Why Batman's Grappling Hook Should Kill More People (Because Science w/ Kyle Hill)

Batman has one rule no killing he certainly has the means to build a weapon that could level a city or at the very least kill a guy but he never does that's funny because the way that he most commonly saves people is also the most deadly that's the second most famous Batman gadget aside from the Cape his grappling gun it's taken many forms over the years through movies and video games and comics but the idea is the same shoot out a wire that sticks into a wall and ascend or hook onto someone or something and catch it as it's falling when I started researching this episode I wanted to figure out how fast Batman could rappel up the side of the building without ripping his arm right off but it turns out that's really really complicated and it's hard to find numbers in how much force it takes to rip someone's arm or leg right off of their body but the numbers that I did find pointed me in a different direction that's still also really fun and kind of morbid so let's go that direction looking through references and journal entries and blog posts and horror stories of people getting their arms ripped off while playing tug of war don't Google search that I ended up agreeing with Randall Munroe of the fantastic webcomic xkcd who put the limb ripping limit at around 10 kilonewtons or 10,000 Newton's of force I didn't go with Batman ripping off his own arm when shooting off his grapple gun because when you look at the movies he never really zips up a building that fast but what he does do is grab other people's limbs all the time when they're falling off of the size of buildings with that tear off their limbs instead Oh to find out we have to look at specific examples from the films and I must warn you it does not turn out well Bruce you calculate the kind of forces that someone would experience after coming to a complete stop while in freefall you have to know how fast they're moving when they do stop and to do that when someone is falling towards the ground their cell rating at G or the acceleration due to gravity around ten meters per second per second and if you multiply that by T or the amount of time they're falling you get viii or the velocity they are traveling at when they are stopped by a grappling hook we also have to know something called impulse or I that's just how some things momentum changes which is that velocity times that things mass that equals impulse and if you divide that impulse by the time it takes them to stop you no longer have impulse you have a force do you see why I'm more high energy usually sounding like a teacher is not always fun so let's look at a few examples to see if Batman's grappling gun would break you in 1989's Batman Vicki Vale is falling for around 16 seconds before she and Batman are stopped after 16 seconds the pair would be falling at around 160 meters per second ignoring air resistance but in reality they would be falling at a bit over terminal velocity for a person shaped thing around 53 meters per second if they stopped in maybe a tenth of a second the force on the pair is huge 46,000 Newtons that would certainly rip off a limb or at least be enough G's to kill them the dad in 1995's Batman Forever Nicole Kidman or whatever her character's name was is falling for around nineteen seconds before the grappling hook line goes totally rigid she should also be going at a terminal velocity by then or around 53 meters per second and if the stopping time is the same she's pulling 38 kilonewtons of force yep she's dead oh damn oh yeah and Robin to Dan in 2008 The Dark Knight The Joker falls for only 5 seconds before being caught by the leg still he'd nearly hit terminal velocity in that time or around 50 meters per second when stopped his leg experiences 44,000 Newtons yep leg right up basically if you've been falling off of something for more than a second or two Batman is not going to be able to save you by grappling your body just asks spider-man about Gwen Stacy anyway there are still ways to get around death by grapple you can increase the amount of time that someone takes to slow down I bet Batman can build a device that slowly slow someone down after it feels tension and doesn't just go totally rigid although I'm gonna bet that Batman is gonna accidentally break his one rule every once in a while because charge faster way by now I'm sure you've seen our kick-ass team Nerdist video where me and the gang are trying to get back our Xboxes from a bunch of jerks and we take them out and buy take them out i mean division style well if you're wondering why we did that it wasn't just because they had our Xboxes and malik sweet sweet saves its to celebrate the release of Tom Clancy's the division out right now on PC Xbox one and ps4 like our sketch it's about the aftermath of a massive pandemic and descends the city in new york city into chaos and you are an agent of the division you have to upgrade your gear and specialize and take the city back so go grab that because it sounds like a lot of fun and thank you to the division for sponsoring today's episode at superior spider as on Twitter when Nightcrawler teleports shouldn't he create some kind of vacuum that would create a huge boom whenever he teleported yes superior spider you are most correct if he was to teleport he would leave a vacuum in an area of space that had nothing where his atoms used to be in the air would rush in and many hundreds of meters per second and close and causes audible sonic boom around that area so not very stealthy try to try to get into the what to the White House with that or whatever he did in that movie movie

Channel: Nerdist

Views: 790,914

Keywords: Nerdist, Fvid, Because Science, Kyle Hill, science, batman v superman, grappling hook, batman begins, batman forever, arkham asylum, arkham city, arkham knight, video game, movie

Id: d39sY1rkICE

Length: 6min 42sec (402 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 17 2016