Do You Want an Adamantium Skeleton?

look I'll be the first to admit it I've spent many hours of my career telling you which super powers and abilities and augmentations you don't want from super strength to super speed to flight to invisibility to x-ray vision to teleportation I've ruined a lot of dreams well maybe I have and even though I don't feel bad about that today I want to explain to you a superpower that I think you actually do want because scientifically speaking I think an adamantium skeleton would be pretty sick now entering the facility bone is an amazing material a latticework of fibers and proteins supporting a mineralized matrix that is not only strong it's tough able to handle the stresses and strains of daily vertebrate life the human skeleton is pretty robust and I'm told pretty cool to hang your flesh husk on but famously the mutant known as Wolverine has the ultimate in bone technology Canadian bones covered in adamantium a so-called indestructible metal to prove to you this is the kind of augmentation you might actually want in terms of superpowers we first have to evaluate the mechanical properties of bone and that means defining strength in more scientific terms in engineering speak the ultimate strength of a material is a description of how much stress it can handle before failing this stress limit could be in the single digits or in the billions but in general very strong materials can withstand stresses in the millions of Pascal's of pressure or Newton's per square meter and bone is one of those materials a typical human bone can take a hundred mega Pascal's of pressure before snapping and cracking like when you were a kid and you fell off that wall outside of the taqueria and you broke your collarbone on your birthday too much information right sorry when force is applied to a bone before it breaks it will of course deform or strain by some amount in comparison to its original shape for any material then we can graph the force required to change its shape and where this curve tops out is the ultimate strength buon is incredible and given just how often we seem to be playing catch-up with nature how we're always finding some new substance or natural material that blows what humans have made out of the water you'd be forgiven in thinking that natural bone must just be naturally better but that's simply not true whoa whoa love where'd you get that giant bone from which Zoo I gotta makes I gotta make some calls bone may be pretty boss do people still say that but artificial materials outperform it across pretty much every metric that matters now I don't know how strong and a mantium is supposed to be so let's just use some reference values for a common steel oh that yeah I had that bad boy installed a while ago I give killer high-fives I give killer high-fives Steel's make bone look downright weak with ultimate strengths five to ten times higher than that of bone not mega pascals but up to giga pascals not only that but Steel's are much more robust in terms of energy absorption which your bone prison needs when it's moving around and taking impacts the physics here are pretty obvious steel is stronger more resilient tougher it bends more and fractures less and we could extend that reasoning out to adamantium mechanically speaking it would be better than a bone skeleton pretty much however we want to define it and what it would allow you to do is why I think you wanted I know you wanted if metal is so superior Kyle I can hear you asking that exact tone of voice why has an evolution produced some kind of metal endoskeleton already well thank you for your question I love your voice first of all it's important to remember that evolution doesn't necessarily always select the most perfect or strongest material or design it only goes with what works in a population over time over many many generations from random mutations that are randomly presented to it second there is no actual limitation on incorporating metal in a significant way in a body plan and so there is kind of a Wolverine like creature look at the scaly foot snail this gastropod has iron sulphide plates all over its foot that look like armor but scientists don't actually know what these plates are for they could be for protection from the hydrothermal vents or the hot gases and water that they live around or it could be interestingly enough a byproduct of the microorganisms living inside of these snails this would be a very weird form of detoxification and not armored at all now I know that these snails don't exactly look like Logan but it's at least proof that incorporating metal in a significant way biologically speaking is at least phenotypic ly possible snail chainmaille na so why do you want an adamantium skeleton like Wolverine or at least a metal one well we don't tend to think about it but the strength of Bones directly affects how you can act and how you look Aria can you pull up the files from the latest reconstitution the one with the hair yes the one with the hair imagine that you have an absolutely gorgeous skeleton with all metal bones these bones don't have to be solid they can be more to be in shape because the steel is on average still much stronger and this is good because your red blood cells are made inside of your bones and you don't want to disrupt that I'm not a human doctor but I'm pretty sure you need blood also this more 2 V shape if adamantium is light and very efficient in its construction probably means that you wouldn't be adding like a hundred pounds on to your frame like it does to Wolverine so you could spare some weight for maybe a claw or six so you have these metal to be bones what can you do with them well much stronger bones means that you will be able to carry much more mass and much more muscle this design would enable the average person especially the more genetically gifted among us to cultivate a lot more muscle mass on their frames and become much stronger than the average person this is a more realistic pathway towards actual super-strength Lola oh how many elephants did you eat oh oh oh no she ate seven the children were terrified bones when inside a living thing and not recently spit up by a kaiju who's misbehaving are very good at repairing themselves you would likely fall apart after just a few years if your body wasn't constantly repairing and maintaining and plastering your bones over with protein thanks to all the tiny accumulating damage with an adamantium skeleton though your bones would never need repair the massive mechanical strength increase could handle any stress and strain from daily life you could punch harder fall from higher and likely never break a bone and if you did encounter some force that did bend you out of shape forget about wearing some cast for two months until it totally smells like button you have to it's your skin with a pen or a pencil another thing and then the pen or pencil smells all gross now just have your beef Castle of a doctor with a metal skeleton brings you back into shape oh not gonna lie though that's that's gonna hurt a lot think of how society would change if we all had metal Skelly's everything that depended on the robustness of the human body would shift just think of what American football or all of the Olympics or boxing would look like if this was the case don't get me wrong though there would be some potential downsides depending on the material and the density of it swimming might be a thing of the past sorry and going to the airport might be a tremendous hassle and you definitely do not want the kind of surgical application of this material to ear bones like Wolverine had I don't think anyone could really survive that kind of trauma and even if they did I don't think they're unchanged tendons and ligaments would handle the increased mass very well I still think I can convince you on this idea though let's forget about the Wolverine part of this for a second and just imagine if we had metal skeletons from birth if humans evolved to have metal skeletons I think you might look very different now writing like a projection room 300 the big boy program the one with the hair yes remember when we use some biological scaling laws to resize the king of monsters Godzilla well what I left unsaid was that all of those equations use the same material and material strength bone and that makes sense they're all the same kind of creature but now we're considering metal canonically Wolverine is 5 foot 3 not very tall if I grew up with metal bones if humans evolved to have a metal skeleton then using these same scaling relationships and increasing the strength of the material 5 to 10 times I could theoretically be at least 5 times taller and a hundred and twenty five times more massive than Logan no get him down there so tiny little baby claws only five foot three are now 30 feet tall and 20,000 pounds and I have enough space in my forearms to fit what can only be described as finger swords longer than Logan is tall not a metal skeleton would be awesome I pretty sure I convinced you I don't know and everything until next time REI TV that Lolan here we need to talk to eating elephant thing is just not sustainable given their population size at all thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in creating this very video today I especially want to call out research assistant Erik Harrington and visiting scholar oh Lisa Nana if you want to join the facility get on the staff get on a patreon and our disk orbit right now over 1,100 nerds are talking with each other at all hours of the day having their own game nights movie nights giving the episode ideas and sharing squid gifts you can go to patreon.com/scishow and every week and as you can see there's more and more views so I don't know how to I don't like the term indestructible is indestructible engineering-wise has to be relative to something right so a metal bar would be indestructible to an ant a single ant but it's not indestructible to a human power hammer or a bandsaw or something so adamantium could be indestructible for the average person in what they can do a human non-mutant but too sweet Magneto oh now I don't think that's indestructible anymore still going okay I'm just gonna thanks for watching

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 664,393

Rating: 4.9388418 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, comic books, marvel comics, hugh jackman, x men, kyle hill channel, wolverine, logan, adamantium

Id: Anq4xgIr2UA

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/thelonelyecho208]

Okay, so let's forget everything about the skeleton itself and just look at the claws. Are those possible with appropriate modifications?

[u/thewilloftheuniverse]

No, absolutely not. It might be stronger, but it's heavy.

Your tendons, ligaments, and muscles would all be seriously fucked by having adamantium or even steel bones. And your vertebrae? Yeah, those are gonna compress and become completely useless after even just a few days of that extra weight.

This was the first episode of Kyle's that I just thought, what no, this isn't looking at any of the biological factors. You're better than this, Kyle.

I want to see a retraction of correction of some kind for this. Put it in context of the fun narrative you have going on though. Just an outright, "fans pointed out I was wrong" wouldn't be as fun as a conspiracy that someone at the facility is sabotaging you research. Because they clearly are.

Bu then again, the whole point of science is to be on the lookout for when you're wrong, so I don't know, ts your life and beautiful hair.

[u/Usa2point0]

Another amazing video. I remember an alternate reality video where you talk about vibrabium and you mentioning how rediculous and complicated figuring out how fictional metals work. Something along the lines with "I'm done. They just make up stuff to make it to what they want and figuring out how it real works is giving me a splitting headache." Well something along those lines. Lol

My take on vibrabium: vibrainiums true power is manipulating and near perfect transfer of kinetic force. Similar to the balls in a Newton's cradle but controllable. Rather than deforming the metal the force transfers thru the metal thru its molecular structure and released at the endpieces of its structure. So cap takes a head on collision the force travels thru the structure before ejected out the outside edge of the shield away from his body. And when he hits with the edge of the shield it tries to go thru but ends up goes back thru the end of the molecular structure causing the force to be reflected back immediately so that it bounces around without losing momentum. This property reflects a bullets force back exactly on itself causing it to cancel out and just drop to the ground creating the bullet proof effect. With advanced fine tuning and precision of manipulating forces exactly where you want it to go also leads to Wakanda's technological superiority. Idk what do you think? It makes to most sense out of what I can think of.