REALITY BEHIND THE GODZILLA

Because bigger is always better, the 2014 version of Godzilla is the largest ever, some 106 meters (350 ft) tall and weighing over 160,000 tons (over time, Godzilla has tended to grow in size so as not to be dwarfed by increasingly large buildings). Of course, there is a reason that beasts of this size exist only in fiction—they are physiologically impossible. There are a number of surprisingly scholarly articles that explain the various reasons Godzilla couldn’t exist. First, there is no way the monster’s skeleton could support its body, even if it was made of titanium. The heat generated by its muscles would be tremendous, and there would be no way its heart could pump blood to its extremities.At the more grotesque end of the spectrum, in his battles with humanity and other gigantic monsters, Godzilla tends to take quite a beating, toppling over time and again only to rise even stronger than before. Unfortunately, the impact of such a great weight falling from a height would be tremendous, enough to make the lizard explode upon hitting the ground. For a rather evocative example, the physics of falling giants was explained in an essay by J. B. S. Haldane in 1928: “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”