- [Kyle] Could Ant-Man defeat Thanos by...
Uh, flying into his butt?
Dread it.
Run from it.
The memes still arrive all the same.
And now, they are here.
Or should I say, "Science is here."
The Avengers have proven they are willing to do
whatever it takes to save the universe.
So, could Ant-Man defeat Thanos by flying into his butt?
Yeah, we're doin' it.
(exhales)
You did this to me.
Alright, so it's time to ask the cheeky questions.
There's been a meme going around for months now
that the easiest way to defeat Thanos in Avengers: Endgame
is for Ant-Man to fly up into Thanos' butt,
expand to Giant-Man size, and then I guess,
explode him from the inside out.
The idea is gaining so much traction
that people are actually asking Paul Rudd about it,
and surely he has more promotional things to do.
So in the grand tradition of this program,
let's take this ridiculous situation absolutely seriously
and try to figure out what would really happen
in a battle between Scott Lang and intes-Titan.
(laughs) C'mon, that was pretty good.
First, obviously, having someone or something
enter your body and then expand to human size
or greater and explode you would be
an absolutely horrible way to die.
But Thanos does not have to explode
for this Ant-Man move to kill him.
If Ant-Man really entered Thanos' colon,
I told you we were gonna take this absolutely seriously,
then all he would have to do is perforate
the bowel tissue, or tear through it.
Bowel perforation is an extremely serious injury,
and that's because many different species of bacteria
live inside your guts alongside of you,
doing beneficial, sometimes harmful,
and sometimes neutral things.
But if they get out into your surrounding body tissues,
they can cause deadly infections.
The mortality rate from this kind of injury
is somewhere between,
according to the literature, 11 and 81%.
So, if Ant-Man just perforated the colon tissue,
that might be enough to defeat Thanos.
Our next question is, then,
can Ant-Man get into angry Grimace's butt?
This is an easy one.
If Ant-Man can access with his suit the so-called
quantum realm, which is the universe
on the very smallest scales,
he should be able to easily move between the spaces
of, say, clothing fibers on the millimeter scale,
and even skin cells of organisms on the micrometer scale.
The Ant-Man suit has allowed the user to pass
in between the metal atoms of a missile's casing,
so I think Ant-Man could surely get into that boo--
Alright, so now Ant-Man is inside Thanos' butt.
Now what?
If we think about this question more deeply
because I guess we have to now because internet,
it can't be as simple as Ant-Man just expanding
and that's it for Thanos.
And that's because when Ant-Man is usually expanding
he's only pressing outwardly on the air around him,
and we can do that right now,
air isn't very heavy, and so it doesn't provide
much resistance to outward motion.
This though, this is Titan colon.
Surely, Titan colon from an alien, superstrong,
supervillain, ultimate-being person must provide
more resistive force to the expansion of Ant-Man
than air would.
How strong, though, is purple butt?
These, these are the questions we must answer.
Now, we have to approximate just how strong
Thanos' colon is and how hard Ant-Man can push on it
to complete this anal-ysis.
What a quantum-mechanically-powered thief
can do to a reality-wielding alien's butt
is an extremely complicated question,
but I think that we can still
roughly approximate what's going on.
Imagine that we have a section of
the colon in question here
that Ant-Man will be expanding in.
What we really wanna know is
what will the forces and the stresses be
as Ant-Man expands in this colon tissue,
and will that stress overcome the so-called
ultimate tensile strength of this tissue?
We are doing very important butt science here,
so of course, as you know, we will be using
the Young-Laplace equation for estimating
the hoop stress created by the pressure
in a cylindrical pressure vessel with thin walls,
with the colon being the pressure vessel
and Ant-Man supplying the pressure.
(laughs) Duh.
If you look at the equation,
the tensile forces involve what we're looking for
on the colon tissue will be dependent on the pressure
that we have to find for Ant-Man,
what he's pressing on with,
the radius of the colon and the thickness
of the colon's walls.
We will get back to this equation
once we have all the numbers that we need
to compare to the ultimate tensile strength
of colon tissue.
One interesting thing to note while we're here
is that according to these equations,
it is much easier to inflate a section that is spherical
than it is to inflate a section that is cylindrical,
which is why (blows) it's much harder to inflate a balloon
at the beginning and it gets easier as it gets,
ya know, bigger. (squeaks balloon)
If the tension created in the walls of Thanos' colon
by Ant-Man's expansion exceed the ultimate tensile strength
of colon tissue, then obviously the colon will rupture
and this Ant-Man move will work as per the meme.
According to actual scientific studies
on the strength of human colon tissue,
yep, we found that study,
human colon tissue and it's ultimate tensile strength
sits somewhere between the ultimate tensile strengths
of human muscle and human skin, at .9 megapascals,
or .9 million newtons per square meter,
to rupture this colon material.
Now what's important for us is that .9 megapascals
isn't all that much in the scheme
of ultimate tensile strengths.
For example, a balloon has mor--
(balloon deflates)
A balloon's rubber has more.
Okay, so now we have an equation
to calculate the stress in up past Thanos'...
Th-anus, and we have the ultimate tensile strength
of human colon material, which we can compare
to Titan colon material.
Now though, we butt up against our biggest problem.
How much pressure does Ant-Man push
on the surrounding material with when he enlarges?
Is it so much that he forces material out of the way,
or is it not enough so he just conforms
to the surrounding material?
This is very important.
We have to solve this, butts depend on it!
This is where we have to start making
some serious ass-umptions because the movies
aren't very clear on exactly how Scott Lang's powers work.
Does Ant-Man actually push on stuff when he enlarges?
That makes or breaks this meme,
and the movies aren't very clear on this.
For example, sometimes Ant-Man is enlarging
through the dirt, forcing that dirt out of the way,
which is obviously some amount of force.
Other times though, he gets caught expanding
inside of a room, like the room itself
is keeping him from expanding further,
like our Thanos colon might.
Other times, whole buildings are expanding
with Pym particles, obviously pushing stuff
out of the way with some force,
but then other times Ant-Man is expanding
into a punch like he's providing no force
of his own at all.
Paul Rudd doesn't even know how to approach this question,
and he's Ant-Man.
- I don't know! I don't know.
- I surveyed every single shrinking or enlarging
of Ant-Man or The Wasp in the entirety of the MCU
and found that, more often than not, it is implied
that enlarging provides some kind of force.
Okay, but how much force?
I think the best example and most straightforward one
might be this, when The Wasp uses her car
and Pym particles to launch an SUV.
In that scene, the SUV looks like it's launched
at around a 45-degree angle and spends
a full two seconds flying through the air.
Now in that scene, the car specifically
is a 2000 GMC Yukon XL.
Yes, we must get this specific.
If we assume that this car gets
a rough parabolic trajectory during this launch,
which I think is a reasonable assumption,
then we can use the equations for parabolic trajectories
to solve for the initial velocity needed
to give this car this kind of motion.
Then, we can plug that initial velocity value
into the work-energy equation to see
just how much force applied over what distance
it will take to move the car from zero velocity
in the direction of launch to the initial velocity
we just calculated for the parabol--
just a second.
Do all of this and we get a force imparted
to the SUV from The Wasp's car of a little over
100,000 newtons, almost done, butt math!
The Wasp's car in this scene, I checked,
is a 2010 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter,
the dimensions of which you are seeing right now.
I think it is a reasonable assumption to think
that this force is being applied
over every square inch of the roof of the car,
because that is what is pushing on the SUV,
and if you do that, divide the force value
by the dimensions of this 2010 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter roof,
then you get a pressure value of 2.5 pounds per square inch
that Pym particles are allowing that Sprinter
to push on the SUV with.
Because Ant-Man is using the same
Pym particle pushing power,
I think that this, this is our pressure value.
Whew, okay so now we have everything we should need
to take this meme way too seriously.
So, Ant-Man shrinks.
He moves past fabric, past skin cells,
and into Thanos' colon.
He then enlarges with Pym particles
with 2.5 pounds of force acting across every square inch
of his body, and therefore against the colon walls.
Using even more butt studies to get
a range of dimensions for colon radii
and colon thickness, and we get a tension
in the walls of Thanos' colon of...
0.2 megapascals, or...
over four times less than the
ultimate tensile strength of human colon tissue.
Now, before we conclude, let's just check our numbers
with a different source.
According to another butt study from 2016, entitled
Rupture of the Sigmoid Colon Caused by Compressed Air,
I quote, "The average pressure needed to cause
"full thickness tearing of the human gastrointestinal
"tract is 0.29 kilograms per square centimeter."
Can you do the conversion in your head?
That's okay, I can.
The average PSI needed to rupture the human colon
is 4.12, or a full 60% more pounds per square inch
than we calculated Ant-Man would be pressing
on Thanos' colon with.
And so, if our assumptions, estimations, and calculations
are reasonable, no, Ant-Man would not be able
to just fly into Thanos' colon, expand, and defeat him
from the inside out.
Thanos' colon would be strong enough to resist
the continued expansion of Ant-Man,
and so this meme wouldn't work.
And this is especially true if Thanos' colon
is much stronger than human butt,
which surely, it must be.
This meme now has to be done and dusted.
So, could Ant-Man fly into Thanos' butt and expand
as a way of finally defeating the Mad Titan?
Well, if our assumptions and calculations
are close to correct, no, he wouldn't be able to.
The movies don't really give any good indications
that Pym particle expansion comes along
with any real amount of force.
The most straightforward example that I could find
in the films does throw a car, sure,
but if you take that force and distribute it
across the surface area of Scott Lang's
relatively smaller body, it doesn't produce
butt-bursting pressures.
In reality, if Ant-Man tried this meme,
he would be stuck inside Thanos' colon,
the size of Thanos' colon, and this surely
has to be worse than being stranded in the Soul Stone.
Let's turn that into a meme, butt-cause, science.
Oh, I guess you could say that
Ant-Man wouldn't have rekt-um.
You know, I have more butt puns,
if you want them, here's another one.
(electronic music)
I know on the face of it, it sounds maybe
a little ridiculous that a human wouldn't be able
to enlarge past and get out of something
that has a rubbery tensile strength,
like you wouldn't be able to get out of a balloon.
However, look at people actually trying
to get out of balloons after they do
a dumb internet challenge.
You can be easily constrained and trapped
inside something that has colon-like properties,
so I don't think it's as ridiculous as it seems on its face.
Thank you so much for watching, Christina,
if you want more of me and you want to suggest
ideas for future episodes,
please follow us here at these handles on social media.
Also, the fourth episode of The Science of Mortal Kombat
is now live, we are nearing to a close,
and whoa, that last one, hey,
we really made that guy get over here, huh?
If you haven't seen it, you're gonna wanna check it out.
Thanks.
(electronic music)