I've been a fan of the Godzilla franchise for a long time. I'm absolutely stunned to learn that the films don't hold up to scientific scrutiny. I feel lied to, and betrayed. How could they do this‽ Everything is ruined.
101I mean it’s pretty well explained in the movie that there is actually an entire ecosystem of giant life forms living in the center of the planet, and that they sometimes accidentally find tunnels out into our world, duh! -pushes up glasses on face-
95And they're all nuclear powered.
7I can't fucking believe they leaned into that.... Like out of nowhere considering Kong island. And still haven't brought it back up to do anything with it instead of immediately doing a journey to the center of the earth's sun monster mash.
4But being that deep would compound the square-cube problem.
3You would think so intuitively, but once you pass Max q it actually reverses polarity and you become lighter!
Like putting too much air in a balloon!
4
Godzila for one is powered by ✨nuclear energy ✨
78Does he eat nuclear energy? Or does he like chow down on some humpbacks every day?
Is Godzilla the real reason the Japanese whaling fleet won't stop?
29Their whaling fleet is a cover for his late night snacks. As near apex predators they have the highest concentration of radiation from Fukushima Daichi. Kinda like DDT and bald eagles.
But luckily we have Gojiro which is a natural sink for radiation 🥳👌🏽✨
20He does neutrosynthesis kinda like plants do photosynthesis but different.
10He drinks water and fuses the hydrogen into helium. This needs some deuterium to start off, which is why godzillas only occur in nuclear testing sites.
7
The oxygen concentration in today’s admoaphere would not be enough. That’s why bringing dinos backs wouldn’t work. That and Nedry.
38But what if we gave each dinosaur an oxygen mask?
16Now there’s an idea…
3
But where is the oxygen now then?
For what its worth most of the carbon from back then has been sinked into the ground, and while we extracted and burned enough of it to fuck the climate, it is nowhere near enough to have caused a relevant change in the atmospheric oxygen concentration.
0Google geological oxygen sinks.
4Animals breathed it in and exhaled CO2 over millions of years
0
Strength squares as you scale up but mass cubes; creatures this large wouldn't be able to move their own body weight.
28Godzilla is nuclear powered so he's not limited by biological energy sources. There's still the entire issue of the form factor, but for that I like John Scalzy's take on the Kaiju Preservation Society.
15
They literally show the ecosystem in the movie... This meme sucks.
20Well, kind of.
They showed the interior of the earth with other megafauna, but how exactly Godzilla or Kong are getting their caloric intake satisfied on a regular basis is somewhat of a question regardless.
Godzilla especially... feeds on radiation? But not just like, consuming uranium ore. He can take a full thermonuclear blast to the face and seemingly heals bodily injury. Maybe makes him feel really full too?
It's handwaved at best, which is fine. Trying to figure out how Kaiju work is like trying to explain The Force with physics. It's just magic, don't worry about it.
12There are some real life fungi that are radiotrophic (like photosynthesis but with radiation [ok light is also a kind of radiation but you know what I mean]) So at least part of that makes sense but not the adsorbing a nuclear blast bit.
3Pacific Rim says they're grown in a lab on a planet that may have different laws of physics than Earth's. They're not naturally occuring, they're engineered shock troopers.
1
My question is how are these boats so buoyant, rigid, and stable!?
4
You also can't just scale things up and have them work the same way. I forget if there's a proper name for this but weight is related to volume which is the cube of the dimension, but pressure is related to area which is the square of the dimension. So giant king kongs ankles aren't looking so great right now as the pressure will increase with scale.
17Fittingly enough, this is called the Square-Cube law
24Why can’t we just petition to amend the law?
6Thank you! I was sure it had a name.
3
Ideally you aren't slamming all of your weight on your ankles with every step though. If you do that at human scale with normal human weight, there won't be much of your ankles left either. Your muscles work as a spring to catch most of the force and they also grow cubicly. So i think the law cannot be applied this directly to biological systems. Of course you are right, that King Kong would probably not just be a scaled up Gorilla, but also altered in his shape.
6
Massive flocks of meaty birds. Like Godzilla-sized plankton that can fly.
17Permanently Deleted
13I hate that this is even a thing.
- Godzilla is a metaphor (either intended or simply ingrained in the Japanese psyche) for Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- King Kong is a "Beauty and the Beast" love story
They are from different eras and are important films in their own way.
But we end up getting this shite because monsters must fight monsters, apparently.
It's all a load of fucking shit and devalues the importance of each movies. It should never have been made.
Anyway, I haven't seen the movie but Godzilla would win. Atomic breath. Come on guys, the monkey's dead meat that you can't touch for a hundred thousand years.
13- Godzilla is a metaphor (either intended or simply ingrained in the Japanese psyche) for Hiroshima and Nagasaki
From what I've gathered, not quite. The film showed up around the time of the Castle Bravo tests at the Bikini Atoll. The bomb tested there turned out to be dirtier than predicted, and fallout made it to some Japanese fishing vessels. It became a bit of an international incident.
And then the original Gojira film launched. And one early scene showed a fishing boat, which went under in a bright flash of light.
Gojira, or Godzilla as he was westernised, was not just the personification of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was the personification of the fact that this could happen again.
6Yes, you're absolutely right, I'd forgotten about that.
I think my main point is still valid though - Godzilla is a physical manifestation of the destruction that nuclear activity can cause.
As I read on another post somewhere: "Ask a Japanese, and radiation creates monsters. Ask an American, and radiation creates superheros."
3
Shin Godzilla was great for following the original idea behind the first movie. Also that version of Godzilla would kick King Kongs monkey ass every day of the week.
3Do you still like Pacific Rim though?
1
The most "scientifically feasable" of all Godzillas, in my opinion, was from the 1998 film.
One single individual, born out of the radion from nuclear tests. This implies it took decades to fully grow and mature.
Although gigantic, one animal would be sustainable by the ocean.
The film ends with the animal being killed, so, for a change, humans eliminated a bigger global ecological threat.
12I thought it ended with at least one egg intact?
3It does, so it hints the cycle will restart.
1
The book Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi actually explains this for the megafauna in its universe. It's not a perfect explanation but it does well enough
7Oh shit, have not heard about this book and need one for my upcoming vacation. Gonna look into this!
4It's a great vacation read! It's pretty light and fun, I'd recommend it for that
2
More like Earth's gravity prevents living creatures of their size without serious changes to their skeletal structure.
Also, how the fuck do they eat enough to live?
6Godzilla is radiosynthetic isn't he, wasn't that like a big part of the cartoons? Like dude absorbs radiation to survive in most cases the sun but if there's a nuclear accident homie gets a buffet.
6
Bonk!!!
6Hummm.... Tokio, evidently.
2BTW, dinos only were so big, because the atmosphere had more oxygen. They wouldn't survive nowadays.
1Gamera could totally take both of them.
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