How much does Godzilla weigh?
A good question. And since the life-size version doesn’t seem to be in New York at the moment, we’ll have to use a smaller replica and then multiply by a scaling factor. Our Godzilla, shown below eating Buffalo-Chicken Dip, lives in our house and occasionally visits Our Best Friend Craig over at Puntabulous (whose Guest Debates and Story of a Snake Wrangler are simply brilliant).
The first thing we need to do is estimate Godzilla’s volume. Since I was absent the day my geometry teacher covered volumes of giant monsters, we’ll use water displacement. The original plan for this experiment had us using a calibrated beaker, submerging Godzilla, and measuring how much the water level rose, but it turns out that we don’t have any giganto-sized beakers. Instead, we took a 5-gallon cooking pot filled to the absolute top with water, placed it in an emptied toy-container (to catch the water), and then dunked Godzilla in and measured the water that spilled out.
Here’s TwoPi dunking Godzilla.
Unfortunately, Godzilla didn’t fit completely. So TwoPi carefully added more water to bring the water level back up to the top:
And then dunked the part of Godzilla that hadn’t fit originally.
The next step was to figure out how much water had overflowed. TwoPi poured it into a measuring up while Godzilla ate an oatmeal cookie to recover from his bath.
It turns out that the volume of water was 2.9 liters:
Now we need to calculate the scaling factor. Here’s where things get interesting. Our Godzilla is 37.5 cm tall (head to foot). According to Robert Biodi, the original Godzilla was 50 meters tall.
In the 1984 movie Godzilla, the monster had grown to 80 meters (possibly because the buildings in Tokyo were larger), and for films in the 1990s, including the 1992 Godzilla vs. Mothra, he was 100 meters.
But now, in the 2000s, he’s back to 80 meters. So which height shall we use? Let’s stick with the original of 50 meters. Since our Godzilla is 0.375 meters high, the linear scale is 50/0.375≈133.3. But we are working with volume, so we have to cube this scaling factor to get (50/0.375)3≈2,370,370.37.
We take this number and multiply by the 2.9 liters of water that our Godzilla displaced. The original Godzilla would displace 6,874,074 liters of water!
But how do we translate a volume (liters) to a weight (kilograms, except that’s really a mass, but you know what I mean)? We need to multiply by Godzilla’s density. There aren’t any scientists that mention that in any of the films, so we’ll use the density of a crocodile body: 0.9 kg/liter. So we multiply 6,874,074 by 0.9 and find that Godzilla weighs about 6,186,667 kilograms, or 13,610,667 pounds.
Maybe 13,610,668 after all his snacks.
Thanks to Bill Korth for sharing this method of calculating the weight of dinosaurs during a teacher workshop. He himself got it from Dinosaurs: The Textbook (3rd ed.) by Spencer G. Lucas, which explains that this is in fact the way that scientists estimate dinosaur weights, using very accurate scale models.
February 24, 2008 at 12:20 pm |
That was great! Informative and funny!
Thanks for the shout out!
February 28, 2008 at 5:27 pm |
Update: I just found a whole article about the science of Godzilla! In it, Michael Dexter says that the 100-meter Godzilla would weigh about 60,000 tons, which is quite close to what we found. [The 50-meter Godzilla weighs 6820 tons, so the 100-meter Godzilla would weigh 8 times as much, or about 54,560 tons. Except for his probably-too-weak skeleton, his probably-way-too-high blood pressure, and a host of other medical ills. Poor Godzilla!]
June 11, 2008 at 8:32 pm |
[...] a foot tall. To put it into perspective, if you multiply by the scaling factor of 133.3 (from when we calculated Godzilla’s weight), it’s equivalent to the original 50 meter Godzilla running at just over 54 meters per [...]
August 19, 2008 at 10:18 am |
Hehe, I can’t imagine what your family was thinking as you were dunking the big G in a bucket of water. Mine would have reailized I had finally gone over the edge
August 21, 2008 at 5:38 am |
Hello, funny thing to do with Godzilla toy! I was wondering where did you get your Godzilla from? We manufactured this model as a light at our shop, but unfortunately lost contact with the maker of the toy. He mysteriously disapeared…. look forward to hearing from you! Regards, Kym
August 21, 2008 at 6:50 am |
I really like the lights at your shop Kym! Some of them look like classy version of “the glowing torso” (a mannequin turned into a handmade lamp that we got from friends and that was lost in our move from Madison to Rochester, to our disappointment).
The Godzilla was a birthday gift to our older son several years ago, and I think it just came from a toy shop in our neighborhood. It looks like the Godzilla himself was made in China in 1997 by Dor Mei. (He’s got U.K.R.D. on the other foot, seems to be another manufacturer of toys, or else Godzilla is part of a media company. I wouldn’t claim to know all the secret lives of Godzilla.)
October 6, 2008 at 8:11 pm |
i loled so hard because my godzilla looks just like that and the fat bastard always eats tooo!
October 7, 2008 at 7:18 pm |
Ah yes, Godzilla does love to eat. I think he has a sweet tooth.