Introduction – Montage of video clips of the Great Orbax. Orbax is middle aged, bald with a ponytail at the back. A long curling moustache and a goatee. He is wearing a 3-piece grey plaid suit, with a lab coat, sometimes old motorcycle goggles. He is situated in a Physics lab at the University of Guelph and speaks directly into the camera.
Video clips show Orbax, putting on his lab coat and goggles. Running experiments in his lab with electricity, models, and beakers. Visuals end on the words Reel or UnReal.
Orbax is standing in the lab with a book in his hand, behind a lab table.
[Orbax]- Oh, hi there. I'm the great Orbax from the department of Physics at the University of Guelph. We're going to explore the science of pop culture as we see what's Reel or Unreal.
Visuals - Large text on screen accompanied by animated Godzilla and Kong
[Orbax]- Godzilla versus Kong!!! For years, we wondered who would win in the battle between our greatest titans, King Kong, and Godzilla.
Visuals – movie clips from the Godzilla vs Kong movie, a fight scene between the monsters.
[Orbax]- While for decades the answer was very clearly Godzilla, the ever-changing incarnations of Kong have really stepped up to the plate in terms of giving us a Kaiju that can face the king of all monsters.
So, let's see.
In reality... who would actually win? In their latest endeavor, Godzilla versus Kong. Let's take a look at the Tale of the Tape. Nice.
Visuals – Animated #TeamGodzilla along with each of the specs said by Orbax on screen closed with a quick movie clip of Godzilla breathing fire. A a similar animated treatment for #TeamKong, ending with a Kong fight scene throwing huge punches.
[Orbax]- First up, we've got Godzilla, bio-atomic structure the ability to withstand multiple extinction events. And furthermore, he's powered by geothermal radiation drawn from the Earth's core. Next, we have King Kong. A giant monkey. Speed, agility, and a punch so strong, it actually registers as a magnitude 4.2 earthquake
Our first contestant in our battle royale is King Kong.
Now, Kong presents us with a classic argument. Take an object, be it a person, be it an ape, be it a cow. And make it bigger. To quote Rita Repulsa from the Power Rangers.
Visuals – clip from Power Rangers of Rita’s face up close.
[Orbax]- Magic wand make my monster grow! But here's the thing about that. As organisms, we're the size we are often for very particular reasons. And a lot of the times it's just gravity.
Visuals – two drawings on left and right hand of screen. One man standing on the moon, another standing on the earth showing the different weights based on gravity.
[Orbax]- Our bones, our muscles, our tissue all are optimized to work through a certain range of size. and it's a tradeoff between moving a mass of an object and how much energy is required to do that.
Visuals – scene from movie where Kong is walking through a river and a man is observing him, in sheer awe of Kong’s size.
[Orbax]- We can tackle this for Kong with a simple scaling argument. Now the average person is not much different than an ape, especially the average people that I meet.
If you were to take a six-foot person and scale them up to Kong size, that would be about fifty-six times as tall. But here's the thing. They're not just fifty-six times taller. They're fifty-six times wider and 56 times thicker.
Visual – a small wooden animal sitting on a lab desk with thick boards for a body and head, and toothpick legs.
[Orbax]- The mass of that giant scales is the volume, which is three dimensions in length; a length, a width and height.
When we think about what supports that mass, we think about the legs, and the legs have a cross-sectional area.
Visual – same wooden animal now half the size of Orbax. Orbax is carrying the animal and places it on the ground. All the toothpick legs break demonstrating how scaled up mass doesn’t work.
[Orbax]- Area goes as only two dimensions in length, and depending on how big that mass gets, that cross-sectional area may no longer be able to actually support the mass of the giant itself.
So, here's the deal.
A human or ape femur can support about 10 to 30 times its mass. If you scale up to about the size of Kong, it would have to support almost sixty times that mass, which it just simply can't do.
Basically, what would happen is in the first step of that fight, both of Kong's legs would break, and Godzilla is the victor!
Visuals – Movie clip of Godzilla walking and facing the audience.
[Orbax]- So, but here's the other side of that leg snapping coin. Godzilla is all legs.
Based on the original Toho studio designed rubber suits. Godzilla has got these thick thighs that actually could support 120-meter-tall Leviathan.
Visuals- Various movie clips and images of Godzilla, from its early creation in the 1950s up to today.
[Orbax]- So, here's the question, I guess did a 120-meter-tall lizard ever exist? Very seldom are Titanosaurus skeletons ever found intact.
Visuals – Images and drawings of dinosaurs.
[Orbax]- But scientists can make estimates whether we're looking at Argentinosaurus, or Dreadnoughtus or any of the other titanic sauropods, we're basically looking at creatures that would have capped out at about 20 meters tall and 30 meters long max.
Pretty small when compared to Godzilla who clears those stats by an easy 100 meters.
But let's say it's possible, say we could have 120-meter-tall dinosaur the problem in that case isn't the structure of the body.
The problem is actually the energy required to move that. Cold blooded creatures simply can't generate enough energy or power to move a structure like that around, let alone fight.
I mean, in order to actually power something like that, you'd have to have like a nuclear power plant in its stomach or something.
Visuals – images of cold-blooded animals, fish, lizard, and frog. Images of warm-blooded animals, elephant, and bird.
[Orbax]- And there's actually even some credence about this going back to the dinosaurs, not the nuclear part, but like the warm blooded versus the cold-blooded part.
Scientists have speculated that some of the large Titanosaurs might actually have been partially warm blooded in order to stabilize their body temperatures.
Visuals – cartoon Godzilla – KING OF THE MONSTERS in text on screen. Followed by a movie clip of Godzilla.
So, I mean, when it comes down to it, while no dinosaur ever got close to Godzilla in size, he has the right structure, he has the right power supply, and he's got the gumption to maintain his position as the King of the Monsters.