Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

by Geoffrey West

In his latest incarnation Godzilla is 350 feet long, which translates into a weight of about 20,000 tons, about 100 times heavier than the biggest blue whales. To support this gargantuan amount of tissue Godzilla would have to eat about 25 tons of food a day, corresponding to a metabolic rate of about 20 million food calories a day, the food requirements of a small town of 10,000 people. His heart, which would weigh about 100 tons and have a diameter of about 50 feet, would have to pump almost 2 million liters of blood around his body. However, to counterbalance that, it would have to beat only just over a couple of times a minute and sustain a blood pressure similar to ours. Note, by the way, that his heart alone is comparable in size to an entire blue whale. His aorta through which this enormous amount of blood flows would be about 10 feet across, easily big enough for us to walk through quite comfortably. Godzilla might live for up to two thousand years and would need to sleep less than an hour a day. Relatively speaking, he would have a tiny brain representing less than 0.01 percent of his body weight, compared with the approximately 2 percent of ours. This doesn’t mean that he would be stupid, but that’s all he would need to carry out all of his neurological and physiological functions. As to the possibly less savory parts of his life, he would need to pee about 20,000 liters of urine a day, comparable to the size of a small swimming pool, and poop about 3 tons of fec...