Does GODZILLA have a biological limit?

today's episode is sponsored by Wizards of the coast welcome to my megafauna menagerie the place where I come to study beasts of all sizes and shapes I'm visiting today because my favorite game Magic the Gathering is returning to a land of behemoths in its latest set I Corey and they've even partnered with the iconic Toho film studio to bring Godzilla itself to the new set so I figured that today would be the perfect opportunity to ask the big question just how big can a creature like Godzilla get oh I just fed you we're running out of pallets of spam she loves spam now entering the facility why aren't there any animals the size of skyscrapers why haven't there ever been animals this size well while it would be pretty dope if there were all life on Earth has natural limits placed upon it that steer organisms away from gigantic it's first consider just the muscle it would take to move a movie size body around the largest creature to ever exist on the planet Earth the blue whale has over 50,000 pounds of purely propulsive swimming muscle more than Big Ben ways and it can still be hopelessly entangled by a single fishing it being big is very hard consider another limit the size of the bones needed to support these massive muscles another colossus the brontosaurus had femur bones the width of tree trunks and yet it still didn't scrape the sky there are other limits on natural life like metabolism but these are the big ones themselves a consequence of gravity the great way to given that doesn't mean that the infinite crucible that is evolution hasn't come up with some clever ways for life to circumvent some of these limits consider our friend the blue whale again outside of water it just cannot exist its own weight would crush itself but in water that's a different story observe my pool my bucks Oh science what I'm gonna do this is just regular old science water what I'm gonna do is take a cup very carefully I'm gonna take a copper ingot ooh 99.9% pure and it is weighted exactly one pound and I'm gonna drop it in this boxer science it's six obviously but now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to I'm going to take a Magic the Gathering play mat and tube exactly weighted to one pound as well and I'm gonna place that in the water now what happens it perfectly floats why they're exactly the same weight but one is floating and the other does not well they are experiencing different forces one is experiencing more of a buoyant force which is the force pushing back on objects when they're submerged in a fluid like water and it's equal to the weight of that fluid they're pressing out of the way the tube is pressing more water out of the way so is more of a buoyant force and it just happens to float compared to the ingen a blue whale outside of water might be a hundred and eighty thousand kilograms but in water the effective weight is reduced by 75% Godzilla is semi-aquatic so that would go a long way towards explaining its massive girth administrator Lola just ate another car clever girl it's a good thing too that Godzilla is apparently a limitless reservoir of energy because being big costs a lot of energy working again with my friend and evolutionary biomechanism are hutchinson we came up with some estimates what we did is look to the research for empirical relationships relationships discovered through experiment and not necessarily theory and scale them up to Godzilla size that Godzilla seen here which we figure is about 20,000 tons now if use this relationship and plug in that W that mass in kilograms you find that it would take hundreds of thousands of joules just for Godzilla to take a single step to fuel a jaunt across a city like Tokyo it would take the largest power plant in the United States twenty seconds to generate the equivalent amount that Godzilla would need or you could use an empirical relationship like this one plug in that mass mass and get the amount of calories that Godzilla would need every day and you find that every day he'd need about 38 years worth of human food that means every two days Godzilla would need to eat the equivalent amount of food that you would eat in your entire lifetime that's nuts and Godzilla probably isn't eating the junk that you shouldn't be eating that you know you shouldn't be eating you should stop eating it you and I are endo therms that means we generate our heat endogenous ly or within our own bodies as you can see that's opposed to something called an ecto therm which have to get their heat from outside of their bodies from a source like the Sun reptiles are ectotherms and you would expect Godzilla to be 2 that is unless it's a giganto therm these are creatures so large they lose very little heat to the outside environment its surface area is so much less than its volume that it retains heat as if it were warm blooded scientists think that many large dinosaurs and even modern animals like leatherback sea turtles may maintain a near constant body temperature like you or me thanks to giganto therm a while you could use any of the limits we've been talking about so far to try and rescale Godzilla most of those limits like a circulatory system functioning muscle fiber orientation bone density are just too hard to really model with so many unknowns for this unknown biology so we are gonna go a different route cartilage cartilage is a connective tissue that sits in between your bones and help provide a friction free environment so that the bones aren't scraping against each other and it helps cushion the forces from movement making it critical to proper movement it might be so critical in fact that it could be an upper limit err on the mass of land animals at least that's what dr. Mike P Taylor thought in his paper upper limits on the mass of land animals estimated through articular area of limb bone cartilage or something like that in this paper dr. Taylor provided a fairly simple method of calculation yeah I'll pick it up sorry the strength of biological tissue is usually measured in Pascal's a unit of pressure or how much force is acting over some area the force will be the weight of Godzilla or mass multiplied by the acceleration due to gravity on earth now we have to estimate the area of the cartilage in the leg bones that the force will press on dr. Taylor did this by mathematically scaling up a brontosaurus leg and distributing its scaled up weight over two legs instead of four because Godzilla is traditionally bipedal ten million kilograms in dr. Taylor's estimate pressing on just an estimated five square meters of tissue produces 19 million newtons of force per square meter inside of Godzilla's legs the best general figure you can find in the research for the compressive strength of articular bone cartilage is also in the millions of Pascal's but it's only five million now you do not have to be a paleontologist to know that 19 is a lot bigger than five so of the Hema this size with this 10,000,000 kilogram estimation one of the smallest sizes for Godzilla that we've ever seen at minimum means that this creature would be enduring extreme discomfort when just standing still and when moving probable cartilage rupture but don't worry we can use this exact same math to make a more plausibly sized monster what's that how are you standing there I don't know because you're cool and it's my show when Godzilla isn't scaring submarines or stomping around cities what does it do well another fun thought experiment that our friend dr. Hutchinson came up with is to consider the king of monsters like we would another king of the jungle the lion how much physical space would a land-based Godzilla need to roam what would be the true size of its terrifying territory well here again we can apply the same scaling equation we have been in the research and this time we are gonna use those for carnivorous mammals like the line if we do that and we use the smallest mass for Godzilla just to be conservative we find that land-based Godzilla would need eighty times more land mass and is currently available on the planet earth to roam around these scaling equations kind of get out of whack when you give them masses that are way outside their normal ranges but I guess it really would be the king of monsters if it needed an entire planet to itself with respect to the biology that humans are familiar with Godzilla is just too big so why don't we take the same scaling laws that we are working with before and try to bring the king back down into some more safe cartilage range what we can do is take advantage of another mathematical principle which just happens to be another limit on how big life can get the square-cube law this law relates the relationship between an object's surface area and its volume so observe this cube out science let's say that this cube Oh science has a length L that means each side has a surface area of l squared and that the total volume of the cube is L cubed now if we double L that means that the surface area of each side will quadruple meaning that it increases to the power of two squared and the volume will octuple or increase to the power of three cubed this square cubed law this law prevents animals in nature from getting too big because volume so quickly outpaces surface area that muscle cross-sections and circulatory systems just can't keep up math time what we are going to do is relate a brontosaurus to Godzilla like the good doctor did so first we relate their masses basically their volumes we don't know what our new Godzilla's mass is going to be yet but we do know that it will be related in a cubed fashion from the square-cube law so let's take the cube root of this relationship to figure that out then we multiply this relationship with the total area of brontosaurus cartilage to scale it down accurately now we yeah I know it's complicated but bear with me now we put all of this underneath the weight of our bipedal Godzilla again not knowing what it is there's no super simple way to solve that equation so what I'm going to do is pick the same mass and plug it into both of our X's if I do that I can see what my result is and see if it's close to my target of 5 mega Pascal's if I do that I can note the result and then pick another number to try to get even closer to where I'm trying to go this is called iteration and if you do this you find that you only have to decrease Godzilla's mass by a factor of 10 or an order of magnitude from around 20 million kilograms to 10 million kilograms the stress on the cartilage drops to a safe level of just under 4 mega Pascal's the King would still be 5 times heavier then a blue whale than the largest creature to ever exist on earth but the silver screen shaking size of maybe a hundred meters tall drops to just 20 about 60 feet very impressive not Skye's baby Godzilla could still work of course the creature could have biology completely foreign to us to allow for its immense size can have denser bones stronger muscles more robust to the reptilian cartilage and if the King's stayed in the oceans all the time everything gets much more believable and dare I say much better or it's or it's totally cool and fine just the way it is until next time now exiting the facility thank you so much to Magic the Gathering and wizards of the coast for sponsoring today's episode magic is hands-down my favorite game so it was a blast to work with them if you want to get your hands on the new behemoths of I Coria and especially the Godzilla monster series cards I know I do you can venture online too i Coria right now on Magic the Gathering arena or you can pre-order the set from your local game store for when it drops in paper on May 15th I already have three commanders I know I'm gonna build around thank you so much to the very nerdy facility staff for their direct and substantial support creating this video today I especially want to recognize research assistant KC Scott and visiting scholar banana hands if you want to join us on staff at the facility especially our patreon and our disk orbit right now hundreds of nerds are setting up their own remote game nights and trying to find spiders that escaped in their house and giving me episode ideas you can go to the patreon link in the description of this video and if you support just enough you get your name on Aria here each week and you can see there's more and more of you every one of these videos so I'm gonna pass the time bite oh one other thing that we calculated me and dr. John that was really fun godzilla is huge and because of that it was a hundred meters tall or so wouldn't walk quite as fast as you think dr. John came up with a figure of a round based on the hip height of Godzilla around eight point three meters per second which is like a good sprinting speed if you're a human so it would take Godzilla 11 days to walk across Russia so in a lot of circumstances you know in terms of world threat it could be like oh no Godzilla's arrived but we have quite a long time to wait speaking of waiting

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 211,013

Keywords: magic the gathering, mtg, godzilla, science, biology, physics, learning, education, stem, monsters, math, mtg arena, ikoria lair of behemoths, trading card game, because science, engineering, kyle hill, the facility

Id: zE1ODR3Xk9U

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BloodyPommelStudio]

In terms of muscular strength being a limiting factor we can put a very conservative lower bound of about 24ft. An elite 6ft powerlifter can squat about 4x their body-weight (3x body-weight on the bar + their own weight). It's not uncommon for an untrained person to lack the strength to squat just their body so we can conclude the powerlifter has at least 4x the strength needed to survive.

With that in mind and the square-cube law we could scale the powerlifter up by 4 or 24ft and they'd still have the strength to walk (though they'd certainly have a massively reduced life expectancy if they lacked other adaptions for a number of reasons).

This is of course ignoring all the possible optimizations an animal could have to help them survive, they could be a bit more pyramid shaped increasing their leg strength to bodymass ratio, have long elastic ligaments like kangaroos to take strain off of muscles etc, at a guess maybe 30-35ft would be possible from a purely muscular perspective.

I suspect getting enough calories would be the true limiting factor. Each doubling of scale would be roughly 8x the required calories then you have to consider the extra energy used to cover that extra ground. It's no wonder the largest animals spend the majority of their waking hours eating.