Wouldn’t a monster that big have extra large bones and muscles to support all that mass?
In: 1458
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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)
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…
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.
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.
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.
Latest Answers