WTF are Kaiju?

As a kid, I once had a nightmare.  I was in a room with a window, and there was someone… or something… outside. It  was dark, and powerful, and it was stupid big, just enormous, and it looked into the window, and  it scared the shit out of me. I ran to the door, through some narrow passage, up the stairs, and  into some other room – but the monstrous face in the window was back there soon again. It probably  wanted to pull me out through the window, or to shake the house until I collapse, I don’

t know,  I woke up in cold sweat, probably screaming. After that, I dug into books, whatever I  had back then on zoology, cryptozoology, paleonthology and mythical beasts, and I read  until it was clear to me that creatures that huge simply do not exist, at least not anymore. I didn’t know it back then yet, but the thing I was looking for is called “Kaiju”. Word “Kaiju” is Japanese, and it means a “strange beast”, or a “weird beast”. Initially,  the word didn’t have any giant-size connotations a

nd was used for any generic mythological  monster. In the beginning of 20th century, word “Kaiju” got commonly used to describe early  dinosaur-inspired movie monsters. And then, well, then there was Godzilla, the first official kaiju  movie – and the meaning of the word got cemented since then, as a monster that is really, really  huge. All the other kaiju movies that followed were also Japanese – in fact, in 20 years after  Godzilla, there were just one or two gap years when the new kaiju movi

e wasn’t released in Japan.  Some purists only agree to apply the word to the Japanese-born giant monsters exclusively,  but I believe that the concept of kaiju is big enough to transcend cultural borders  – albeit with varying degree of success. The best definition of kaiju I’ve ever heard is  probably the one given by Red from the Overly Sarcastic Channel: “…eh, you know it when you  see it…” she said, and that is very fair and I agree with it completely, but here on Hardcore  Sci-fi channel,

to answer the question = what type of fiction are kaiju? = we gonna need more  tangible data than eyewitness accounts – like, at least, the minimum size requirement. I mean, I guess, when it comes to kaiju, size matters. In her first movie, Godzilla was 50 meters tall, and I propose we  count that as a ‘kaiju minimum’, since kaiju generally only kept getting bigger from there on. Hey, you might say, but what about the King Kong? He surely has to be the first kaiju then? Well, I  actually believe

there might have been some kaiju before Godzilla, but that title does not go to  King Kong. However menacing they make him look these days, on his first appearance King Kong was  no higher than 8 meters – he was a giant, but not yet a kaiju: Kong had to climb a skyscraper, while  Godzilla could have just destroyed it. King Kong soon reached the necessary size to fight Godzilla  and became kaiju as well, but he came back to being just a giant fairly often. So, what’s that other kaiju that appear

ed before Godzilla, you might ask? Well, it’s kinda not even just a separate kaiju, but a whole subspecies of them. We can roughly  divide all kaiju into three groups, you know. The simplest ones are gigantic copies of some  smaller creature, I call them “Gigamorph Kaiju”, and that’s, for example, King Kong and Kraken, who  are basically a giant gorilla and a giant squid. Then, there are those that had some original  prototype real-life animal, but were changed to at least some degree, and somet

imes in a  very significant way – to accommodate for a bigger size or just for a fancier look. I call  those “Derivant Kaiju”, and these would be, for example, Godzilla and Arrakean Sandworm. Unlike the first two types, who look at least somewhat familiar to us, third type of kaiju is  not generally based on any known Earth species. Parts of their anatomy might be somewhat  familiar to us, but their whole structure and body plan is beyond anything that we can  find on Earth, both now and in any

previous era. These creatures are often alien in origin,  and they are often chimeras – composites of the body parts from entirely unrelated animals, as  well as they can have extra limbs, or heads, or other body parts. In the most extreme cases,  kaiju of this group are just a chaotic blubbering mess with no general structure whatsoever. The  first fictional creatures that really fit that description, appeared not on screen, but on page  – and I propose to call them “Eldritchu Kaiju”. Say what

you want about H. P. Lovecraft, but the  man has founded a new genre, on a scale comparable probably only to what J. R. R. Tolkien did. And  well, there is one archetype that repeats a lot in Lovecraftian prose and poetry: incredibly  enormous, incomprehensible being from the other worlds, god-level omnipotent, and deadly  dangerous, and not just in plain physical, but in psychical way as well. Lovecraft has imagined  no less than dozen of such creatures, but the most well-known one is, of cours

e, the Cthulhu. The “Call of Cthulhu” was first published in 1928, whole five years before the first King Kong movie.  However, it was just a short story in a magazine, and Lovecraft didn’t become popular until much  much later – fame generally came upon him post mortem. The footage you are watching right now  was actually produced in 2005, and that was the first time Cthulhu really made it to the screens.  Eldrich type of kaiju, however, were there long before that – with notorious representati

ves being  Ghidorah and Biollante. Eldrich kaiju are probably the most popular in Western culture in the  recent decades – with most new additions to the bestiary being almost exclusively Eldrich-type. So, now that we have a minimum size requirement and some basic taxonomy system, it’s time to poke  the elephant in the room with the stick and try to answer the question: can there be kaiju? Do we have any examples at least somewhat close to that? Is it possible for any living being to reach the u

ltimate size of 50  meters – or maybe grow even bigger than that? Actually, yes – a lot of  plants and fungi do that. Well, we are here not for the plants and fungi,  you might say, and fair enough, let’s have a look at the biggest active animals that we know of.  Getting bigger is a viable defensive strategy both on land and in the water: if you keep  increasing in size, at some point there will be no predator big enough to threaten you. The  blue whale, capable to reach almost 30 meters and up

to 200 tons, is the biggest life form  in our oceans, and possibly the biggest animal on the planet Earth ever, period. The current  biggest animal on land is African elephant, which reaches height of almost 4 meters and  weight of up to 10 tons. The biggest land animal of all that have ever existed on Earth was  probably some Sauropod – a long-necked dinosaur, which were known for their outstanding sizes. You  never know when paleonthologists will uncover the next biggest one, but I guess it’s

safe to  take Argentinosaurus, whose full skeleton was never found, but the estimates from the known  remains point to something around 40 meters and up to 100 tons. Even if there ever was something  bigger than that, then probably not for much. Huh, given that, it almost looks like original  Kong was intentionally designed to outsize an elephant, while Godzilla was meant to outsize  generally all living things on Earth, ever, and Cthulhu, well, Cthulhu kinda went for overkill… So, back to the

subject – what is that mysterious force that stops real-life animals  from getting at least Godzilla-big? Well, it is, first of all, the Square Cube Law. Square Cube Law says: you can’t just take and resize stuff – there are some consequences. Imagine one cubic meter. Now, let’s double the length of its edges. The surface area of  the cube, however, does not double – it quadruples. Volume of the cube, at the same  time, increases the whole eight times! Now, let’s try to to do this with bone. Bo

ne  resistance depends on its cross-section, while its mass correlates with the volume – and  if there is eight time the mass on four times the resistance, you get yourself a fracture. Or let’s take some muscle, which has strength proportional to cross-section. While it  gets four times the strength, the body also becomes eight times heavier, so muscle  has to do much more work – and thus becomes much weaker, if it is able to move at all. Or maybe let’s increase in size something that flies. Its

wing surface goes square, while its  volume – as well as the mass – goes cube – and behold, it cannot fly anymore, at least not  before it gets some badass wing extensions. The Square Cube Law kinda destroys any chances  of Gigamorph Kaiju to ever be serious science fiction: you can’t just make the monkey big –  you will have to rebuild it on cellular, tissue, organ and even organ system levels to make it work  on a bigger scale – and it will inevitably end up looking very different from the or

iginal. Well, you might say, maybe some animals could evolve sturdier bones and more  efficient muscles – and become big anyway? Well, the issue is – the structure of animal  bodies has been perfected by the millenia of evolution by now, and is close to its natural  limits anyway. The best-resistance bones and the most energy-efficient muscles have been  selected for by the natural selection during the geological periods of time – and the biggest  animals that we know of don’t really have some u

ltra sturdy bones or superpower muscles –  they have to use special tricks instead. Blue Whales, for example, have the benefits  of water. Because of Achimede’s principle, things don’t weight as much submerged in water  as they do while in the air – so everything can generally grow much bigger if it stays  underwater. In fact, Archimede’s force is proportional to the volume, so it actually  doesn’t suffer much from the Square Cube Law. Argentinosaurus, on the other hand,  had pneumatized bones a

nd air sacs, as birds and many dinosaurs did. In terms of  physics, it’s basically a battery of in-built air balloons along the backbone, that made Sauropods  much lighter than they should have been for their size. Their leg bones, on the other hand, were  close to the size limits of a land-based lifeform: there are theories that if they grew any  bigger, Sauropods probably wouldn’t be capable of either movement or body support. Another trick of Argentinosaurus is its weight distribution – I mea

n, we  say it’s 40 meters long, but really, more than three quarters of these 40 meters are  the neck and tail of the beast, which weight very little. Skulls of all the Sauropods were so  lightweight and fragile, that their fossils are considered to be some of the rarest and most  valuable finds in palaeonthology – in fact, skull of Argentinosaurus has not yet been found. One more important thing is – while Argentinosaurus was maybe really 40 meters  long, it definitely was not 40 meters tall, s

ince, first of all, quite a lot of its length was  the tail, and second: most of the Sauropods didn’t really hold their necks upright, except only for  several specialized genera like Brachiosaurids. The tallest of the Brachiosaurids was probably  Giraffatitan, who could raise his head up to 13,5 meters. There is still a discussion going on among  palaeonthologists, about whether the necks of the rest of the Sauropods were held horizontally or  at some intermediate angle – we have their neck bon

es, but lack the cartilage, muscle, tendons  and the air sacs – those don’t fossilize well – so we don’t know for sure. However, we know very  well, that the higher you pump the blood against the gravity and atmospheric pressure – the more  powerful of a heart you need, and it’s much more profitable in terms of biomechanics to have your  head closer to the heart level. The title of the tallest Sauropod for now goes to Sauroposeidon,  who by the most optimistic estimates could rise as high as 18

meters – and well, eh, that  is not even the half the kaiju minimum. So, up to 40 meters long, up to 20  meters high, and just a little bit over a hundred thousand tons – is that all  we can have on land? Is it the maximum? Well, maybe not. There was a study in 1986, by some Suomi scientist Jyrki Hokkanen, aimed to calculate the  maximum technically possible size of an animal, and it turned out to be not a hundred thousand,  but up to a whole million tons. The same study, however, points out the

reason why it has  probably never happened and never will: there are no reasons for any creature to grow  that big in ecological and evolutionary sense: it does not provide any sensible benefits  and the tradeoffs it requires are enormous. One of the main ecological problems that giants  have are their gigantic energy requirements. If you have a chunk of biomass as large as one or  two hundred tons, you gonna need a shitload of calories to keep metabolism online, and you better  have some very

plentiful food source nearby! Trick of the trade of the Argentinosaurus is  that it does not chew – it just trims the greens with its teeth and swallows it, leaving all the  digestion to the enormous bioreactor of its belly. That way, they could keep their heads busy with  just one simple task most of the time: get more food. Sauropods could also save a lot of energy  thanks to their necks – like, find a good place, spend a couple of hours consuming all the foliage  in the neck radius – and then

have a short walk to the next feeding position, wasting very little  energy on moving that enormous body around. If you spend life like that, eating 24/7 and saving  every bit of energy – you might just get enough calories to keep going even with 100 tons. Theoretically, predators could do better here, since meat is way more nutritious than plant  matter and requires less digestion. On the other hand, however, meat is much harder to get, and  getting it costs a lot of energy – which means, pred

ators run at higher risk/reward ratios, and  can starve to death much easier. Getting big also has that unpleasant side effect of becoming weak  and slow: besides the Square Cube Law, there is a certain speed threshold of how fast electricity  can travel through the nerves. The bigger is the distance between your brain and your limbs – the  longer it takes the signals to arrive – the slower you tend to move – and the harder it becomes to  catch smaller prey. Try to remember last time you tried t

o kill a fly, and you’ll get what I  mean. No wonder that the biggest land animals, both current and extinct, are giant herbivores  – which don’t have to chase their food much. In marine ecosystems, however, rules are  different. Rooted plants can only grow close to the shores here, and they are not the  main primary producers of the ecosystem. If some animal tried to grow as big as possible  on a diet of just marine sessile plants, like kelp, it would probably stop around the  10 meter limit, l

ike Steller’s sea cow did. The title of the main producer in the oceans  goes, instead, to the phytoplankton – a menagerie of tiny free-floating algae, which, in turn,  gets eaten by some tiny free-floating fauna, like some small crustaceans, fish or squid.  The most notorious example is, of course, the krill – the main food source of the Blue Whales.  Krill is seasonally abundant in certain areas, it tends to crowd into huge shoals, and  its individual units are slow enough to be harvested in a

way that foliage gets eaten  on land – without wasting too much energy, just in case of whales it’s filtering through  baleen, rather than lawn-mowing the canopy. Curiously, somewhat similar food source also  exists on land – I’m speaking about ants and termites, which in certain areas of Africa and  South America consume no less plant matter than hoofed herbivores. However, ants and termites are  no match for the krill: the biggest creatures that they can support as a food base are aardvarks, 

sloth bears and giant anteaters, which are all not that much bigger than the average adult human. So, to sum it up – Blue Whale and Argentinosaurus probably demonstrate not only physical,  but also ecological limits of what can be technically achievable on the planet Earth.  In fact, our current environment is much more unforgiving and does not permit even that:  most of the planet’s ecosystems are now heavily exploited by us, humans. Argentinosaurus and  Blue Whales evolved in the ages of abun

dance, when lush forests grew on land and the seas were  red with krill. Our current ecological situation, on the other hand, is described by some as  the sixth mass extinction, with the previous, fifth one, being the one that wiped out all the  non-avian dinosaurs, you know, the meteorite. Age of Humans has actually started with the  worldwide genocide of land-based megafauna – the species that made their stake on becoming too big  to have natural predators. They were once a common sight on eve

ry continent, but now most that we  have left is in Africa – where giants coevolved with us humans from the very beginning and learned  to coexist to at least some degree. Giants around the rest of the planet were naïve to the dangers  of the upright-walking monkeys with rocks and sticks – and were quickly hunted to extinction.  Many paleontologists point out to climate change around the same time, and suggest that maybe  we humans didn’t do that much damage after all. However, extinctions coinc

ide with appearance of  human bones in fossil record quite precisely, and the climate change itself might have been at least  partially caused by the extinction of megafauna. Giant animals are often cornerstone species of  their biomes – like, for example, mammoths were for Mammoth Steppe – and the extinction of giants  might lead to a decline of entire biome. If that’s happening around the world, that, I guess, might  influence climate, but I am no paleometheorologist to speak any further on su

ch topics. What I’m trying to say is that we humans seem to be kinda counterproductive to the survival  of megafauna, which makes the appearance of some kaiju behind the windows of our skyscrapers even  less likely. Most of the kaiju – as they are shown in the movies – come from a species with just  a single representative, which puts them on the brink of extinction already – and in the world  filled with humans and their tech, chances are that real-life kaiju will go extinct long before  they g

et to destroy New York, Hong Kong or Tokyo. Not all hope is lost, tho. There is one group  of kaiju that might be resistant to humans, as well as they can have their ways to avoid  ecological constraints and even the Square Cube Law. I mean, of course, Eldrich-type kaiju. These usually come in two flavors: genetic engineering and visitors from outer space, and  sometimes they are both. Both these origin options are not without their problems, but they are both  much more plausible than the appea

rance of a kaiju in a process of evolution on Earth. I’d say, if  we rate average Gigamorph kaiju as cake tier, then it’s only fair to assign Eldrich kaiju  at least rubber tier on average – weak science fiction, but science fiction nevertheless. Those are, of course, just average estimates, and the final sci-fi hardness rating should  be estimated for each species in a personal order. That’s exactly what I gonna do,  with, for, example, Godzilla, King Kong, Cthulhu and many others – if you have

any  bright ideas, leave them in the comments! If you liked the video – click a like, and  if you wanna see more like it – subscribe, that is scientifically proven to work. Stay  hardcore, and see ya in the next video!