saturday morning geekery
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters.
In which it is explained why many a giant cinema monster’s fearsomeness would be rather tempered by the fact that volume increases with the cube of length while surface area goes with the square of length; why Mothra would of necessity have been light enough to be blown away by a stiff breeze; and why, the issue of your retina being smaller than the wavelength of visible light aside, that whole miniaturized-journey-into-the-body thing’s not such a great idea:
If volume decreases but mass does not, then density must increase. The shrinkage is sufficiently limited in these movies that we don’t have to worry about dealing with miniature black holes, but an object the size of a cell but the mass of a submarine—as in Fantastic Voyage—is going to pass through the table, the floor, and the earth’s mantle like a hot knife through butter.
The bit about real-life mammalian size differences is pretty fascinating. It turns out that if you were to scale a mouse to the size of a dog without any behavioral changes, the mouse’s bones would break just from walking around. Based on bone geometry alone, mammals become un-doable somewhere between prairie dog and goat.
Alright, I do have a bit of real work to do …
September 2nd, 2006 at 10:10 pm
In the case of THEM! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047573/) a movie about gigantic ants spawned in the desert from radioactively modified ant eggs, the assumption was that the giant ants resulted not from cells blowing up in size, but from the number of cells being cubicly multiplied. So mass increased with volume and therefore this multi-ton exoskeletal insect would consume you in a second. Pretty scary.