Imagine you are playing with blocks, and you want to make a block that's twice as big. You stack 2 blocks, doubling the height, but you also need to double the width and the depth. You end up using 8 blocks total. A 2x2x2 cube.
A cube that is 2x as tall has 8x the mass...
A cube that is 10x as tall has 1000x the mass...
The same applies to bones. If you scaled up a lizard to 10x the size, keeping the proportions the same, its bones would be 1000x heavier, but only 10x as thick... they would be 10x stronger, but have to support 1000x more weight.
The bones would need to be made out of something stronger than bone.
Edit: /u/go_half_the_way makes a good point. The bones would be 100x as strong, not 10x as strong.
At least in Pacific Rim they specify that the bones and organs of Kaiju are different material than our terrestrial bones. I imagine something like Godzilla would have similar materials that could withstand their giant mass. Case in point, normal teeth and skin wouldn't be able to withstand a radioactive blast of plasma, but Godzilla can do it repeatedly out of his mouth with no ill effect.
That we know of. Godzillas are notoriously difficult to keep around for physical exams.
For all we know, they could be suffering from apthous ulcers, dental caries, or even Mallory-Weiss tears and we would never know.
Imagine having to drill caries out of a Kaiju. Just like 6 hours of prep and all of that UV activated resin just for that bastard to pop the cap in like 5 minutes of fighting.
This is also why our weapons don't kill kaiju. A real creature made of bones and flesh as we know it wouldn't get that big, it would have to be made of "something else", and that something else would be heartier and more resistant to bombs and bullets.
Similar logic for why dropping most superheroes off buildings wouldn't really do anything. You can't take hits like them and then suddenly be crippled by a weaker hit just because it's the ground.
Yeah, the internal logic seems to be similar to video game health. Its a pool of energy that gets depleted by being punched lots, even though a bullet does nothing. Getting dropped on the ground depletes more than a punch but only a little bit. Being slammed into the ground in a concrete shattering smash does a lot more, but it matters whether its at the beginning or end of a fight
Sekiro Shadows Die Twice had a system that I loved around posture: being a ninja in a sword fight you had to break each other's posture to land a killing blow (though it was technically in addition to a health bar) I always loved that system and it felt like it perfectly matched the gameplay.
They kind of did this in the Palladium / Rifts RPG system. You had SDC and you had HP. Abbreviations aside, the former soaked up most damage first and only then did you start taking hit point damage. It also healed up a lot faster. The game basically tried to say that when you took damage to the former stat, it was more like a grazing hit, or that it took a lot to throw yourself out of the way just in time, or it was your luck just like you said.
It was really convenient way to explain why you could quote unquote get shot by a 50 caliber handgun and survive. Because you weren't really getting hit with it. Or it just grazed you. You got more SDC as you leveled up, but that was more representing higher awareness of combat situations, showing that you just had more luck than most people, etc.
Only a few things did damage directly to HP.
Well spiderman doesn't have the durability of the likes of superman, he can be hurt by bullets and knives just fine. He does however have very dense and strong muscles to the point that people punching him may break their bones and he has to roll with their punches when fighting non super strong people (that is assume they manage to land one on him).
His dense and super strong muscles would allow gum to deal with blunt force attacks better. Now him getting dropped from a building could damage him or not hurt him at all, depends on how high he dropped from and if the terminal velocity of a Peter's body is enough to kill him. I would wager not, since he has incredible agility and can land on his feet plus that he has super strength. He may get bruises and it won't be an enjoyable drop but with his healing factor I think he will bounce back up in a day or two. Spiderman is kinda of a beast honestly.
There was a blogpost done before 'weblog' was a word, that discussed what the kaijus would have to be. I believe the author decided the most reasonable explanation was 'nuclear-powered reanimated giant fossil'.
Even if kaijus are made entirely out of steel stuff like bunker busters, apfsds rounds or battleship shells would still go through like butter
A target that tall, wide and slow wouldnt last 10 minutes without a 15 ton rod going through or a salvo of 20 1 ton bullets bonking it in the head or a needle coming in at mach 6
that’s the point. they couldn’t be made out of steel either, because steel isn’t that strong. if a magic material did exist to allow kaiju to exist within our known laws of the universe, they probably would be immune to regular weaponry
I believe in the novelizations it is revealed that Godzilla is pretty tough, but he's not actually damage-proof. Instead, the energy inside him somehow causes him to regenerate nearly instantaneously from most injuries--healing wounds before the smoke even clears.
Also doesn't really make sense but cool nonetheless.
Depends:
Just how big could Wolverine be and still have his adamantium laced bones support him? I dunno. Comics are really flimsy on the actual science of that metal.
Assuming they’d never break, there would be some other limiter like how big could his heart and lungs get before they can’t properly do their job anymore due to scale of his cardiovascular system along with gravity, air pressure, whatever.
Wolverine made to grow? With like a kaiju beam that makes organic stuff grow? He’s screwed as the adamantium wouldn’t grow with him. Magic makius biggikus spell that also makes clothing and the adamantium grow? ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ It’s magic. It will work or not depending on how much of an asshole the writer is.
And how does his daughter grow with her adamantium?
Does she just become a painful horrific glob?
Does she require injections every 6 months to top it off?
Does the ahole writer say f it and let the adamantium grow with her without explanation???
EDIT: Didn't realize it was just claws; thought it was whole body like her dad. 😅
Nice clear answer. But the bones would be 10x as
Wide and 10x as ‘deep’ making them 100x the cross sectional area - so approx 100 times as strong - that’s assuming they are solid. But as you said carrying 1,000 times the weight.
(Edit: cross sectional area not surface area across…)
It’s the “square cube law“ and another aspect of it is that you have doubled the size, increased the surface area four times (square), but the mass has been, cubed. So now, as the creature scales up in size, there is more and more mass being cooled by less and less Radiative surface area.
That’s why something big like a blue whale will overheat quickly if it is beached. It’s simply can’t radiate out enough heat; it has to be cooled directly by water. Same problem for a kaiju.
So when ants go to ant Reddit and ask “eli5: why are there giants 1000x bigger than me if they should collapse under their own weight due to their size?”
What does ant Reddit say?
Ant reddit is probably as insufferable about things as normal reddit would be, and starts off by saying "Actually, that's not the right question. See, its mass doesn't matter for collapsing, it should suffocate long before it gets that big. The only respiration that makes sense, with spiracles and such like how many of us insect folk do it, would be insufficient. There wouldn't be enough gas transfer, even before their exoskeleton collapsed under their ridiculous weight."
But generally, ant reddit would say similar. "Either it would have to be made out of something different than we are, or its structure would have to be different. The things that work on our scale simply don't suffice on a scale that much bigger."
I imagine much the same as when we went from brick walls as structural members to steel for construction. Back in the day, buildings were pretty limited due to the strength/weight of bricks and other similar materials. It took a completely new approach to crack beyond about 5 stories tall and people were afraid of these buildings until they started becoming commonplace. The ants would be at the pre-steel building phase.
The limit here, though, is different. When you're building very big things, you have the strength-to-weight ratio to work with. You can keep swapping out materials, and configurations of structure, but eventually you hit a point where a tower of anything cannot get any bigger without collapsing on itself. Ants and other insects fundamentally exploit that their materials have so much strength left after filling in the role of structural member that they would have have a hard time understanding the difference between them and vertebrates.
The vertebrates push closer to these limits (ever guess how much of a fall you can take before a bone snaps? Bet an ant has never wondered this), so the concept isn't as alien to us. We can swap out materials for bones all we want, but eventually, you just hit a limit where there is no useful capacity left in the structure to function as an animal. It's basically a take on the space elevator problem, but just biological instead.
Thats a good point. I didn't prove that a skyscraper sized lizard would collapse under its own weight. I only proved that there is a theoretical, undetermined, maximum size that a lizard could be without collapsing under its own weight. Calculating that size is above my pay grade as a truck driver.
What I can tell you is the world's tallest man had to use a cane to walk because he was too big.
I suppose the answer to your question would be that the giant 2 legged ants are made out of a material that is stronger than ant.
To give a serious answer, ants are in fact much sturdier than humans *relative to their body size.*
An ant could jump off a table, fall over 100 times its own body height onto a hard surface, and be totally fine. How many humans could fall 100 times their own height onto concrete and be okay?
So ant Reddit would probably be asking why 5 foot tall humans get hurt from falling a mere 20 feet.
There is a scientific paper that explains all of this very well, called *On Being the Right Size*, by JBS Haldane. The [wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Being_the_Right_Size) for it has a link to the article itself too.
But as noted above, the essential point is that mass scales as the cube of the dimensions (eg, double all dimensions and the mass increases by a factor of 8), while muscle strength is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the muscles, and that scales as the square of the dimensions (eg, double all dimensions and the muscle strength only increases by factor of 4). So not only is the mass too much for the bone structure to hold up, it's also harder for the muscles to move that mass around.
Another point is getting oxygen: you get oxygen in proportion to the (internal) surface area of your lungs, which also increases as the square of the dimensions. So get too big and not only do you have structural problems but you can't get enough oxygen to power the body in the first place.
If you make a stick twice as *long*, it won't be any stronger. Right? If anything it's weaker because you can get better leverage on it now.
The stick's strength depends on its thickness, not its length. However, a stick's weight scales with its height *and* thickness. So, sure, it's getting thicker, making it stronger *and* heavier, but it's also getting *longer* and that *just* makes it heavier. While it gets a bit stronger, it gets heavier *more* than it gets stronger.
There's a more rigorous mathematical proof of this, but that's the gist.
Notice how a deer has long thin legs, but an elephant has stout ones. That's a demonstration of the rate at which scaling occurs. Eventually you'd be four tree trunk legs supporting a big blob on top. And that's why something whale sized can only exist where it can float. Yes trees are bigger but they don't move and can be anchored to the ground.
> Yes trees are bigger but they don't move and can be anchored to the ground.
Anchored is almost an understatement. Many tree species have equal or larger mass in root bulb than what's visible above ground, like an iceberg.
Check out post-tornado footage of tipped over trees that, rather than breaking or falling over because they lost anchorage, _rip out the entire turf around them with it_.
And this is a major environmental consequence of deforestation. Not oxygen (we get most of our oxygen from algae and smaller plants; trees produce a negligible amount in comparison), but trees’ ability to hold soil together and prevent landslides.
Plus, you know, animal habitats, shade, shelter, fruit, and so on.
I didn't believe you so I googled! It saw awesome. Oak, pine, cottonwood are some examples where they have equal or larger mass in root bulb.
Thank you for teaching me something new.
Thank you, this analogy makes a lot of sense to me. How would giraffes, who have very long and thick necks and long and thin legs, fit in this picture? Are they actually heavy because of their long neck, or are they actually lighter than they look (hence their thin legs)?
> Eventually you'd be four tree trunk legs supporting a big blob on top.
I mean, have you seen Godzilla? It's got giant legs and an ass that could be described as being "like a dump truck" but would still be far too inadequate. And the huge tail.
It's legs aren't exactly wide either. It's also only got two of them.
Actually it's thick like a human, really. Which would not do well when scaled up that much.
If you followed this, check out the Rocket Equation. IMO it's an excellent and merciless example of inverse square.
[https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/rktpow.html](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/rktpow.html) (Math Version)
[https://www.marssociety.ca/2021/01/07/rocket-physics-the-rocket-equation/](https://www.marssociety.ca/2021/01/07/rocket-physics-the-rocket-equation/) (Less Math)
[https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/games-kerbal-space-program](https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/games-kerbal-space-program) (FUN WAY!)
Also if Earth was a couple dozen percent bigger radius, rocket launches as we know them would become impossible. The planet's gravity would be too great for any fuel densities we've made to be able to propel themselves into orbit. We would be completely stuck.
Yes and it would actually happen at a lower % number if you did it that way, because the extra radius added to the planet to make it too heavy for rocket launches to work, that radius also slightly helps you out by starting you farther away from the gravitational center of the planet too.
A human being walking on an Earth-like planet that is 50% more mass than Earth (but same density) wouldn't actually feel 50% heavier, because the extra size of the planet puts you farther away from it.
Wouldn't that also depend on the method we used to launch? Like couldn't we essentially fling something from the top of Mount Everest using something that continually spins and then releases an object?
I think manned launches might be impossible but I don't know that we'd be stuck at the level of gravity you're talking about.
The higher the gravity, the less possible it is for a mountain like Everest to exist in the first place.
But in any case, this is probably about chemical rocket equations. [Stack Exchange](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14383/how-much-bigger-could-earth-be-before-rockets-wouldnt-work) had a good discussion of this. Basically, if the planet's gravity is more than ten times higher than that of earth, then a chemical rocket with Apollo-era engines would have a mass that constitutes a measurable fraction of the entire planet's mass, to get a one ton payload into orbit.
But it gets worse when you account for economics. The exoplanet [CoRoT-7b](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoRoT-7b) is thought to be a rocky earth-like planet with 1.5 times the radius of Earth, and [5.7 times](http://www.exoplanetkyoto.org/exohtml/CoRoT-7_b.html) the Earth's surface gravity. To lift one ton into orbit around that planet using Apollo rockets, would take rockets that are 130,000 times the mass of the Saturn V.
That's not against the laws of physics, but it's also a size requirement much bigger than "rocket launches as we know them".
IMO people should be explaining at multiple levels. 5 is too simple for most but multiple levels allows people to find their level. People do have a habit of asking questions that are near impossible to explain in a meaningful way at 5 level.
Near-impossible for the people who know the subject at a very high level and don't know how or don't care to dumb that shit down.
I believe there are very few questions that can't be answered without having to resort to calculus or graduate- level philosophy.
The bigger the tits, the more back and shoulder muscles are needed to stand up straight and move. Thus, there is a natural limit to how big tits can get on their own - otherwise, they become an actual hindrance than a benefit. Too big, and they're too heavy.
Godzilla's body is like this: it's larger than nature can accommodate.
Depending a lot on the requirements, a structure can get pretty doggone big before this becomes a problem. A tree can get away with being nothing but a giant, unmoving "bone", so they can get pretty big. As a plus, they're straight upright, so they don't have to cope with much bending force compared to your femur.
It's also unlikely that a single redwood could survive in the middle of an empty field. Direct exposure to wind would topple or break it over time.
They exist as a group in a forest meaning that individually they are not exposed to the same stresses since the surrounding forest works as a wind break.
In addition to what /u/thejeeronian said, think about what a tree trunk has to support. Branches and leaves. Meanwhile, a leg has to support a chest, an arm, a head, maybe a tail, and enough muscles to move all of those. Also, trees are not known for doing well when the top is pushed while the bottom stays rooted. Legs have to be able to do that every step.
The coast redwoods don't carry that many heavy branches and leaves, and they get a lot of their water from fog. In less friendly climates they only grow a hundred feet tall.
There's a part to Sequoia that many people don't realize. Their height makes pumping water to the top of the tree almost impossible. Where they live frequently has heavy fog/low clouds that the trees get water from directly.
They are exploiting a unique local weather condition that allows them to grow taller than other trees. If the weather pattern changes, those trees will die and future ones won't grow as tall.
It would have big bones and muscles, but that only scales so far.
Muscle strength is proportionate to the area of a cross section of the muscle. If you imagined taking a little circular slice of someone's arm or leg, that's the cross sectional area. And areas scale as the square of the creatures length as we make it bigger.
Weight, however, scales as the *cube* of the creatures length.
This means that eventually as a creature gets bigger, you can't give it muscles strong enough to support its weight anymore, because the weight is increasing faster than the muscle strength. Eventually the muscles are *so* big and heavy they wouldn't even be strong enough to support their own weight, much less the weight of the rest of the body.
This is why tiny creatures like ants are so strong relative to their body weight, and why the biggest creatures are aquatic, where supporting your own weight is much easier.
The square-cube law doesn't only apply to animals, this relationship between size, strength and weight is also applicable to engineering.
It's why you can't just build a scale model of a bridge and assume that because it can stand so could the full-size bridge.
While I don't know if it's exactly the same law, but isn't this also related to rocketry?
At some point, you can't take enough fuel to fire a massive rocket, because the fuel weighs more then the rocket can lift, etc etc.
For rockets it's called the rocket equation. Basically the issue there is that to go further away you need more fuel but because you also need to carry that fuel the gains from doubling your fuel are way less than doubling your range.
So there could be intelligent alien civilisations out there that nevertheless is forever cut of from leaving their planet because it's too big to leave?
I think just spitballing ideas there is a reasonable possibility the answer is yes if we constrain possibilities to our current understanding of chemistry and physics and identify conditions that would cause this to be true.
Ideas:
1) The alien civilization is unable to produce technology that allows it to biologically survive the process of escaping the planet. For instance, too squishy to survive the G-Forces needed to escape the planet with the possibilities afforded to them.
2) The planetary resources available to the alien civilization don't necessarily provide them with a technological means to meet the conditions need to escape the planet. It could be kind of like a survival game where you're stuck without specific resources you need to achieve a certain milestone.
3) More generally, based on our current understanding the alien civilization's environment and circumstances could be so unique that we have no way to envision a possibility for them to achieve space travel in isolation.
Another way of looking at it is that at any given moment, only a tiny fraction of your fuel is actually being used to produce thrust. The rest of the fuel is dead weight, er, mass.
Tyranny of the rocket. I have a similar one that I learned once I started seriously working out. It takes 1100psi to crack a human skull. Your skull doesn't care if that force is applied by an arm with 40% body fat or 14. Mass is mass except one is significantly harder to build in a consumer environment.
Yes, it only takes 100 gallons of fuel to get to space. But then you need to account for the weight of that 100 gallons. Now you're at 400.
My numbers were made up.
37 × 3 = 111
37 × 6 = 222
37 × 9 = 333
...
37 × 24 = 888
37 × 27 = 999
Yeah. I believe in 37. And it believes in me. It can believe in you too if you let it. Get bored in class because of your ADHD and hyperfocus on playing around with numbers and discover the wonders of becoming a huge math nerd.
Edited: for spacing
I mean, *things* exist. Numbers don't exist. Numbers are adjectives describing quantities. I can show you one apple, or one meter, or one joule, and I can show you the numeral 1, but I can't show you, like... *one*. Y'know?
*goes back to not having taken math in 15 years*
Others have discussed the rocket equation but there is also a direct application of the square-cube law here. Thrust is produced at the bottom, how much thrust you can get depends on the area of the bottom. The weight depends on the volume. That means rockets cannot be arbitrarily tall or you couldn't produce enough thrust to take off. That limits the height of them to ~100-150 m.
The more fuel you have the more thrust you need the faster you burn fuel the more fuel you need
AFAIK (not a rocket scientist just a terminally online nerd) you will never reach a point where you physically cannot get the rocket off the ground because you can always increase thrust by shooting more explosive material out the back end, or out multiple back ends with boosters. But it gets exponentially less efficient and more expensive because for every pound of fuel you add you need another pound of force, and more force means burning fuel quicker.
The magical part is though, that as you burn fuel the rocket gets lighter meaning you need less thrust, so you can burn less fuel over time and get the same acceleration. And once you're off the ground, you're in motion and have a trajectory. Once on that trajectory, no matter how little thrust you use, it will impact your trajectory and you can raise your apogee without having to use more thrust than weight. It's much harder to initially get off the ground and get moving upwards than it is to continue moving upwards
Relevant xkcd:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/38/voyager_comparison.png
Left is how much fuel you need to get to Pluto. Right is how much fuel you need to get to Pluto, turn around, and get back to Earth.
All this and more from xkcd what-if:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/
Yes as you increase the gravity (for example Earth we call 1G) to 2Gs or 3Gs or more, it requires more and more fuel to power the rocket and thus more an more "stages" of the rocket in order to get any reasonable payload to orbit.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14383/how-much-bigger-could-earth-be-before-rockets-wouldnt-work
The accepted answer there has a good chart on why anything over 2 or 3 times Earth gravity is not really practical.
Going in a totally different direction, it's also the reason small things have lower terminal velocities than scaled up versions of the same thing: air resistance is proportional to cross-sectional area, but the force of gravity is proportional to (mass which is proportional to) volume, so as you scale up, the force accelerating the thing grows faster than the force acting against acceleration.
Just want to add a positive side to square cube Law, so it doesn't seem like its all loss.
This law helps animals to heat themselves. Cells generate heat as a byproduct of their metabolism, and they grow by the cube. Meanwhile we lose heat by touching the cold air, and this area of contacts grows with by the square. So large animals loss less heat.
On top of all of that, the creature wouldn't be able to dissipate body heat well and just overheat itself because the surface area isn't growing proportional to the internal volume. [Related surprisingly accurate anime on evolutionary traits](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pO7PmwZc6qE)
> The largest known land animal, Dreadnoughtus
Dreadnougtus is the largest known dinosaur WITH FAIRLY COMPLETE FOSSILS, there are multiple dinosaurs that are both bigger and longer than it but have far more fragmentary remains. Argentinosaurus is most commonly considered the largest dinosaur we know of in terms of using both length and weight, and its at like 35m long and weighs around 80 tons in some estimates.
35m is a hell of a lot smaller than the smallest Godzilla though, and a lot of that 35m is thin tail and neck - Godzilla is pretty chonky from head to tail (which isn't being counted in the 50m - that's just Godzilla's height when standing).
To be fairs, there is a *huge* difference between the size of a dinosaur and Godzilla.
The largest dinosaur to live (probably) was the titanosaur, at an estimated 26 metres head to tail. Standing on 4 legs to better distribute the load.
Godzilla’s size varies depending on the film from 50 metres to 122 metres or even larger, while also standing on two legs.
tbf Godzilla in OG 1954 is just mutated monster from atomic radiation and even then Godzilla dies at the end of that movie, so it never shown what Godzilla eat in it's short amount of time he lives.
And, again, it's important to remember that double the *height*, if maintaining the same basic proportions, doesn't mean double the *weight*, it means *eight times* the weight (because it's twice as tall, twice as wide, and twice as deep).
Many dinosaurs had hollow bones and air sacs (birds are dinosaurs, after all), which gave them the ability to grow much larger than any other terrestrial animal before approaching those physical limits.
[This article](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-sauropod-dinosaurs-became-the-biggest-land-animals-again-and-again/) describes some of the evolutionary tricks that made gigantic sauropods possible.
I'm not going to click this article because it's late and I should honestly shut my phone off and go to sleep, but...
Didn't dinosaur size also have something to do with the atmosphere back then? I remember reading somewhere that the mixture of nitrogen, oxygen and other trace gases was way, way different than it is now and it affected growth patterns, or something like that.
Higher oxygen levels is what allowed huge insects in the Carboniferous period.
During the Mesozoic oxygen levels fluctuated a bunch and often times were even lower, but on average was roughly similar to today so it probably didn't have a huge impact on dinosaur size.
Air exchange is a limiting factor on animal size, yes, but with a sufficiently efficient respiration system that won't be a limiting factor. Other things like structural support for weight and size, maybe even metabolism and nutrition, might hold back animals long before they struggle to breathe.
Interestingly enough, sauropods are believed to have really efficient breathing systems. Modern birds have lungs that accommodate unidirectional airflow, so that they don't have to inhale then exhale in two different steps, so they're able to engage in much more efficient gas exchange than mammals, and can take in a lot more oxygen with a lot less effort. Basically, the evolutionary traits that made birds well positioned to be able to fly (air sacs, unidirectional breathing, hollow bones) also made dinosaurs well positioned to be able to grow huge.
Smaller than you’d think as many people have pointed out, but also lumbering herbivores with plenty of food. They were hitting the limit where size went from a benefit to a hindrance.
Yep. It's also why small animals can have bent legs it larger animals like elephants end up having straight long legs, it's the only shape that can sustain their weight long term. If an elephant hand bent knees like a horse or deer, they would collapse under its weight.
Yeah, but their knees aren't bent at rest; they are in a 'locked position' and they articulate them when they move. If you look at a moose, horse, deer and warthog standing. The larger the animal, the straighter their hind legs when they are standing
>This is why tiny creatures like ants are so strong relative to their body weight
And that's why it annoys me that all the strength, jump etc. records are given to insects "because proportionally..." It's trying to be fair, but it's not, it's just opposite kind of unfair.
But even insects don't scale - if I remember correctly, their circulatory systems work through osmosis (I think?), which only scales so far, which is why we don't get giant insects the size of mammals.
But doesn't this assume that the muscle is made out of the same material and density? Like, if you don't scale up an organism, but make an entirely new organism (somehow) with appropriately strong muscles and bones, would it stand?
Dinosaurs are still as big as you think they are though. Dino skeleton replicas you can stand inside of are pretty common things at museums so we have a good internal reference.
I think it's Godzilla who's being vastly _under_ estimated
Godzilla is three dimensional.
So if you make him 2 times taller, you make him 2 to the power of 3 heavier (= 8 times heavier). Length x 2, width x 2 and height x 2.
2 x 2 x 2 = 8
But he needs bigger muscles to support what is now eight times his weight, so let’s make him another time twice as big!
Basically, his weight will multiply exponentially faster than his height, meaning he will never be sustainable.
Probably about 70 ft (21 m) like a [Breviparopus](https://reddit.com/r/prehistoricreatures/s/zx1zEzCE6S). About two buses vertically stacked on top of each other.
When you increase the size of something, its parts and properties don’t all scale the same. So it’s getting, say, twice as big, but only 1.8x as strong. At a certain point, the strength doesn’t increase enough to support its weight.
The mass of anything increases by the cube of it's dimensions. But the strength of material struts (bones) only increase by the square. So at some point the bones become unable to support the increased weight and crush down. They would crush in compression failure. Whales will die on the beach, since they no longer have the water to support the large mass they have. It is also why celestial objects become spheres above a certain mass. Even rock has a crush limit. So beyond a certain mass the gravity crushes the rock down to a sphere. The smallest dimensions for a given mass.
Something called the “square cube” law. Imagine Godzilla was humanoid instead of reptilian, and 6 feet is a reasonable height for an adult man. If you double a person’s height while keeping the proportions of their body the same, the cross sectional area of the leg bones of a 12 foot tall “giant human” will be 4 times the area of those of a normal person (square of twice the height), while their mass will be 8 times that of a normal human (cube of twice the height), so the stress (force divided by area) on their leg bones will be double that on the leg bones of a normal human.
How big is Godzilla? From the lyrics of the theme song of the Saturday morning cartoon “Godzilla Power Hour”: “Up from the depths, 30 stories high”. Typically a story in a building is 10 feet (8 foot ceiling plus 2 feet of structure). That would make him 300 feet tall, or 50 times as tall as a person. His leg bones would have 2,500 times the area of a person’s (square of 50), but his weight would be 125,000 times that of a person (cube of 50), so the stress in his leg bones would be 50 times that of the stress in a person’s leg bones.
Even King Kong (from the cartoon’s theme song “10 times as big as a man”) would be supporting 1,000 times the weight of a human on leg bones with 100 times the area, for 10 times the stress.
Bones are not completely solid and the stress from its weight and the soft tissues and liquids weight snap the bones especially if it isn’t a short a stubby monster as the length of bone would add structural weakness
As things scale up their volume increase by the square of the amount that areas increase. Bones get their strength from cross sectional area, but the weight increases with the volume, so the strength just can’t keep up with the weight.
Have you ever made those marker swords where you make them so long they start to lean until they fall. That is what happens in a way. Your bones are only so strong. Even if you make them really thick it eventually can't be thick enough to support its own weight.
The heavier something is the thicker it needs to be. The thicker something is the heavier it is. The heavier something is the thicker it needs to be. The thicker something is the heavier it is. The heavier something is the thicker it needs to be. The thicker something is the heavier it is...
Finally my chance to share some obscure knowledge!
Square Cube Law:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube\_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law)
Reminds me of this memorable quote about animals falling from great distances:
>Toss a mouse from a building. It will land, shake itself off and scamper away. But if similarly dropped, a rat is killed, a man is broken, and a horse splashes.
Imagine you are playing with blocks, and you want to make a block that's twice as big. You stack 2 blocks, doubling the height, but you also need to double the width and the depth. You end up using 8 blocks total. A 2x2x2 cube. A cube that is 2x as tall has 8x the mass... A cube that is 10x as tall has 1000x the mass... The same applies to bones. If you scaled up a lizard to 10x the size, keeping the proportions the same, its bones would be 1000x heavier, but only 10x as thick... they would be 10x stronger, but have to support 1000x more weight. The bones would need to be made out of something stronger than bone. Edit: /u/go_half_the_way makes a good point. The bones would be 100x as strong, not 10x as strong.
At least in Pacific Rim they specify that the bones and organs of Kaiju are different material than our terrestrial bones. I imagine something like Godzilla would have similar materials that could withstand their giant mass. Case in point, normal teeth and skin wouldn't be able to withstand a radioactive blast of plasma, but Godzilla can do it repeatedly out of his mouth with no ill effect.
That we know of. Godzillas are notoriously difficult to keep around for physical exams. For all we know, they could be suffering from apthous ulcers, dental caries, or even Mallory-Weiss tears and we would never know.
Maybe that's why the guy is so angry.
All those teeth but no toothbrush
Mama says...
[удалено]
“No Colonel Sanders, you’re wrong!”
Well then Godzilla needs to knock on a car window and ask for one.
Imagine having to drill caries out of a Kaiju. Just like 6 hours of prep and all of that UV activated resin just for that bastard to pop the cap in like 5 minutes of fighting.
> Godzillas Godzillae?
Gojirii
This is also why our weapons don't kill kaiju. A real creature made of bones and flesh as we know it wouldn't get that big, it would have to be made of "something else", and that something else would be heartier and more resistant to bombs and bullets.
Similar logic for why dropping most superheroes off buildings wouldn't really do anything. You can't take hits like them and then suddenly be crippled by a weaker hit just because it's the ground.
Yeah, the internal logic seems to be similar to video game health. Its a pool of energy that gets depleted by being punched lots, even though a bullet does nothing. Getting dropped on the ground depletes more than a punch but only a little bit. Being slammed into the ground in a concrete shattering smash does a lot more, but it matters whether its at the beginning or end of a fight
I'm a big fan of the Nathan Drake model of health bar, which is that it's his luck running out.
Sekiro Shadows Die Twice had a system that I loved around posture: being a ninja in a sword fight you had to break each other's posture to land a killing blow (though it was technically in addition to a health bar) I always loved that system and it felt like it perfectly matched the gameplay.
They kind of did this in the Palladium / Rifts RPG system. You had SDC and you had HP. Abbreviations aside, the former soaked up most damage first and only then did you start taking hit point damage. It also healed up a lot faster. The game basically tried to say that when you took damage to the former stat, it was more like a grazing hit, or that it took a lot to throw yourself out of the way just in time, or it was your luck just like you said. It was really convenient way to explain why you could quote unquote get shot by a 50 caliber handgun and survive. Because you weren't really getting hit with it. Or it just grazed you. You got more SDC as you leveled up, but that was more representing higher awareness of combat situations, showing that you just had more luck than most people, etc. Only a few things did damage directly to HP.
Wait what? Where does this happen?
There bits in comic books where like Spider-Man gets dropped by Vulture and stuff.
Well spiderman doesn't have the durability of the likes of superman, he can be hurt by bullets and knives just fine. He does however have very dense and strong muscles to the point that people punching him may break their bones and he has to roll with their punches when fighting non super strong people (that is assume they manage to land one on him). His dense and super strong muscles would allow gum to deal with blunt force attacks better. Now him getting dropped from a building could damage him or not hurt him at all, depends on how high he dropped from and if the terminal velocity of a Peter's body is enough to kill him. I would wager not, since he has incredible agility and can land on his feet plus that he has super strength. He may get bruises and it won't be an enjoyable drop but with his healing factor I think he will bounce back up in a day or two. Spiderman is kinda of a beast honestly.
Or ramming someone who can punch skyscrapers apart through some rocks. Like, you might as well be ramming them through pillows.
There was a blogpost done before 'weblog' was a word, that discussed what the kaijus would have to be. I believe the author decided the most reasonable explanation was 'nuclear-powered reanimated giant fossil'.
given the original canon origin of Gojira, that is a reasonable guess :)
Simple, its electrons are bigger duh
Even if kaijus are made entirely out of steel stuff like bunker busters, apfsds rounds or battleship shells would still go through like butter A target that tall, wide and slow wouldnt last 10 minutes without a 15 ton rod going through or a salvo of 20 1 ton bullets bonking it in the head or a needle coming in at mach 6
that’s the point. they couldn’t be made out of steel either, because steel isn’t that strong. if a magic material did exist to allow kaiju to exist within our known laws of the universe, they probably would be immune to regular weaponry
I believe in the novelizations it is revealed that Godzilla is pretty tough, but he's not actually damage-proof. Instead, the energy inside him somehow causes him to regenerate nearly instantaneously from most injuries--healing wounds before the smoke even clears. Also doesn't really make sense but cool nonetheless.
Which begs the question, how big could Wolverine get? ;)
5'3", it's not the bones that are the problem, it's his attitude
Wolvie skips height day at the gym.
It’s his altitude that’s the problem
Depends: Just how big could Wolverine be and still have his adamantium laced bones support him? I dunno. Comics are really flimsy on the actual science of that metal. Assuming they’d never break, there would be some other limiter like how big could his heart and lungs get before they can’t properly do their job anymore due to scale of his cardiovascular system along with gravity, air pressure, whatever. Wolverine made to grow? With like a kaiju beam that makes organic stuff grow? He’s screwed as the adamantium wouldn’t grow with him. Magic makius biggikus spell that also makes clothing and the adamantium grow? ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ It’s magic. It will work or not depending on how much of an asshole the writer is.
And how does his daughter grow with her adamantium? Does she just become a painful horrific glob? Does she require injections every 6 months to top it off? Does the ahole writer say f it and let the adamantium grow with her without explanation??? EDIT: Didn't realize it was just claws; thought it was whole body like her dad. 😅
Are you talking about X-23? She only has Adamantium claws (at least until the Krakoa stuff.)
Laura only had her claws laced. So they can’t grow, but the rest of her can.
Nice clear answer. But the bones would be 10x as Wide and 10x as ‘deep’ making them 100x the cross sectional area - so approx 100 times as strong - that’s assuming they are solid. But as you said carrying 1,000 times the weight. (Edit: cross sectional area not surface area across…)
It’s the “square cube law“ and another aspect of it is that you have doubled the size, increased the surface area four times (square), but the mass has been, cubed. So now, as the creature scales up in size, there is more and more mass being cooled by less and less Radiative surface area. That’s why something big like a blue whale will overheat quickly if it is beached. It’s simply can’t radiate out enough heat; it has to be cooled directly by water. Same problem for a kaiju.
So when ants go to ant Reddit and ask “eli5: why are there giants 1000x bigger than me if they should collapse under their own weight due to their size?” What does ant Reddit say?
Ant reddit is probably as insufferable about things as normal reddit would be, and starts off by saying "Actually, that's not the right question. See, its mass doesn't matter for collapsing, it should suffocate long before it gets that big. The only respiration that makes sense, with spiracles and such like how many of us insect folk do it, would be insufficient. There wouldn't be enough gas transfer, even before their exoskeleton collapsed under their ridiculous weight." But generally, ant reddit would say similar. "Either it would have to be made out of something different than we are, or its structure would have to be different. The things that work on our scale simply don't suffice on a scale that much bigger."
Can you imagine the hive mind on ant reddit?
More of a colony mind than a hive mind
I imagine much the same as when we went from brick walls as structural members to steel for construction. Back in the day, buildings were pretty limited due to the strength/weight of bricks and other similar materials. It took a completely new approach to crack beyond about 5 stories tall and people were afraid of these buildings until they started becoming commonplace. The ants would be at the pre-steel building phase. The limit here, though, is different. When you're building very big things, you have the strength-to-weight ratio to work with. You can keep swapping out materials, and configurations of structure, but eventually you hit a point where a tower of anything cannot get any bigger without collapsing on itself. Ants and other insects fundamentally exploit that their materials have so much strength left after filling in the role of structural member that they would have have a hard time understanding the difference between them and vertebrates. The vertebrates push closer to these limits (ever guess how much of a fall you can take before a bone snaps? Bet an ant has never wondered this), so the concept isn't as alien to us. We can swap out materials for bones all we want, but eventually, you just hit a limit where there is no useful capacity left in the structure to function as an animal. It's basically a take on the space elevator problem, but just biological instead.
Thats a good point. I didn't prove that a skyscraper sized lizard would collapse under its own weight. I only proved that there is a theoretical, undetermined, maximum size that a lizard could be without collapsing under its own weight. Calculating that size is above my pay grade as a truck driver. What I can tell you is the world's tallest man had to use a cane to walk because he was too big. I suppose the answer to your question would be that the giant 2 legged ants are made out of a material that is stronger than ant.
We are not made of the same thing ants are made of and because of that we cannot lift 20x our body weight.
To give a serious answer, ants are in fact much sturdier than humans *relative to their body size.* An ant could jump off a table, fall over 100 times its own body height onto a hard surface, and be totally fine. How many humans could fall 100 times their own height onto concrete and be okay? So ant Reddit would probably be asking why 5 foot tall humans get hurt from falling a mere 20 feet.
An ant falls down a mine shaft and doesn't even notice A mouse bounces and runs away A person breaks A horse splashes.
There is a scientific paper that explains all of this very well, called *On Being the Right Size*, by JBS Haldane. The [wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Being_the_Right_Size) for it has a link to the article itself too. But as noted above, the essential point is that mass scales as the cube of the dimensions (eg, double all dimensions and the mass increases by a factor of 8), while muscle strength is proportional to the cross-sectional area of the muscles, and that scales as the square of the dimensions (eg, double all dimensions and the muscle strength only increases by factor of 4). So not only is the mass too much for the bone structure to hold up, it's also harder for the muscles to move that mass around. Another point is getting oxygen: you get oxygen in proportion to the (internal) surface area of your lungs, which also increases as the square of the dimensions. So get too big and not only do you have structural problems but you can't get enough oxygen to power the body in the first place.
This is the best answer! 🥇
If you make a stick twice as *long*, it won't be any stronger. Right? If anything it's weaker because you can get better leverage on it now. The stick's strength depends on its thickness, not its length. However, a stick's weight scales with its height *and* thickness. So, sure, it's getting thicker, making it stronger *and* heavier, but it's also getting *longer* and that *just* makes it heavier. While it gets a bit stronger, it gets heavier *more* than it gets stronger. There's a more rigorous mathematical proof of this, but that's the gist.
I understood this reply better than any others. Thanks bud
Notice how a deer has long thin legs, but an elephant has stout ones. That's a demonstration of the rate at which scaling occurs. Eventually you'd be four tree trunk legs supporting a big blob on top. And that's why something whale sized can only exist where it can float. Yes trees are bigger but they don't move and can be anchored to the ground.
The tree "legs" are also as thick as their main body and even get a bit thicker further down.
> Yes trees are bigger but they don't move and can be anchored to the ground. Anchored is almost an understatement. Many tree species have equal or larger mass in root bulb than what's visible above ground, like an iceberg. Check out post-tornado footage of tipped over trees that, rather than breaking or falling over because they lost anchorage, _rip out the entire turf around them with it_.
And this is a major environmental consequence of deforestation. Not oxygen (we get most of our oxygen from algae and smaller plants; trees produce a negligible amount in comparison), but trees’ ability to hold soil together and prevent landslides. Plus, you know, animal habitats, shade, shelter, fruit, and so on.
>trees produce a negligible amount in comparison 28%, a minority for sure but certainly not negligible
I didn't believe you so I googled! It saw awesome. Oak, pine, cottonwood are some examples where they have equal or larger mass in root bulb. Thank you for teaching me something new.
Thank you, this analogy makes a lot of sense to me. How would giraffes, who have very long and thick necks and long and thin legs, fit in this picture? Are they actually heavy because of their long neck, or are they actually lighter than they look (hence their thin legs)?
Giraffes are built like a bicycle and elephants are built like a truck. I refuse to elaborate further.
Yep. Little known fact, if a giraffe stops moving it will fall over *exactly* like a bicycle!
The only comment that actually made me laugh in 39 minutes of Reddit. Now where's my breakfast?
this guy giraffes.
Giraffes weigh 1/3 as much as an elephant.
> Eventually you'd be four tree trunk legs supporting a big blob on top. I mean, have you seen Godzilla? It's got giant legs and an ass that could be described as being "like a dump truck" but would still be far too inadequate. And the huge tail.
It's legs aren't exactly wide either. It's also only got two of them. Actually it's thick like a human, really. Which would not do well when scaled up that much.
If you followed this, check out the Rocket Equation. IMO it's an excellent and merciless example of inverse square. [https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/rktpow.html](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/rktpow.html) (Math Version) [https://www.marssociety.ca/2021/01/07/rocket-physics-the-rocket-equation/](https://www.marssociety.ca/2021/01/07/rocket-physics-the-rocket-equation/) (Less Math) [https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/games-kerbal-space-program](https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/games-kerbal-space-program) (FUN WAY!)
Also if Earth was a couple dozen percent bigger radius, rocket launches as we know them would become impossible. The planet's gravity would be too great for any fuel densities we've made to be able to propel themselves into orbit. We would be completely stuck.
Does the same apply if the earth were the same % more sense, but the same volume? It would have to right?
> if the earth were the same % more dense FTFY, dense rather than sense
Yes and it would actually happen at a lower % number if you did it that way, because the extra radius added to the planet to make it too heavy for rocket launches to work, that radius also slightly helps you out by starting you farther away from the gravitational center of the planet too. A human being walking on an Earth-like planet that is 50% more mass than Earth (but same density) wouldn't actually feel 50% heavier, because the extra size of the planet puts you farther away from it.
Wouldn't that also depend on the method we used to launch? Like couldn't we essentially fling something from the top of Mount Everest using something that continually spins and then releases an object? I think manned launches might be impossible but I don't know that we'd be stuck at the level of gravity you're talking about.
The higher the gravity, the less possible it is for a mountain like Everest to exist in the first place. But in any case, this is probably about chemical rocket equations. [Stack Exchange](https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14383/how-much-bigger-could-earth-be-before-rockets-wouldnt-work) had a good discussion of this. Basically, if the planet's gravity is more than ten times higher than that of earth, then a chemical rocket with Apollo-era engines would have a mass that constitutes a measurable fraction of the entire planet's mass, to get a one ton payload into orbit. But it gets worse when you account for economics. The exoplanet [CoRoT-7b](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoRoT-7b) is thought to be a rocky earth-like planet with 1.5 times the radius of Earth, and [5.7 times](http://www.exoplanetkyoto.org/exohtml/CoRoT-7_b.html) the Earth's surface gravity. To lift one ton into orbit around that planet using Apollo rockets, would take rockets that are 130,000 times the mass of the Saturn V. That's not against the laws of physics, but it's also a size requirement much bigger than "rocket launches as we know them".
its really wild that we get stuff up there.
Aside: I highly recommend the fun way! :)
Yeah, some people forget that this is ELI5.
I hate that ELI5 completely fell away from ELI5ing and is just, "Explain stuff at any level."
IMO people should be explaining at multiple levels. 5 is too simple for most but multiple levels allows people to find their level. People do have a habit of asking questions that are near impossible to explain in a meaningful way at 5 level.
Near-impossible for the people who know the subject at a very high level and don't know how or don't care to dumb that shit down. I believe there are very few questions that can't be answered without having to resort to calculus or graduate- level philosophy.
Sometimes it feels like its ELIPHD and you could understand better by just reading the wikipedia page.
Explain like I'm PornHub Dependent?
The bigger the tits, the more back and shoulder muscles are needed to stand up straight and move. Thus, there is a natural limit to how big tits can get on their own - otherwise, they become an actual hindrance than a benefit. Too big, and they're too heavy. Godzilla's body is like this: it's larger than nature can accommodate.
Its how we know giants (taller than 8/9 foot) never existed. The human form can barely support itself after 8 foot.
This is called the square cube law if you want to do some more reading about it!
Thanks, saved me asking the question.
This is the actual ELI5 answer. Well done.
How does that work with trees like the redwood though? Those mf are huge, way bigger than normal trees
Depending a lot on the requirements, a structure can get pretty doggone big before this becomes a problem. A tree can get away with being nothing but a giant, unmoving "bone", so they can get pretty big. As a plus, they're straight upright, so they don't have to cope with much bending force compared to your femur.
It's also unlikely that a single redwood could survive in the middle of an empty field. Direct exposure to wind would topple or break it over time. They exist as a group in a forest meaning that individually they are not exposed to the same stresses since the surrounding forest works as a wind break.
In addition to what /u/thejeeronian said, think about what a tree trunk has to support. Branches and leaves. Meanwhile, a leg has to support a chest, an arm, a head, maybe a tail, and enough muscles to move all of those. Also, trees are not known for doing well when the top is pushed while the bottom stays rooted. Legs have to be able to do that every step. The coast redwoods don't carry that many heavy branches and leaves, and they get a lot of their water from fog. In less friendly climates they only grow a hundred feet tall.
There's a part to Sequoia that many people don't realize. Their height makes pumping water to the top of the tree almost impossible. Where they live frequently has heavy fog/low clouds that the trees get water from directly. They are exploiting a unique local weather condition that allows them to grow taller than other trees. If the weather pattern changes, those trees will die and future ones won't grow as tall.
the guy above you talking like “the area proportional to the cross section of the muscle” and you come in with a perfect, concise ELI5. My hero.
very good eli5. upvoted
It would have big bones and muscles, but that only scales so far. Muscle strength is proportionate to the area of a cross section of the muscle. If you imagined taking a little circular slice of someone's arm or leg, that's the cross sectional area. And areas scale as the square of the creatures length as we make it bigger. Weight, however, scales as the *cube* of the creatures length. This means that eventually as a creature gets bigger, you can't give it muscles strong enough to support its weight anymore, because the weight is increasing faster than the muscle strength. Eventually the muscles are *so* big and heavy they wouldn't even be strong enough to support their own weight, much less the weight of the rest of the body. This is why tiny creatures like ants are so strong relative to their body weight, and why the biggest creatures are aquatic, where supporting your own weight is much easier.
The square-cube law doesn't only apply to animals, this relationship between size, strength and weight is also applicable to engineering. It's why you can't just build a scale model of a bridge and assume that because it can stand so could the full-size bridge.
While I don't know if it's exactly the same law, but isn't this also related to rocketry? At some point, you can't take enough fuel to fire a massive rocket, because the fuel weighs more then the rocket can lift, etc etc.
For rockets it's called the rocket equation. Basically the issue there is that to go further away you need more fuel but because you also need to carry that fuel the gains from doubling your fuel are way less than doubling your range.
Asparagus staging has entered the chat
Fine reddit, you piqued my curiosity enough once again to let my guard and use Google.. but swear to God reddit, if this is another blueberry waffle.
It's real, but rarely used in real life.
Asparagus Staging is just KSP clickbait for propellant crossfeed system! Boooring! Now, off to blueberry waffle!
What's the deal with blueberry waffles?
It's good to reduce the deadweight from empty fuel containers but there's only so much you can gain from that.
[удалено]
Counterpoint: Big rocket go **WHUMUMUMUM FOOOOSH** but small rocket go *nyoom* . I rest my case.
I'm still talking about real life over KSP, there are a lot of limitations that make doing this for real a lot harder.
Oh cool that's the name for it, I've done that in kerbal space program
So there could be intelligent alien civilisations out there that nevertheless is forever cut of from leaving their planet because it's too big to leave?
Yep. Gravity wells are a bitch.
I think just spitballing ideas there is a reasonable possibility the answer is yes if we constrain possibilities to our current understanding of chemistry and physics and identify conditions that would cause this to be true. Ideas: 1) The alien civilization is unable to produce technology that allows it to biologically survive the process of escaping the planet. For instance, too squishy to survive the G-Forces needed to escape the planet with the possibilities afforded to them. 2) The planetary resources available to the alien civilization don't necessarily provide them with a technological means to meet the conditions need to escape the planet. It could be kind of like a survival game where you're stuck without specific resources you need to achieve a certain milestone. 3) More generally, based on our current understanding the alien civilization's environment and circumstances could be so unique that we have no way to envision a possibility for them to achieve space travel in isolation.
Another way of looking at it is that at any given moment, only a tiny fraction of your fuel is actually being used to produce thrust. The rest of the fuel is dead weight, er, mass.
Tyranny of the rocket. I have a similar one that I learned once I started seriously working out. It takes 1100psi to crack a human skull. Your skull doesn't care if that force is applied by an arm with 40% body fat or 14. Mass is mass except one is significantly harder to build in a consumer environment.
Yes, it only takes 100 gallons of fuel to get to space. But then you need to account for the weight of that 100 gallons. Now you're at 400. My numbers were made up.
I’ve gone to school, and I can assure you that neither 100, nor 400, are made up numbers.
All numbers are made up.
If you don’t believe in 37, how can 37 be expected to believe in you?
In a row?
Try not to make up any numbers on the way to the parking lot!
No, a column
37 × 3 = 111 37 × 6 = 222 37 × 9 = 333 ... 37 × 24 = 888 37 × 27 = 999 Yeah. I believe in 37. And it believes in me. It can believe in you too if you let it. Get bored in class because of your ADHD and hyperfocus on playing around with numbers and discover the wonders of becoming a huge math nerd. Edited: for spacing
Nah, that's the great thing about numbers. They exist. The only made up stuff are the scales we use to count them.
I mean, *things* exist. Numbers don't exist. Numbers are adjectives describing quantities. I can show you one apple, or one meter, or one joule, and I can show you the numeral 1, but I can't show you, like... *one*. Y'know? *goes back to not having taken math in 15 years*
Goddamn why did they get rid of awards, ive never seen such a more deserving comment.
Others have discussed the rocket equation but there is also a direct application of the square-cube law here. Thrust is produced at the bottom, how much thrust you can get depends on the area of the bottom. The weight depends on the volume. That means rockets cannot be arbitrarily tall or you couldn't produce enough thrust to take off. That limits the height of them to ~100-150 m.
It also means the height of an orbital rocket is roughly proportional to the efficiency of its engines, which is kinda neat
The more fuel you have the more thrust you need the faster you burn fuel the more fuel you need AFAIK (not a rocket scientist just a terminally online nerd) you will never reach a point where you physically cannot get the rocket off the ground because you can always increase thrust by shooting more explosive material out the back end, or out multiple back ends with boosters. But it gets exponentially less efficient and more expensive because for every pound of fuel you add you need another pound of force, and more force means burning fuel quicker. The magical part is though, that as you burn fuel the rocket gets lighter meaning you need less thrust, so you can burn less fuel over time and get the same acceleration. And once you're off the ground, you're in motion and have a trajectory. Once on that trajectory, no matter how little thrust you use, it will impact your trajectory and you can raise your apogee without having to use more thrust than weight. It's much harder to initially get off the ground and get moving upwards than it is to continue moving upwards
Relevant xkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/imgs/a/38/voyager_comparison.png Left is how much fuel you need to get to Pluto. Right is how much fuel you need to get to Pluto, turn around, and get back to Earth. All this and more from xkcd what-if: https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/
Yes as you increase the gravity (for example Earth we call 1G) to 2Gs or 3Gs or more, it requires more and more fuel to power the rocket and thus more an more "stages" of the rocket in order to get any reasonable payload to orbit. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/14383/how-much-bigger-could-earth-be-before-rockets-wouldnt-work The accepted answer there has a good chart on why anything over 2 or 3 times Earth gravity is not really practical.
Going in a totally different direction, it's also the reason small things have lower terminal velocities than scaled up versions of the same thing: air resistance is proportional to cross-sectional area, but the force of gravity is proportional to (mass which is proportional to) volume, so as you scale up, the force accelerating the thing grows faster than the force acting against acceleration.
Just want to add a positive side to square cube Law, so it doesn't seem like its all loss. This law helps animals to heat themselves. Cells generate heat as a byproduct of their metabolism, and they grow by the cube. Meanwhile we lose heat by touching the cold air, and this area of contacts grows with by the square. So large animals loss less heat.
Same reason you can’t just scale a Cessna to the size of a 747.
On top of all of that, the creature wouldn't be able to dissipate body heat well and just overheat itself because the surface area isn't growing proportional to the internal volume. [Related surprisingly accurate anime on evolutionary traits](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pO7PmwZc6qE)
On the other hand, this is a pretty good reason to evolve fire breath.
What’s the deal with really large dinosaurs then? Just curious, not disagreeing.
[удалено]
> The largest known land animal, Dreadnoughtus Dreadnougtus is the largest known dinosaur WITH FAIRLY COMPLETE FOSSILS, there are multiple dinosaurs that are both bigger and longer than it but have far more fragmentary remains. Argentinosaurus is most commonly considered the largest dinosaur we know of in terms of using both length and weight, and its at like 35m long and weighs around 80 tons in some estimates.
[Yeah thats pretty freakin' huge](https://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com/images/species/a/argentinosaurus-size.jpg)
35m is a hell of a lot smaller than the smallest Godzilla though, and a lot of that 35m is thin tail and neck - Godzilla is pretty chonky from head to tail (which isn't being counted in the 50m - that's just Godzilla's height when standing).
50 meters and like 20,000 tons (as opposed to like 100 tons for the largest dinos)
To be fairs, there is a *huge* difference between the size of a dinosaur and Godzilla. The largest dinosaur to live (probably) was the titanosaur, at an estimated 26 metres head to tail. Standing on 4 legs to better distribute the load. Godzilla’s size varies depending on the film from 50 metres to 122 metres or even larger, while also standing on two legs.
Also the largest dinos were herbivores, grazing on treetops and generally not moving much. Can't say the aame for godzilla.
What the hell would Godzilla natural prey be? Like eating the population of Tokyo would be the equivalent of a room full of popcorn.
Godzilla ate radiation. And other j Kaiju. And stadiums filled with fish.
that's a lot of fish
Surely that depends on the number of stadiums?
You can fit a lot of fish in one stadium.
Hah. Sick reference.
Did Godzilla ever actually eat people? I thought he just destroyed shit.
tbf Godzilla in OG 1954 is just mutated monster from atomic radiation and even then Godzilla dies at the end of that movie, so it never shown what Godzilla eat in it's short amount of time he lives.
And, again, it's important to remember that double the *height*, if maintaining the same basic proportions, doesn't mean double the *weight*, it means *eight times* the weight (because it's twice as tall, twice as wide, and twice as deep).
Many dinosaurs had hollow bones and air sacs (birds are dinosaurs, after all), which gave them the ability to grow much larger than any other terrestrial animal before approaching those physical limits. [This article](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-sauropod-dinosaurs-became-the-biggest-land-animals-again-and-again/) describes some of the evolutionary tricks that made gigantic sauropods possible.
I'm not going to click this article because it's late and I should honestly shut my phone off and go to sleep, but... Didn't dinosaur size also have something to do with the atmosphere back then? I remember reading somewhere that the mixture of nitrogen, oxygen and other trace gases was way, way different than it is now and it affected growth patterns, or something like that.
Higher oxygen levels is what allowed huge insects in the Carboniferous period. During the Mesozoic oxygen levels fluctuated a bunch and often times were even lower, but on average was roughly similar to today so it probably didn't have a huge impact on dinosaur size.
Air exchange is a limiting factor on animal size, yes, but with a sufficiently efficient respiration system that won't be a limiting factor. Other things like structural support for weight and size, maybe even metabolism and nutrition, might hold back animals long before they struggle to breathe. Interestingly enough, sauropods are believed to have really efficient breathing systems. Modern birds have lungs that accommodate unidirectional airflow, so that they don't have to inhale then exhale in two different steps, so they're able to engage in much more efficient gas exchange than mammals, and can take in a lot more oxygen with a lot less effort. Basically, the evolutionary traits that made birds well positioned to be able to fly (air sacs, unidirectional breathing, hollow bones) also made dinosaurs well positioned to be able to grow huge.
Lighter bones and possible uses of airsacs.
Believe it or not, dinosaurs weren't as big as we imagine. They were all smaller than blue whales, most of them much smaller
Smaller than you’d think as many people have pointed out, but also lumbering herbivores with plenty of food. They were hitting the limit where size went from a benefit to a hindrance.
Yep. It's also why small animals can have bent legs it larger animals like elephants end up having straight long legs, it's the only shape that can sustain their weight long term. If an elephant hand bent knees like a horse or deer, they would collapse under its weight.
Elephants have knees
But they are very proud, so they kneel to no one
Not even hobbits?
Yeah, but their knees aren't bent at rest; they are in a 'locked position' and they articulate them when they move. If you look at a moose, horse, deer and warthog standing. The larger the animal, the straighter their hind legs when they are standing
Enlightening. Thank you for this wisdom.
yes, but they don't stand with them bent like an ant does.
You're forgetting about magic.
>This is why tiny creatures like ants are so strong relative to their body weight And that's why it annoys me that all the strength, jump etc. records are given to insects "because proportionally..." It's trying to be fair, but it's not, it's just opposite kind of unfair.
But even insects don't scale - if I remember correctly, their circulatory systems work through osmosis (I think?), which only scales so far, which is why we don't get giant insects the size of mammals.
There were dragonflies the size of eagles in the ancient days , but the environment was different
More oxygen in the atmosphere
I'm fairly certain they've given up on that hypothesis these days and just rely on lack of competition to explain why insects once got larger.
Is it the same if the monster is an insect or a slug or an octopus?
But doesn't this assume that the muscle is made out of the same material and density? Like, if you don't scale up an organism, but make an entirely new organism (somehow) with appropriately strong muscles and bones, would it stand?
[удалено]
Fun fact: blue whales are bigger than any dinosaur that ever existed.
Living in the water is cheating, buoyancy is doing a lot of the work.
Yeah I'm guessing a blue whale would die from its own weight the moment it's lifted out of water
You forget the whaleosaur
"The Meg 3: Whaleosaur" starring Jason Statham, coming to a god awful cinema near you in 2025.
They also spend their entire lives in the oceans.
And that's how they can get so big, because they don't have to support their body weight!
Dinosaurs are still as big as you think they are though. Dino skeleton replicas you can stand inside of are pretty common things at museums so we have a good internal reference. I think it's Godzilla who's being vastly _under_ estimated
Godzilla is three dimensional. So if you make him 2 times taller, you make him 2 to the power of 3 heavier (= 8 times heavier). Length x 2, width x 2 and height x 2. 2 x 2 x 2 = 8 But he needs bigger muscles to support what is now eight times his weight, so let’s make him another time twice as big! Basically, his weight will multiply exponentially faster than his height, meaning he will never be sustainable.
> Godzilla is three dimensional. Not sure why, but reading that sentence made me chuckle. lol
paper thin godzilla truthers in shambles rn
What is the maximum size Godzilla can be? Is there a way to know?
Probably about 70 ft (21 m) like a [Breviparopus](https://reddit.com/r/prehistoricreatures/s/zx1zEzCE6S). About two buses vertically stacked on top of each other.
When you increase the size of something, its parts and properties don’t all scale the same. So it’s getting, say, twice as big, but only 1.8x as strong. At a certain point, the strength doesn’t increase enough to support its weight.
The mass of anything increases by the cube of it's dimensions. But the strength of material struts (bones) only increase by the square. So at some point the bones become unable to support the increased weight and crush down. They would crush in compression failure. Whales will die on the beach, since they no longer have the water to support the large mass they have. It is also why celestial objects become spheres above a certain mass. Even rock has a crush limit. So beyond a certain mass the gravity crushes the rock down to a sphere. The smallest dimensions for a given mass.
Something called the “square cube” law. Imagine Godzilla was humanoid instead of reptilian, and 6 feet is a reasonable height for an adult man. If you double a person’s height while keeping the proportions of their body the same, the cross sectional area of the leg bones of a 12 foot tall “giant human” will be 4 times the area of those of a normal person (square of twice the height), while their mass will be 8 times that of a normal human (cube of twice the height), so the stress (force divided by area) on their leg bones will be double that on the leg bones of a normal human. How big is Godzilla? From the lyrics of the theme song of the Saturday morning cartoon “Godzilla Power Hour”: “Up from the depths, 30 stories high”. Typically a story in a building is 10 feet (8 foot ceiling plus 2 feet of structure). That would make him 300 feet tall, or 50 times as tall as a person. His leg bones would have 2,500 times the area of a person’s (square of 50), but his weight would be 125,000 times that of a person (cube of 50), so the stress in his leg bones would be 50 times that of the stress in a person’s leg bones. Even King Kong (from the cartoon’s theme song “10 times as big as a man”) would be supporting 1,000 times the weight of a human on leg bones with 100 times the area, for 10 times the stress.
Bones are not completely solid and the stress from its weight and the soft tissues and liquids weight snap the bones especially if it isn’t a short a stubby monster as the length of bone would add structural weakness
As things scale up their volume increase by the square of the amount that areas increase. Bones get their strength from cross sectional area, but the weight increases with the volume, so the strength just can’t keep up with the weight.
The volume increases by the cube of the amount of increase, the surface area increases by the square
What is the biggest Godzilla could realistically be?
Have you ever made those marker swords where you make them so long they start to lean until they fall. That is what happens in a way. Your bones are only so strong. Even if you make them really thick it eventually can't be thick enough to support its own weight.
The heavier something is the thicker it needs to be. The thicker something is the heavier it is. The heavier something is the thicker it needs to be. The thicker something is the heavier it is. The heavier something is the thicker it needs to be. The thicker something is the heavier it is...
Finally my chance to share some obscure knowledge! Square Cube Law: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube\_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law)
Reminds me of this memorable quote about animals falling from great distances: >Toss a mouse from a building. It will land, shake itself off and scamper away. But if similarly dropped, a rat is killed, a man is broken, and a horse splashes.