How powerful is Saitama's Serious Punch?
Saitama, better know as One Punch Man,
is a character designed not to be taken seriously.
His power level goes way beyond 9000
because his strength comes from satire
and not any backstory,
so we've never really seen
this incredibly formidable hero,
though he doesn't look it,
unleash his full potential.
He will simply be stronger, probably,
then the strongest enemy he faces.
But I think, with a little bit of math,
and a little bit of anime investigation,
we can at least calculate what happens
when Saitama gets serious.
(electronic music)
For our analysis, we're gonna consider
season one of the One Punch Man anime.
In it, the most serious showing of Saitama's strength
is during his fight against Lord Boros,
a cyclopic alien invader who carries immense power
inside his Ken-doll-like body.
Let's take the fight blow by blow
until we get to Serious Punch levels
to see if we can get an idea
of just how strong Saitama can be.
We're gonna go step by step through this fight
because, by the rules of anime,
whatever enemy attack that you can withstand,
shake off, or deflect, you must simply be stronger than.
(laughs) Nice try!
This is why we have to evaluate all of Lord Boros' attacks,
just to see how strong Saitama has to get.
And Lord Boros starts out strong.
The first attack that One Punch Man has to shrug off
is a blast from Boros that the cyclops
claims can completely vaporize enemies, bones and all.
Since Lord Boros is always talking about
the energy bound within him,
how much physical energy would it take
to completely vaporize a person?
There are a few ways we can tackle this question.
The most direct approach might be a brute force method,
where we take the relative amounts
of everything inside the average human body,
all the calcium, all the protein,
all the water in a human body,
and see just how much energy it would take
to take those solids or liquids
and turn them directly into gas.
Going through some tedious calculations
that I'm not gonna show you
because then we would just be padding out this episode
like we were Dragonball Z or something,
you get around three billion joules,
three gigajoules worth of energy needed
to vaporize an entire person, bones and all.
This about the amount of energy
in your average lightning bolt,
but we should at least check this number,
our more brute force approach,
with a more practical one.
According to the Federation
of British Cremation Authorities,
it takes around 300 kilowatt hours
of natural gas and electrical energy
to reduce a person completely to ash,
to vaporize almost all of them.
It just so happens that if you convert this value,
you get just about
one gigajoule,
which means our numbers from two separate approaches
are in decent agreement,
which means our values get an S ranking,
but this is the low end of the energy on display
during this fight because...
Just a second.
Because next, Lord Boros punts Saitama to the moon
and this would take even more energy.
You've probably heard of the term escape velocity before.
It's the theoretical velocity at which
you'd have to launch something
off the surface of a body, like a planet in space,
in order to move that object infinitely far away.
Such that it is always moving outside of the
gravitational influence of that body,
always slowing down, but never approaching zero
and never falling back in.
On Earth, that value is around 11.2 kilometers per second.
You can use this theoretical velocity
to get at how much energy you would need
to put into something to punt it off the surface
of a planet, like Saitama.
You can use either side of this equation to do so,
either the kinetic energy needed to do that
with the escape velocity or how much work
you would have to do against the pull of gravity
in order to pull something off of a planet.
Ignoring the atmosphere, the amount of energy
Lord Boros would have to put into his knee
and then into Saitama's body is around four gigajoules.
However, if Lord Boros gets OPM to the moon
in just three seconds, as we see in the anime,
this value spikes to 700 petajoules.
That's more energy than the sun hits the Earth with
in total every second.
But Saitama shrugs this attack off too,
which means that his serious move
has to be even stronger than this.
What?
Now?
(sighs) Okay.
One,
two,
three, one hundred.
Boros' final move is a bit harder to put into
real world terms, but it should give us
a point of comparison for Saitama's final fist.
In the final phase of the Lord Boros fight,
the extraterrestrial being unleashes
an incredibly powerful attack, his final move,
but what this final move is supposed to do
depends on which version of One Punch Man
you are looking at or reading.
In the English dub, for example, of the anime,
he says blasting you and this planet to hell.
In the English manga, however, he says
wiping you away along with the planet's surface.
And the same confusion exists in the Japanese versions.
For this analysis, we're gonna focus on the version
where he says wiping away an entire planet's surface.
Simply because it's more interesting to me.
If you were an evil alien looking to
wipe out the surface of an entire planet,
how much of that planet would you actually be destroying?
Well, I've drawn Earth here to scale,
with Earth's crust the thickness of Earth's crust,
which I would consider to be Earth's surface.
And as you can see here, at 150 millionth scale,
the Earth's crust is almost nothing.
It's like the skin on the grape that is the Earth.
If you were going to destroy a planet's surface,
relatively speaking, although it would take
an obscene amount of energy,
you wouldn't be destroying all that much.
Now, what does wipe out the surface of a planet really mean?
If we're talking about a big anime-style fight,
I'm guessing Lord Boros wants to vaporize
the surface of the planet like he wanted to
vaporize Saitama's bones.
If that's the case,
we need how much energy it will take
to turn Earth rock into sick Earth rock vape.
Just like ice can go from ice to water to steam
if you add enough heat energy,
rock can go to rock vapor if you add enough heat energy,
so if you wanted vaporize some section of Earth's crust,
you would just need to know the total amount of heat needed.
However, the Earth is a very complicated thing
with many different materials
and many different temperatures
and you would have to do an equation like this
with specific heats, heats of fusion, heats of vaporization
for every single different material
and how much mass and it's percentages and
it's very complicated.
So, instead, we are just going to broadly approximate.
Estimating and approximating, I think a decent value
for how much energy it will take
to vaporize one cubic meter of Earth's crust
will be around 25 gigajoules.
The numbers are so large here,
even if we're off by just a little bit,
it won't matter all that much.
Now, all we have to is apply our approximation
to the entirety of Earth's surface.
If Lord Boros launched an attack
to vaporize the entirety of Earth's surface,
it would have to have enough energy
to completely erase what amounts to
about 1% of Earth's volume.
Do the math with our values and you'll find
that the total amount of energy required
to vaporize all of Earth's surface
is a million
septillion
joules, which is a ridiculous amount of energy.
Surely, ridiculous enough to be associated
with a character like Saitama.
But, like we did before, let's just check our numbers.
If this is the amount of energy to vaporize 1% of Earth,
what would 100% of the energy be?
By simple multiplication, the value would then be
10 to the 32 joules and this just happens to be
almost exactly the gravitational binding energy of Earth,
how much energy you would have to put into Earth
to remove all of its pieces out into infinity or destroy it.
This is almost the value that you always hear discussed
when we talk about the Death Star.
So, our value actually makes a confusing amount of sense.
And, therefore, this is the amount of energy
Saitama's Serious Punch would have to deflect.
And so, by the rules of anime, Saitama's Serious Punch
has to be at least this strong.
Strong enough to evaporate entire sections of a planet
like it was nothing.
(screaming) One punch!
Now that we comparisons for serious punch energies,
we can investigate how the move actually works.
What?
It's not weird.
The Serious Punch, unlike other anime-style final moves,
doesn't look like some kind of blast of plasma energy,
rather it looks like a gust of air.
Or at least this time it looks like a gust of air.
The same kind of gust that put a hole
in a mountain behind Genos that one time.
So now, let's focus on the effect this move actually has,
parting clouds across the entire planet.
I think there is a real connection
to real world energies here.
This is a very simple diagram of a volcano.
Every so often, a volcano structured like this
can start to build up gasses near the top,
mostly water vapor and CO2.
When the pressure in this plug of air gets high enough
in what's called a Strombolian eruption,
this air gives way and creates enormous pressure waves
in the surrounding atmosphere that, yes,
can move and create clouds.
Here's a recent example caught in Japan.
Look how the air compresses and stretches
the atmosphere with the pressure waves,
such that it creates clouds instantaneously.
And here's another mind-blowingly beautiful example
captured in 2014 in Papua-New Guinea.
Look how the pressure waves almost deform the weather
exactly like One Punch Man was trying to exaggerate.
These are serious punches of air.
Looking to the volcano literature,
you can use an equation like this
to estimate the total energy of an eruption
based on the final height of the plume that it spits out.
The final height for the plume
for that eruption in Papua-New Guinea
that we just looked at was 18,000 meters, 18 kilometers.
If that's the case, that means that this eruption
that moved and created clouds
had around 10 petajoules
worth of energy.
Now, by anime logic, if Saitama can force air
around and from his fist more energetically,
trillions of times more energetically
than this eruption that moved and created clouds,
then it's anime plausible that his Serious Punch
could do exactly what we see in the anime and the manga.
He would be bald, yellow-suited, volacanoful man
who is just a hero for fun.
So, just how strong is One Punch Man's Serious Punch?
At least in season one of the anime,
behind Saitama's fist has to be an eruption of energy,
a gloved volcano of satirical strength that can wipe out
entire swaths of a planet's surface at the very least.
Imagine if he actually hit something.
It would do a lot more than just part the Skytama.
Because science.
I'm fine with it.
(electronic music)
Thank you so much for watching, Kristin.
If you want to suggest ideas for future episodes,
you can follow me and Because Science here at these handles.
Also, we are on to episode four of
The Science of Mortal Kombat.
We just got to the science of get over here!
You're gonna wanna check it out
because there's rope involved.