Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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How to Build a Giant Monster
December 10th, 2008
Build a small monster, then soak it in water overnight.
Heh.
More seriously, my guide for this sort of mad scientist activity is the fossil record. Anything resembling a giant monster there is plausible. Look at dinosaurs, giant sloths, giant lizards and crocs, etc. Plausible. Anything else needs some more work.
The limits on giant monsters are metabolism, food supply, heat loss, and structural integrity. I am assuming we’re sticking on Earth here (giant critters make more sense on a lower gravity world — here they are expensive).
Metabolism first, which is related to the food supply. Cold-blooded reptiles like crocodiles and Komodo dragons keep growing throughout their lifetimes, and don’t have to eat all that often. Anything big will have to have food in large quantities, at some interval. The trick here is to figure out if you’re making a real animal that fits into the ecosystem, or something weird that can suck energy from power lines or whatever. but think about this issue. Most places on Earth today have top predators only a few times more massive than humans, if that.
Heat is an issue. If you have your giant monster living on the tundra, eating polar bears before they drown, or something like that, skip this paragraph. The issue is that as you increase in size, volume increases as the cube of the linear dimension and surface area as the square. Heat is produced per unit volume. Heat is radiated away as unit surface area. Animals like elephants and stegosauruses have ears or plates that can act as heat exchangers. Your giant monster might ought to have big ears, a giant slobbery toungue, or something to let it shed the massive amounts of heat it is going to generate. Godzilla had radioactive fire breath, but King Kong should have probably keeled over with a cooked heart before too long.
Structural integrity and materials is the last point. A giant monster should probably resemble giant man-made structures. A diplodocus has the same build as a suspension bridge, getting everything supported and balanced. Your giant monster needs to manage that, too, unless you’ve invoked unobtanium or other mythical substance.
Finally, I wanted to point out that these issues I have discussed above implicitly rule out simply taking existing animals or people and scaling them up as is. Such giant simulacrums would starve, or bake, or just break their bones.
Now, I really do love giant monsters. I just want them semi-plausible. Address these issues if they show up in print or in a movie, please. I ignore the problems with Godzilla and King Kong since they have been with me since before I could read or think critically. The creature from Cloverfield I kind of liked since they didn’t reveal too much, and it did seem to adhere to structural limitations shambling about on land.
Do you have a most or least plausible giant monster to share?
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While your point about body heat is well-taken I’d have to suggest that your examples — the elephant and the stegosaurus — aren’t all that apt.
While the elephant’s ears are useful cooling devices, rhinos don’t have a comparable mechanism nor did many extinct animals. And there’s no reason to believe that the stegosaurus’s plates served this function.
But now you’ve got me wondering whether the long necks and whip tails of the big sauropods might not have helped them stay cool. And what if a creature had a heat-pump that would allow it to dump excess heat when it excreted? Godzilla’s fire breath takes on new meaning…
I liked the big beast at the end of The Mist — it seemed built to be that size and the idea of making it the center of a mobile ecosystem is pretty cool.
As for the least plausible giant monster, have you ever seen The Giant Claw? It looked like it was designed by Dr. Seuss and I am not kidding.
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