Pacific Rim looks awesome and all, but let's talk about science for a second. Specifically, let's talk about the science, or lack thereof, behind completely awesome giant robots.
Guillermo Del Toro's upcoming sci-fi action pic is probably going to be as awesome as the trailers make it look, unless you're the kind of person who hates the sight of huge mecha fighting against equally huge monsters, in which case please show yourself out. How could you not love enormous robots punching out enormous monsters who lay waste to entire cities? Giant robots represents 90 percent of what we want the future to be like (the other 10 percent: flying cars, and a male birth control pill.) They're extremely cool looking, they transform, and for sheer shock factor they're impossible to beat.
We want them so badly, but could we have them in real life? Unfortunately, hell no. Not because of budgetary constraints, frustratingly missing confirmation of alien life, or the lack of a decent fuel source. There's a bigger problem facing these robots than any alien invasion: Physics.
Yes, the terrible dictator that ruins everything from warp drive to immortality also has a bone to pick with Del Toro's supersized combatants. And unfortunately, as inherently awesome as it sounds, having giant robots brawling with giant monsters in regular ol' planet earth gravity runs right up against the twin problems of weight distribution and the nefarious square cube law.
The square cube law is a paradoxical-sounding mathematical concept, first identified by Galileo, which states that when a given object increases proportionally in size the new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier, but the new volume is proportional to the multiplier's cube. Or restated for those of us whose eyes begin to bleed when the subject of math comes up: When something increases in size, its volume increases faster than its area. If you double the size of an object for instance, surface area increases by four times, but the volume of that object, which is (duh) all the space inside it, increases eightfold.
This law has implications for numerous scientific disciplines, including construction and biology. To get an idea of how it works, let's say you take an average human woman, someone approximately 5 feet, 5 inches tall. Increase her size to 11 feet. You now have a woman whose heart is four times bigger, forced to pump a presumably proportional increase in blood through 8 times the amount of circulatory system her smaller incarnation had. That's a tremendous amount of stress and likely to kill anyone who grows beyond a certain height*.
Of course, animals which have evolved to be big, rather than having had a gene preventing abnormal growth turned off, have developed the respiratory and circulatory systems necessary to handle their needs. But before you break out the snacks for your 'Yay, monsters for everyone!' party, bear in mind that all that volume comes with a ton of additional weight. Mice, for example, don't look like miniature elephants for the very excellent reason that an elephant's bones have to be much bigger in proportion to its body size than a mouse's skeleton does, in order to support all that weight. In fact, if you zapped a mouse with magic to increase it to the size of an elephant, its bones would probably be crushed under the weight of its soft tissue within seconds. EEK! And even though the elephant's bones can support it, it still has to deal with the fact that it's far easier to break something heavy than something light, which is why a mouse could jump off a waist-high kitchen table with no ill-effect, but an elephant can break a leg simply tripping over something.
Complicating things further, all that weight needs musculature capable of dealing with it, and that's another way the square cube law totally screws over giant animals. It takes considerably more muscles to manipulate the animal's limbs and moving parts, but those muscles have to deal with a hell of a lot more weight. This means larger animals tend to be slower and less agile than smaller animals and beyond a certain point there's no amount of naturally evolved biomechanical components that can do the job. In fact, this is why earth's largest animals are water-dwelling, where buoyancy mitigates a lot of the stressors caused by huge mass and weight. Forget deftly sweeping cars off a bridge with the swipe of a taloned hand; a giant monster like the beasts in Pacific Rim might find it difficult to even stand up.
* Read Orson Scott Card's Shadow series for an excellent depiction of the problem. But ignore his reactionary politics which become insufferable as the series goes on.
NEXT: The square cube law and giant freaking robots
The square cube law also affects constructed objects. Aircraft, for instance, need increasingly bigger proportional wingspans the larger the plane, until they get so big they're too heavy to get enough speed to take advantage of whatever lift their giant wingspans can provide. (Imagine a Boeing 747-sized flying monster try to take off. Those broken wings ain't ever going to learn to fly again.) And buildings, for that matter, have a natural limit to their size as well; without modern support structures most skyscrapers would collapse under their own weight. And, in case we forgot, robots would affected too.
Giant robots would have to contend with the way the square cube law affects both biomechanical processes and constructed objects. Lubricants that keep the machine from overheating and freezing up would have to travel enormous distances in incredibly short periods of time, something anyone familiar with city-sized plumbing systems know would be a serious problem. Gigantic, powerful motors, gears, levers and the like would be required to move the machine's monster-sized limbs in earth-normal gravity. And of course, these processes would have to be able to do so despite the machines' incredible weight**.
That's another issue — weight distribution. A giant humanoid machine would, as we've seen, be insanely heavy - all that weight supported by the machine's two humanoid legs. Those tow legs then become points through which the machine's enormous bulk is focused. Those legs are going to punch through anything remotely pliable – dirt, sand, grassland, concrete, streets, etc – like a knife plunging through a graham cracker. Oops.
The epic battle between giant robot and giant monster? In real life it's going to involve a fragile robot sunk waist-deep in the ground, punching slowly and feebly at a heart attack-suffering reptile reduced to the humiliation of using a skyscraper-sized mobility scooter just to forage for food. Forget spending billions developing mecha; all humanity needs to do is wait for the creature to pass out, which should be about 15 minutes after it begins its attack.
Obviously, I don't want to watch that version of Pacific Rim – unless it ends with the UN establishing a chain of monster burger restaurants as a way of funding the rebuilding effort. So I'll go in ready to accept the premise with a open mind and heart. But for the love of science, let's hope they at least a throw in a stray line of dialogue explaining how these things are even possible. Nothing too elaborate, just a simple “It's a good thing we went back in time and punched Galileo,” or “Thank heavens we completely pwned the square cube law at the same time we invented cold fusion.”
On the other hand, that skyscraper-sized scooter sounds pretty awesome. Maybe bring it out for the sequel?
** No doubt this is why most of Voltron's battles take place in space.
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Ross Lincoln is a LA-based freelance writer from Oklahoma with an unhealthy obsession with comics, movies, video games, ancient history, Gore Vidal, and wine. Follow him on twitter (@rossalincoln).
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