What Happens If We Throw an Elephant From a Skyscraper? Life & Size 1

Let's start this video by

throw

ing a mouse, a dog and an

elephant

from a

skyscraper

onto something soft. Let's say, a lot of mattresses. The mouse lands and is surprised for a moment, before letting go and walking away quite annoyed, because this is a very rude thing to do. The dog breaks all its bones and dies unspectacularly, and the

elephant

explodes in a red puddle of bones and organs. and there is no chance of getting bored. Why do the mouse survive, but not the elephant and the dog? The answer is

size

. Size is the most underestimated regulator of living beings.

Size determines everything about our biology, how we are built, how we experience the world, how we live and die. It does this because the laws of physics are different for animals of different

size

s. Fiber spans seven orders of magnitude, from invisible bacteria to particles, ants, mice, dogs, humans, elephants and blue whales. Each size lives in its own unique universe, side by side, each with its own rules, upbs and weaknesses. We will examine these different worlds in a series of videos. Let's go back to the initial question: Why does our mouse survive the fall? Because of how the scale size changes everything; a principle that we will encounter again and again.

Very small things, for example, are practically immune to falling from great heights because the smaller they are, the less you care about the effect of gravity. Let's imagine a theoretically spherical animal the size of a marble. It has three characteristics: its length, its surface (which is covered with skin) and its volume, or all the things it contains such as organs, muscles, hopes and dreams. If we make it ten times longer, say the size of a basketball, the rest of its characteristics not only increase ten times. Its skin will increase 100 times and the interior (that's the volume) will increase 1000 times.

The volume determines the weight, or more precisely, the mass of the animal. The more mass you have, the greater your kinetic energy before hitting the ground and the stronger the impact. The more surface area you have in relation to your volume or mass, the more the impact will be distributed and softened, and also the more air resistance will slow down. An elephant is so large that it has very little surface area in relation to its volume. So a large amount of kinetic energy is dispersed in a small space and is not slowed down much by the air.

That is why it is completely destroyed in an impressive explosion of sticky substance upon impact with the ground. The other extreme, insects, have a large connecting surface in their small mass, so you can literally

throw

an ant out of a plane and it won't be seriously harmed. But although the fall is insignificant in the little ones, the world has other forces that are harmless to us, but very dangerous for small beings. Like the surface tension that turns water into a potentially deadly substance for insects. How does it work? Water tends to stick to itself; Its molecules attract each other through a force called Cohesion that creates a tension on its surface that you can imagine as a kind of invisible skin.

For us this skin is so weak that we normally don't even notice it. If you get wet, you'll be left with about 800 grams of water or about one percent of your body weight. A wet mouse has about 3 grams of frictional water, which represents more than 10% of its body weight. Imagine having eight full bottles of water to rub down when you get out of the shower. But for an insect the force of water's surface tension is so strong that getting wet is a matter of

life

or death. If we shrank you to the size of an ant and you touched water it would be like you were reaching for glue.

It will devour you quickly, its surface tension will be very difficult to break and you will drown. Then insects evolved to become antidote water. Because its exoskeleton is covered with a thin layer of wax, like a car. This makes their surface at least partially repulsive to water because they cannot adhere to it very well. Many insects are also covered in small hairs that serve as a barrier. They considerably increase its surface area and prevent droplets from touching its exoskeleton and make it easier to remove. To take advantage of surface tension, evolution figured out nanotechnology billions of years before us.

Some insects have developed a surface covered by a short, very dense layer of hair that repels water. Some have more than a million hairs per square millimeter when the insect is submerged under the air and water remains within its fur and forms a layer of air. Water cannot enter it because its hairs are too small to break its surface tension. But it gets even better, as the oxygen in the air bubble leaves, new oxygen diffuses from the surrounding water into the bubble, while carbon dioxide diffuses into the water. Thus, the insect carries its own lungs and can basically breathe underwater thanks to surface tension.

This is the same principle that allows pond skaters to walk on water from the road, little anti-water hairs. The smaller you get, the stranger the environment becomes. At some points, even the air becomes increasingly solid. Now let's move on to the smallest known insects, about half the size of a grain of salt and only 0.15 millimeters long. The fairy fly. They live in a world even stranger than other insects. To them, the air itself is like a thin jelly, a syrup-like mass that surrounds them at all times. Going through it is not easy. Flying at this level is not like graceful gliding;

They should trap and retain air. So their wings look like big hairy wings instead of proper insect wings. They literally floated in the air, like a disgusting little alien through syrup. Things get stranger from here as we further examine the variety of different sizes. The physical rules are different for each size which evolution had to design around again and again as

life

grew in size over the last billion years. So why aren't there ants the size of horses? Why are elephants the size of an amoeba? Because? We will discuss this in the next section. We now have a monthly newsletter, subscribe if you don't want to miss new videos and bonus videos.