Vsauce, I'm Jake and come in here - there is a giant prehistoric sea monster that absorbed
massive amounts of radiation roaming the streets.
In fact, he's been called The King of Monsters because Godzilla is incredibly...large.
Here have a menu.
According to Legendary Pictures Godzilla is 355ft tall, 50ft taller than the Statue of
Liberty, and weighs 90,000 tons - imagine a cruise ship...with legs...standing upright.
But it raises the question if a creature of that scale is possible...Could Godzilla Exist?
At 90,000 tons Godzilla is a very big thing, a thing that would need about 215 million
calories a day.
It is estimated that the adult human body has 110,000 calories so if Godzilla had a
taste for people he would need to devour 1,950 of them every day, increasing the global mortality
rate by 1.3%, or he could just eat 826,000 Waffle Tacos.
So has there been any living thing that comes close to Godzilla's weight?
Well, I made a chart.
At the bottom of the scale we have a human being, I used a completely accurate unphotoshopped
image of myself as representation, at 2.2 tons the saltwater crocodile which is the
heaviest reptile, at 11 tons the heaviest land animal - the African Bush Elephant, then
the heaviest animal to have ever existed the blue whale at 209 tons.
For heaviest organism that we know of there's the Pando, a clonal colony of Aspen trees,
at 6,600 tons...13.6 times less than Godzilla.
He actually weighs a little over half of all the gold we have ever mined.
Not only that, but he is 295ft taller than the Sauroposeidon, the tallest dinosaur yet
discovered.
In addition to Godzilla being the heaviest living creature, he would also be the tallest
and, including his tail, the longest.
Fortunately for us, we wouldn't need bullets or missiles to take down The King of Monsters,
just gravity and the square-cube law.
Let's say this cube is bone and the area of it's face is 1cm^2, giving it a volume of
1cm^3.
If we want to double the size the area, it's strength, multiplies by 4 but it's volume,
thus it's weight and mass, multiplies by 8 . As you continue to scale up, the bones get
bigger faster than they get srronger, eventually weighing more than they can support and the
whole thing would collapse under the pressure.
This can be seen to a degree with Robert Wadlow, the tallest human being in recorded history.
At 8ft 11in tall and 440lb, he had to wear leg braces and use a cane because his legs
had trouble supporting the rest of him.
He passed away from an infected blister on his foot due to poor blood circulation.
And that is another issue: blood pressure.
The taller and larger you are, the more powerful your heart would have to be to successfully
fight gravity and send blood throughout your body at a consistent rate.
In the ocean, Godzilla would fare a bit better since the water helps support that weight
- it's why whales can be as large as they are - but once emerging from the depths and
stepping foot onto the beach, he'd sink into the Earth due to the immense foot pressure,
his bones and cartilage would give out under his weight, and his body slamming against
the ground would be the extent of the destruction.
We'd also be able to make about 350 handbags from his feet.
Since pain travels through the nervous system at around 2ft per second, Godzilla would be
dead on the ground before the signal could reach his brain.
According to Paleontologist Dr. Mike Taylor, even a Godzilla at 1/8th the size would still
collapse under the pressure.
But let's say Godzilla could walk around and cause destruction to a city like New York,
how much would that damage cost?
My friends at Cinema Sins made a video detailing just that and I definitely recommend checking
it out.
Especially since we don't have to live in fear of a huge monster stepping on our fleshy
bodies, so we can spend more time watching videos or enjoying the giant creature free
outside world.
And, as always, thanks for watching