerbal space program is actually super familiar with this problem like sure you can make a giant rocket to haul yourself up but the more fuel you carry the heavier your rocket ergo the more fuel you need to lift it etc NASA calls this the tyranny of the rocket equation which in this case I suppose would be the tyranny of the skeletal system the third problem is energy production I'm gonna keep using elephants because it's my show and you can't stop me an African elephant eats all day they need 70,000 calories per day to keep all of this running which is fine I guess it's not that big a deal I mean elephants manage it so could conceivably behemoths and in fact it's here where we have to start tying all the pieces together because while this seems like three separate problems are actually all interconnected energy weight and heat are all points on a triangle that feed into and counteract one another so addressing these problems separately once we get to these energy requirements is no longer viable so let's zoom out and get a look at a big picture are using elephants and you will have to forgive me for that because they are an excellent example of how a modern megafauna can perfectly balance his triangle for peak performance because while it may seem like I covered everything already I actually haven't I left something out of energy production or acquisition as it were something big the most important key to all of this respiration you see breathing comes so naturally to us that we don't think of it as energy production in the way that we think of eating food but it totally is is arguably more important than eating actually it's not even arguable oxygen is the core ingredient of almost all life that moves with any degree of speed walking talking eating watching this video going to work having fun playing video games sleeping all of this would be impossible without adenosine triphosphate the fuel for almost all life on Earth and it requires two things glucose and oxygen and it needs a lot of oxygen 13 molecules worth of the stuff six of which comes from the glucose and the rest has to come from free oxygen delivered by the blood larger animals therefore need more oxygen to supply all their cells which make sense right but there's a problem respiration creates heat so the more oxygen you taking over time the more you produce meaning that increases our heating problem how do you even begin to deal with the runaway weight problem from an organism growing to such a huge size okay let's just calm down to take a deep breath and remember that I have got you covered there is a solution for all of this first the bones we have to deal with the bones big animals like elephants and giant freaking dinosaurs found genius ways to deal with this problem one is that you make the most important bones the spine the ribs and the legs just epic just really thick chunky rocks elephant's went so far as to make their leg bones nearly solid instead of having like hollow places where marrow goes they have these like spongy bubbles in the bone instead allowing their leg bones to be tremendously strong then you start to cut out weight everywhere you can and you do this by just throwing away stuff you don't need dinosaurs like the supersaurus did this by basically turning the rest of their bones into calcium fibres that were filled with a bunch of empty air pockets like a streamlined racing bicycle to reduce weight and amazingly this is what elephants do to they've got these big gaping holes in their skulls this way the bones still provide ample support for their brains and eyes but they don't wave down tremendously this does make their bones more brittle but who cares like the end of the day what animal has the stones that try to smack an elephant in the head it's pretty much win-win for them because it we've already gotten over how elephants deal with heat but there's a lot more to be concerned about how do they get the oxygen they need without bursting into flames well that's pretty simple they just don't breathe a lot elephants have a tremendously slow metabolism taking about 12 breaths per minute humans meanwhile take about twice as many and they also grow very very slowly because they have overall reduced cellular activity this is why elephant pregnancies last joke 22 months it's almost two whole years this is the price you pay for being the largest terrestrial animal you've gotta be slower than everyone of us this is how they manage the balance they move slowly they spend all day managing their heat intake and they eat a lot and they have probably one of the world's most efficiently designed or I guess evolved skeletons but here is where we begin to run into problems when we circle back to our behemoths behemoths do not move slowly they do not conserve energy these things run like as fast as cheetahs but they are the size of two giant elephants how is this even possible and how am I gonna explain the giant insect behemoth I know people are gonna ask me about that one and just as I was having a stress melt town trying to rationalize the anatomy of a fictional creature that was clearly designed to be fun and not you know scientifically accurate I cracked the case you see in the world of Dauntless it's explained that ether the mysterious energy source that serves as the catalyst of all the worlds of vents and trials and tribulations is the reason behemoths exist not only this but they feed on it and it's here this right here that reveals everything because it's wrong they don't feed on ether they breathe it oxygen is how we breathe and oxygen is an amazing element because it is highly reactive for this very reason it makes a great component in rocket fuel you mix it with hydrogen it forms water as a by-product and bam releases a ton of energy this is why it's so great for ourselves but it's not the the option in fact it's not even the only option for us while it's true that our bodies can't survive long without breathing oxygen a great many of our individual cells can engage in what's known as anaerobic respiration you most regularly experience this when you're engaging in rigorous exercise when running your breathing picks up to provide more oxygen to your muscle cells but at certain speeds your breathing can't keep up with all the demands being placed on your muscles so instead of using oxygen and glucose they use just glucose and it breaks into two different pieces one is lactic acid and the other is ATP you just get a lot less of it than you do normally and our bodies are not designed to operate this way for very long but other organisms down in the bowels of the earth and even above it have found another way entirely they can respirate with all sorts of different chemicals nitrates phosphates hydrogen sulfide if there's energy and molecules that can be taken life will find a way to use it it's here that I think ether is the key in order to operate with a metabolic levels that they do behemoths would need to find a significantly more reactive energy source than free oxygen there's thousands of more reactive compounds out there in the universe like really too many to name and ether is literally everywhere it's literally pouring out of geysers in the ground whenever you fight behemoths and this makes total sense did you know that back in prehistoric earth animals and especially insects used to be much larger and one of the reasons is because oxygen concentrations were way way higher this was particularly important for invertebrates like bugs got there which respirate through their skin using organs called tracheas different from our tracheas it's why in the modern day bugs as large as it used to be simply cannot exist and while there are some large animals like elephants they have to dramatically slow their metabolism in order to survive what if the species could evolve to take advantage of a more abundant more energetic source of respiration it would be a total GameChanger all those problems with heats weight and energy requirements would just go out the window interestingly enough this means a behemoth still have to eat a lot because they'd need all the building blocks of nutrients and minerals to keep their bodies you know working and it's here where my favorite piece of the puzzle comes into play floating islands behemoths live on islands in relatively isolated ecosystems and this is the reason they are so large it is a well-documented phenomenon in the creation of megafauna where they're tremendously more likely to evolve on islands this is what's known as Island gigantism it's presumed that in insulated and minimally chaotic conditions evolution favours growing to a large size because there's less predation this means that the biggest threat to a species is usually others of its own species this isolationism from predators favors severely territorial behavior even among herbivores so they can fight off anybody else who may threaten their resources just look at Komodo dragons Island check giant check territorial check if they had access to a more efficient form of respiration they'd probably be the size of elephants is there a komodo dragon behemoth yet well it does address count given everything in game the abundant source of energy the isolationism not only are behemoths possible it'd actually be more surprising if they didn't exist it even explains why they're total freakin jerks all the time so you know given all these caveats I'm gonna label behemoths as solidly plausible I don't hey this is just a fun fact it's not actually super important did you know that there used to be like thousands of times more megafauna in like recent ish history but there's mass extinction events of megafauna and tons of areas that coincide with the arrival of humans and our ancestor species this implies that megafauna competed with invading humans for resources and as a result we hunted them off the face of the earth just to show them who's boss again it's not super important but it's just you know kind of like what you do and dauntless you an expansion competition for Easter as an energy source and you know us murdering them and mass making coats out of their skins is a message to their families if you would like to murder cartoonishly large monsters and make coats out of them in order to shame them into getting out of the way of an invasive simian species bent on over shredding and eliminating them off the planet you don't have to wait you can download and play for free on PC ps4 and xboxone right now by going to play dauntless calm slash are slash the game serious or a much easier way of clicking the link in the description below could you find me killer monsters today my character looks like a sexy buff frontman for an emo band sincerely Austin [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,218,383

Rating: 4.8835497 out of 5

Keywords: dauntless, dauntless game, dauntless gameplay, gameplay dauntless, dauntless trailer, trailer dauntless, dauntless build, dauntless guide, dauntless hanner, dauntless monsters, monsters, behemoth, biology, the science of, the science, the science of dauntless, the science of monsters, monster biology, phoenix labs, game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory dauntless

Id: JNT8bybIDp0

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019

Reddit Comments

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[u/[deleted]]

kurzgesagt video that expands on some of the things touched on in this video. I don't know, I just thought of it immediately, though fellow theorists might like it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7KSfjv4Oq0

[u/FourEyesIsAFish]

Capcom, sponsor this man! He needs to cover MH proper, not some paywall hell spinoff by Epic Games!

[u/CireRekt]

I tried out the game after Jacksepticeye did a sponsored video of Dauntless. It's a fun game, and it was so cool to see this theory explain that the Dauntless beheamoths are a plausible anomaly.

[u/Ruler-of-Defaults]

Austin is a national treasure