(suspenseful music, roaring)
(booming)
- I'm Jake, and before being chased by a giant alien,
I had two loves in my life: science and movies.
So, I decided to put myself in one of my favourite films: Men in Black,
to see if you could survive it.
Could you survive the massive kick-back from firing a tiny alien gun?
Being in close proximity to a galaxy condensed to the size of a ping-pong ball?
Or being swallowed alive by a giant alien creature?
Could you survive Men in Black?
(roaring)
(suspenseful music)
So just to catch you up to speed,
the giant alien that's pursuing us stole a galaxy
the size of a ping-pong ball, and in my attempt to retrieve it
I kind of upset it, now it seems dead set on eating me.
(roaring)
Oh, no. It's right behind me, isn't it?
No! Don't look! You'll give away our position.
I got this.
This is your last chance, you monster. Give me the galaxy.
- Never.
I'll take it back to my planet after I suck the flesh
from your bones, and eat your--
(explosion) (Jake): Whoa!
(laughing)
- Okay, that was... that was my bad.
You know, when handling a firearm,
you should always keep your finger here,
not here on the trigger unless you actually intend to shoot something.
But, you live and you learn.
And speaking of living...
Could you live through the immense amount of recoil
from firing a weapon like this?
Let's do an experiment to find out.
So, for this test, using measurements
that we were able to calculate from the movie Men in Black,
we want to see what would happen to the body
if you were hit with as much recoil as the cricket delivers.
So, here we have our dummy,
which is about the same weight and height as an adult human.
Then we have our canister,
and the canister is filled with compressed air, and a little extra nitrogen,
which all builds up at the end of this tube generating pressure.
That pressure then shoots this into you, and that momentum transfers into your body,
which again is roughly equivalent to what we saw in Men in Black.
So... let's do it.
Three, two, one...
Second, actually. Just to be clear,
this metal plate effectively represents the transfer of momentum.
Of recoil, from firing a weapon like the cricket.
Okay. And... fire!
(impact)
Our stand in cricket...
transfers the full momentum into your body,
and slams your head into the ground in half a second,
causing a serious concussion and splitting your skull open.
But is there a way to survive this?
Well, when a weapon has a lot of recoil,
generally a tripod is used to help mitigate it.
So let's try this test again with a tripod,
and another way to lessen the amount of recoil
is by adding mass to the weapon.
So in this case...
we are going to be adding sand bags to the tripod.
Increasing the mass should reduce the velocity.
And we can see that working here.
The body is nudged out of the way.
But, if it were able to stand it wouldn't have been knocked over at all.
Unfortunately, in the movie, they didn't have weights or a tripod, so...
(impact)
Now, in movies, when a character gets thrown back,
like in Men in Black, or just a little while ago, to me,
what they're doing is called a "Pull Stunt".
And a pull stunt is fairly straight-forward.
There's a harness on me, they attach this right there,
and then it looks something like this.
Whoo! (crashing)
(laughing)
That was fun. Back to the narrative.
We need to get to headquarters and give Em the galaxy.
But first, I need to find the galaxy.
(splashing) Oh.
That was convenient.
(engine starting)
Em. I'm on my way.
You're gonna love headquarters. There's aliens everywhere, agents, it's really fantastic.
(car beeping)
(mysterious music)
(door clanging shut)
Where is everybody?
- What are you doing? We gotta get out of here!
The whole place is gonna explode!
- I gotta go talk to Em.
So many stairs.
(panting) Oh, there's more stairs.
Em. Where is everybody?
- All the aliens are fleeing Earth, 'cause they think it's gonna get blown up.
(sighing) Like that would be the first time?
(Jake): So it's just you and I?
- Unfortunately, yeah. And we might not be here much longer.
Couple of hours ago, the Vulgarians broadcast a message
saying that they would blow up planet Earth
if we didn't get them back the galaxy.
- Wait... You mean this galaxy? - That's the one.
- How did they even get a spiral galaxy to fit into such a small volume?
- Mmm, very good question. But more importantly...
How much does it weigh?
(Jake): H-How are we standing?
Where'd the furniture go?
- Imagine a cloud of gas floating in outer space.
If we wanted to compress it to fit it in a smaller space,
we could do so, but at a certain point,
the pressure in the core would be so great,
nuclear fusion would occur.
(explosion)
A star would be born.
Interesting things happen when you compress stuff a lot.
But we don't just want to compress a cloud of gas.
We're talking about compressing an entire galaxy,
and galaxies are massive.
For example, our galaxy, the Milky Way,
is 200,000 light-years across.
It contains hundreds of billions of stars,
and at least 100 billion planets.
That is a lot of mass.
How much would all of that weigh? Well, depends what you weigh it on.
But, its mass, whoo!
We're talking a mass equal
to about 1.2 trillion solar masses.
That's about 20 tredecillion kilograms.
That's a big number.
Okay, that much mass compressed into something the size of a ping-pong ball,
you wouldn't have a nifty little tchotchke, no!
You'd have a black hole.
A black hole with a diameter of more than half a light-year.
We would be inside it right now. The entire Earth
would be sucked inside. Our solar system would be gone.
But since that's not happening right now, since we're safe,
and because the laws of physics say doing so would pretty much be impossible,
I think it's safe to say that a galaxy in your pocket
is impossible. We have nothing to fear.
- Oh. Well that's great.
- Or do we?
An advanced alien civilization may be able to collapse a galaxy
down to the size of a ping-pong ball
without changing its shape, and without removing any of its mass.
If aliens could do that with an entire galaxy,
and fit it in a ping-pong ball, they may also be able to, at all times, access its energy.
And how much energy is inside an entire galaxy?
Every second, there's enough radiant energy from a galaxy
to boil Earth's oceans...
258.9 billion times.
- So it seems like the best option is to get this thing off of our planet,
before they, or it, destroys all life as we know it.
- Yeah, that would probably be a good idea.
- Where did the furniture come from?
- The Vulgarians have told us where they want to meet you.
I've sent those coordinates to your car.
- I won't let you down.
- Close the door.
(door closing)
- Oh... Mm-hmm.
(suspenseful music)
- Ah. London looks a lot like Los Angeles.
(chittering) (Jake): You...
- I'll take that galaxy back.
- Didn't I blow you up already though?
I mean, I think there's still some of you on the bottom of my shoe.
- Aww, you think she was the only one of us on this planet?
How do you think we create so much content so frequently?
We're all Rosanna Pansino.
- Weird, but uh...
Don't move!
Put your hands on your head.
- If you insist.
(intense music) - Ah...
(roaring)
Well, this sucks...
(music stops) Ugh!
Ah, ah, yeah.
Alright. So, obviously in Men and Black,
and what just happened to me,
when you get eaten by a giant insect-like creature,
you end up in its stomach.
But in the movie, when we see the inside of the stomach,
it's closer to what we imaging a mammal stomach to look like, which is this:
an organ filled with digestive acid.
And if we were actually eaten by an insect, it would look like this:
an insect's stomach breaks its food down by a grinding action instead of using acid.
Basically, it pulverizes its prey.
Not only has a human being never been eaten whole by an insect,
as far as we know, but insects are so small,
it's difficult to film how they digest food.
However, we did find a device to help us visualize what that process would look like,
if a human were swallowed by a giant insect.
A woodchipper.
(soft piano music) We've chosen the woodchipper
because its circular spinning blades and grinding action
provide a compelling and comparable representation
of what happens in the proventriculus;
the insect's stomach.
The metal teeth of the woodchipper
shred the incoming food in a similar manner to the denticles;
or the teeth of the proventriculus.
It's this action that turns the insect's food into pieces small enough to be digested.
The denticles are made from sclerotin; a hard material,
which is interestingly the same substance that makes up its shell.
In addition to sharing a similar motion in toughness,
the blades also have a slight claw-like bend to them.
Akin to the shape of the denticles.
While an exact version of the proventriculus and its denticles
doesn't exit on a large scale, the woodchipper provides an oddly captivating insight
to what would happen if I had actually been eaten
by a three metre tall insect.
All that being said, it does look really cool.
While an insect's stomach employs an active digestive process,
a mammal's is far more passive.
As we can see here in this time-lapse,
the digestive acid works slowly on the food,
breaking down the enzymes until all the nutrients have been leached from the meat.
Leaving a disgusting sludge to be passed from the body.
To really see how the acid breaks down the flesh and bone,
please enjoy this top down time-lapse set to the overture from the Barber of Seville.
(Barber of Seville Overture playing)
(Jake): Ew...
So, neither of those options really seem good for me,
so I think I'm just gonna get out of here.
(explosion, splashing)
Ugh! It's gross!
It's so gross!
Should really be more bothered by this.
(alien grumbling)
Oh. Hey. I think, uh...
I think this galaxy is for you.
Should I just...? You don't really have hands.
Should I just throw it at you? Alright.
(alien grumbling) Cool.
Yeah, I know, it took a while, 'cause I was eaten by an alien.
(alien garbling)
So... We're good? Earth's good?
Sweet. No, you can...
You can go to Taco Bell yourself, I'm not really hungry.
Alright, have a nice trip, then.
Alright, I think you might've seen a little bit too much.
That? That was just swamp gas.
I'm gonna need you to look right here.
And as always, thanks for watching.
Vsauce! I'm Jake, just in case you forgot when I neuralyzed you. Just joking.
That wasn't real, it's all movie magic.
And speaking of movie magic, if you wanna see how we made those incredible VFX,
like that alien row and that other floating alien we saw at the end,
there's a behind the scenes that chronicles how we did that. It's really fantastic.
In addition to that, there's also a new video from Michael Stevens at Vsauce1
and Rosanna Pansino that I cannot recommend enough.
They're in a playlist with a bunch of other YouTube original learning videos
just like this one. So to watch the BTS, click right here to watch the learning playlist
with Michael and Rosanna. Click here and, as always, thanks for watching!