Episode 156: What if all animals ran 100 mph?
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On this episode of Absurd Hypotheticals, Marcus Lehner, Chris Yee, and Ben Storms watch animals run really slow and really fast!
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:36 - Ben’s Answer - 1 mph
00:11:26 - Marcus’s Answer - 10 mph
00:20:46 - Chris’s Answer - 100 mph
00:32:06 - Would you rather: be an experimental patient for cryogenics OR human cloning?
00:39:41 - Outro
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TRANSCRIPTION
Marcus Lehner:
Hello everybody, and welcome to Absurd Hypotheticals, the show where we overthink dumb questions so you don't have to. I'm your host, Marcus Lehner, and I'm joined here today by Chris Yee and Ben Storms. Say hi, guys.
Chris Yee:
Hey, I'm Chris.
Ben Storms:
Hey, I'm Ben.
Marcus Lehner:
Guys, it feels like it's been a while since we've done a good old animal kingdom question, so I'm excited to dive back into just Googling a bunch of cool animals.
Chris Yee:
It has been a while. We used to do a lot of animal questions, and I think we started running out of animals.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, we did so many that we couldn't think of other animals to do.
Marcus Lehner:
It wasn't that we ran out of animals, it was we ran out of ways to break all the animals, but we've thought of another one. Our question today is, what if all animals move at the same speed? And when we say move at the same speed, we say they all have the same top speed. They can go slower than the speed. They're not locked into always going one consistent speed. That would open up a whole other can of issues.
Chris Yee:
That would mean that they would not be able to stop if that was the case, but they can stop.
Marcus Lehner:
But what we did is also, we each took a different speed to evaluate the animal kingdom at. So we've all picked a different top speed and went into what happens with that. So, Ben, you are at the slowest speed, so I'm going to let you start us off.
Ben Storms:
Yes, so I went with one single mile per hour. What if all animals went one mile per hour? For a frame of reference, it's surprisingly hard to get one, actually. The only thing I could find was the speed of an iceberg floating on ocean currents, which does not tell me anything. The average walking pace is between three and four miles per hour, so a third to a fourth as fast as you personally walk is probably about what we're talking here. So there's a lot of ways you could do this. Right? You could look at the fastest any part of an animal's body can move as one mile per hour, and that gets into all kinds of weird, complicated stuff that I didn't want to deal with. So I basically just boiled it down to the simple way to think about it. The fastest you that can propel yourself in any direction is one mile per hour.
Chris Yee:
The travel speed.
Ben Storms:
Exactly, yes. It is possible for your body to move faster than that if you're moved by natural forces, like moving water, or air, or gravity. Right? You could tuck yourself into a ball and roll down a hill, but if you are moving yourself with your own feet or whatever locomotive means you have, that your max speed there is one mile per hour. I did interpret that to mean that things that move slower than that currently do speed up, so shout out to the big winners of this, the sea anemone, the slowest animal on Earth, not actually stationary, it turns out. They generally do stay in one place, but they can move on their one foot at around one centimeter per hour or .00006 miles per hour, which means they're moving 16,000 times faster than they did before.
Marcus Lehner:
I'm sorry. A anemone has a foot?
Chris Yee:
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing.
Ben Storms:
Yes, just one.
Chris Yee:
One foot.
Ben Storms:
A single foot.
Chris Yee:
How does it walk?
Ben Storms:
I'm going to assume, based on the speed and the single foot, it involves wriggling.
Marcus Lehner:
The wriggle foot.
Chris Yee:
How did they classify it as a foot?
Ben Storms:
I mean, man, I'm just going off what the internet people told me. I mean, I would guess a foot is any appendage used to move yourself. Right?
Chris Yee:
So is a snake a foot?
Ben Storms:
Yes.
Chris Yee:
Is a fish a foot?
Ben Storms:
Move yourself across ground, so yes to snake, no to fish. Anyway.
Chris Yee:
Okay.
Ben Storms:
What I very quickly realized is that if everything's maxing out at one mile per hour, most animal interactions actually get very, very boring because everything's only moving at one mile per hour. You can't really have normal predators anymore, or predator-prey interactions, because predators can't burst forward to catch something. And speaking of bursting, that leads to a very fun thing I realized, which is that there is now a fixed limit to how high anything can jump because this propulsion includes going upwards. The fastest you can pull yourself up is one mile per hour, which is about half-meter per second.
Ben Storms:
And as soon as you leave the ground, you start slowing down due to gravity at 9.8 meters per second squared. So if you do the math on that, your upward jump time is only about 45 milliseconds, which is just longer than a single frame in a movie. And if you go through and take that time and your initial one mile per hour velocity, the highest that anything can jump is about one centimeter, which obviously is not great for a lot of things.
Marcus Lehner:
Improvement for the sea anemone.
Chris Yee:
I was going to say, does that mean that nothing can run? I was like, "Oh yeah, one mile per hour."
Ben Storms:
One mile per hour, so correct. And yeah, just normal hunting tactics don't work. And really, the only way to be a land predator now is to be an ambush predator that drops from above because suddenly, the fastest way to move is to fall. Technically, I tried to figure out if there was some way you could have a carnivorous armadillo that rolled down hills towards its prey. But if that happened, prey just wouldn't go towards hills, so that wouldn't be that great of an evolutionary move.
Marcus Lehner:
Or the cartwheeling spider does that. That thing is cool.
Ben Storms:
I did look into the cartwheeling spider, and that is very cool. There are some other animals that do either make their body into a ring or sphere, so it's like armadillos, the cartwheeling spider, pangolins. There's some salamander that cartwheels, but there's not much because that's not a very effective way to move yourself, unsurprisingly. I also don't know how cartwheeling ... Cartwheeling probably doesn't count, does it? Because that's still kind of leaping, but rolling does.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I mean, I know the spider is more rolling than cartwheeling.
Ben Storms:
Right.
Marcus Lehner:
It's more like I'm putting my legs out in a circle so that I don't just smash my face into the sand.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. But I am pretty sure that the salamander is more of an actual cartwheel where it's springing as it goes. It's probably not kosher. Anyway, like I said, land predators basically have to drop from above, which gets us to a very fun situation where, if the land predators have to drop from above from a tree, they're going to have to be small, which means that all the [preyers 00:06:34] are going to get really big. So it's going to go up to very tiny tree-bound predators that drop onto the top of large, burly prey and try to, I guess, get them that way. I don't know. It's not going to work really-
Marcus Lehner:
Poke them to death.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. The ecosystem is all messed up. But moving past ground-based stuff, because like I said, it's all very slow. I want to talk about flight because flight became a tricky proposition in this situation. Birds almost certainly cannot take off from the ground because they basically always either do some sort of jump or run to build up the initial speed when they take flight. Gliding is probably okay. Now, note, I did think about flying squirrels. That does not work. They definitely leap. That will never ever work in the situation. They're just going to sadly droop off the tree. And yeah, no.
Ben Storms:
But I had to look up how much birds can actually fly without flapping their wings. I also realized that flapping their wings in the parameter to the question is a hazy area because this is all [Calvin ball 00:07:38] anyway. But I decided in the spirit of the question, if birds can just flap their wings, everything is going to be a bird. So we're going to stick it to more of a gliding situation. It turns out that large birds very heavily rely on gliding and what they call soaring because the problem they have is that when a bird gets too big, flapping their wings actually just takes a huge amount of energy, and it's super, super inefficient.
Ben Storms:
So there are large birds that spend ... I think albatrosses spend about only 12% of their flight time flapping their wings. There's also a condor that spends about 99% of its time gliding or soaring because its wingspan is so massive that it just can't. Soaring, by the way, it's similar to gliding. But instead of just always moving, gliding is you're falling with style, moving downwards the whole time. Soaring is catching a rising hot air current and elevating as it happens.
Ben Storms:
There's also, I think, swifts. They are small birds that eat bugs, and they will stay airborne for days at a time. They actually eat bugs. So they fly around through clouds of bugs to eat and apparently can sleep while flying. Scientists aren't sure exactly how that one works, but they theorize they might shut off half their brain at a time to sleep.
Marcus Lehner:
I think there's a number of animals that can do that. It's weird as heck.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, it really is. And so technically, birds might be able to still "fly" if they can get enough speed by dropping off a cliff or a tree. But I feel like that's technically possible, practically not going to happen all that often.
Chris Yee:
They have to get up into the tree in the first place.
Ben Storms:
They could climb it. They got little claws.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Ben Storms:
It could work. It's not great, but it's possible. My final question then was obviously, many animals, and birds specifically, migrate. Is this even feasible at this one-mile-per-hour speed limit? So looking at the Canada goose, which is the most ... If you're looking at a goose, it's probably a Canada goose in the US or Canada, I would assume. Normally in their actual migration, they fly around 40 miles per hour, and that can spike up to about 70 if they get a strong tailwind. And going at that, they can go roughly 1500 miles in a day, which is about the distance from Winnipeg, Canada, to Austin, Texas.
Ben Storms:
So I Google mapped the walking route from Winnipeg, Canada, to Austin, Texas. It is roughly, yes, 1450 miles. And Google Maps says it'll take, while walking, 473 hours or just under 20 days, which isn't including time to sleep. Honestly, that's already better than I expected, not going to lie. Unfortunately, doing the math out, it does work out to about three miles per hour, which is clearly breaking our speed limit. So it's more like 60 days, which I guess technically, if they're effectively just nomadic now, the geese could still do. Right?
Ben Storms:
They leave in, I don't know, September, get there before it's too cold, head back up in March. It works. I was really hoping, by the way, that I could get this fun mental image of them using the Mississippi River as basically a highway. But it turns out the average speed of the Mississippi River is about 1.2 miles per hour.
Chris Yee:
It's faster.
Marcus Lehner:
Hey, it's 20% faster.
Ben Storms:
It is 20% faster, which honestly is depressing. But technically, they could use the Mississippi River and cut off a few days that way. Point being, geese could actually still migrate, which I was actually not expecting to be the case. So overall, if animals go one mile per hour, it turns out that's not very exciting because everything is very slow. Big surprise.
Chris Yee:
Who'd have thunk?
Ben Storms:
Who'd have thunk? But there might still be birds. And if that's the case, everything might be birds because it's just a better way to move around than walking around at one mile per hour. So hey, Marcus, what'd you do?
Marcus Lehner:
So I started with my speed of 10 miles an hour. So this is the more normal-ish speed. This is like a decent jog, 10 miles an hour. A lot of the animal kingdom actually does already operate around this speed. Flying insects are also around 10 miles an hour. Flies are usually five to 10. Bees are 15 to 20, somewhere in that range. So this is like a normal operating speed for the animal kingdom.
Marcus Lehner:
And I actually started in the same place you did, Ben, with looking at predation because lots of predators do rely on speed to take down their slower prey, like cheetahs. And that doesn't really work so well if your prey is exactly as fast as you are. But there are actually quite a few ways predators can still function that still just work just fine. You had mentioned ambush hunting. And yeah, if you can't outrun them, just wait for them to come to you.
Marcus Lehner:
As far as ambush hunting goes, there's some pretty cool and some pretty fucked up ambush predators out there. Trapdoor spiders, who literally spring out of trapdoors that they build, are in both camps where, "Ooh, that's cool, but also, man, I don't like that idea." And then in just the pretty effed-up camp, the giant water bug. I don't know if you guys have seen these ones before. It's basically a four-and-a-half-inch giant beetle that ambushes fish by lying in wait at the bottom of the water or off of an underwater plant and then just latching on and hugging fish.
Chris Yee:
I never like it when a bug hunts something that's not a bug.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, it's like regular fish, four and a half inches really doesn't sound like a lot, but it's really big for a bug.
Ben Storms:
It's big for a bug. Anything bigger than like an inch is big for a bug.
Marcus Lehner:
But yeah, so that's ambush hunting. There's also pack hunting. If you can't outrun your prey, I mean, you can just hunt in coordinate groups. The obvious example here is wolves. Although I actually wasn't sure if they were faster than the deer and the elk that they hunt. They are slightly faster. The difference is four or five miles an hour in top speed between 35 and 40. But of course, wolves, they use their pack tactics to encircle and enclose and gain ground through strategy more than actual speed, pretty self-explanatory. Another animal I did not realize is a pack hunter, apparently crocodiles. So enjoy that.
Ben Storms:
Wait, seriously?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, crocodiles. Not always. They're more often hunting solo, but they are sometimes pack hunters.
Ben Storms:
I hate that.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, that's why I wrote it in my notes.
Chris Yee:
The wolf pack hunting image with Ben's one-mile-an-hour is a really funny image.
Ben Storms:
It is. It really is.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, man, there's a hill coming up. Let's strategize, guys.
Ben Storms:
I like the idea that because everything's moving that slowly, the animal that's the prey is going to realize it's dead about a couple of minutes before it actually gets caught, which really sucks.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. There's another version of that too, which is endurance hunting because, yeah, if you can't outspeed them, there's also just the ability to run for 10 miles an hour for much longer than your prey. Wild dogs in Africa do this, but we've talked about it before. The most successful example of an endurance hunter is actually humans. If you ever wondered how humans actually survived before having all their cool technology in the caveman eras where they're like, "Well, we suck at everything. We have bad claws. We have weak, brittle bodies and no fangs for anything." The answer is we are probably the most terrifying because we just chased animals for longer until they were literally so exhausted they couldn't go on.
Marcus Lehner:
We would just chase a deer for a day and a half until it literally collapsed from exhaustion. And our average marathon running speed was slightly higher than the deer's average speed of sprint, wait, sprint, wait, tortoise and the hare type deal, except the tortoise murders the hare at the end of the race, I guess.
Marcus Lehner:
And then my last example here, what they refer to as aggressive mimicry, which is almost like ambush hunting, but you use bait. Think the angler fish. You got a shiny light that attracts fish with the promise of shiny food, I guess. I'm not sure what the fish thinks the bulb is. But, of course, as always, there are worse and creepier examples in the animal kingdom. The margay, for example, which looks like a small cheetah, quite adorable really Bengal tiger-type vibes, is able to replicate the cries of a distressed baby pied tamarin monkey. So basically, it makes the noise of a crying baby monkey. And when the parent monkeys go to check on said baby, are promptly ambushed and murdered.
Marcus Lehner:
So really, the animal kingdom is going to be generally fine. I don't like giving the advantage to these totally messed up predators. And I considered briefly inventing some new version of predators, like a cheetah with an angler fish light on his head. But, man, I can't do better than just the effed stuff that's already happening.
Chris Yee:
I don't know, the cheetah with an angler fish head is pretty good.
Marcus Lehner:
It is funny, especially when I imagine it bobbing around while it sprints across the plains. But instead, I'm going to pivot and revisit an old favorite technicality of mine because coral is technically an animal.
Chris Yee:
Does it have a foot?
Marcus Lehner:
No, it doesn't have a foot, but I'm ignoring that because it's an immobile animal, but I'm saying it's mobile now. So before I went down my coral rabbit hole, they tend to be sensitive fellows with all this constant dying off that they're doing recently. So really, what does a coral need to survive? It needs an ideal water temperature. This is where they're currently getting screwed over. They have like a range that they like to live in, and if it gets even a few degrees out of whack, they don't do super great, and they start dying off. They need clean water, which is just, don't put it next to a factory, exposure to the sun, water circulation.
Marcus Lehner:
This article listed a healthy balance of saltwater. And then it was just like, "This is why you don't see coral reef like at a river mouth." And I'm like, "Oh, so just saltwater is what you mean by a healthy balance of saltwater." And they need food, and their food is ... They're not plants. They are animals, so they actually feed off of the algae and microorganisms that like to live and grow in all its nooks and crannies. They don't actually need anything from the rocks and whatnot that they grow on.
Marcus Lehner:
So this is actually one of the reasons that the manmade reefs, if you call them that, they'll be able to help a coral reef grow by dumping an old truck into the ocean. And it provides the hard surfaces that the coral typically likes to live on, but it doesn't need anything. It can live on metal. It's not getting any nutrients or anything from that rock. It's just a place to anchor.
Marcus Lehner:
So if they're mobile, they're free to roam, which is actually wild because the main reason they stick to these rocks is to keep themselves near the coastline where you have the water circulation. The water is going to pass over them with waves and all that junk. And so they stay close to the surface of the water because the water dies out pretty quickly as you go down. I wish I had the number, but it's not many feet before 75, 80% of the sunlight is gone-zo.
Marcus Lehner:
So now, if they can move, nothing is stopping the coral from simply wandering the ocean slightly below the surface. Food-wise, it effectively makes its own food as long as it's in a place where all the algae and microorganisms can happily photosynthesize. It's fine. It feeds itself. Water circulation, if it's moving at 10 miles an hour, that's plenty of water circulation for it to keep that going. And exposure to the sun, pretty limited because there's only so much shoreline that isn't deep ocean. Most of the ocean, pretty dang deep.
Marcus Lehner:
So there's really nothing stopping the coral reef. They have predators. Things eat coral reefs and mess with anemones and things like that. But it's fairly rare that they do real damage to a reef. So what you'll eventually end up with is just this oceanwide blanket of coral that will swirl and roam around just below the surface, and it'll follow the warm waters up and down the globe as the seasons change. And I can't really decide if that's good or bad as a whole.
Marcus Lehner:
On one hand, it's really going to mess with the ecosystem as a whole. This is introducing a big change, and it's going to really deny lots of the lower layers of the ocean directly below it access to the sunlight they would normally get because coral is not see through last time I checked. But it's also going to introduce a huge amount of life into 99% of the ocean that is effectively a wet desert. If you imagine the ocean is full of fish and things like it is in the coastlines, that's not true. There'll be miles of ocean with a fish in it. It's really completely deserted. And the only time you see groups of fish in the mid-ocean is when there is something near the surface that they cling onto, like almost an oasis. And it can be as simple as tangled fishing net floating around, and it's made this small floating patch that some fish use for shelter.
Marcus Lehner:
And now that some fish are using it for shelter, it's a place for predators to go and eat. And suddenly, there's a small little ecosystem based around this floating stuff, but now we're going to have that everywhere. And maybe there's a limiting factor. I'm not considering nutrients or something that the coral won't be able to go crazy. But I don't know specifically what it is, and I can definitely see just now, there's just coral everywhere, floating around. And it'll just be different. It will suck for boats. I'll say that. It's going to be a really bad day to be a boat. But for the animals, hey, maybe it's a good thing. I'm going to stay optimistic. It's good. So if all animals move at 10 miles an hour, we would save the coral reefs. Chris, what did you do? What was your speed?
Chris Yee:
My speed was 100 miles per hour. What if all animals moved 100 miles per hour, or if that was their top speed? I guess the winners would be the same as what you guys said, the anemone and the coral. You said the anemone, right, Ben?
Ben Storms:
I said anemone, yeah.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. It'd be the same for both of those. They just can move faster now, so it's more extreme. But instead of focusing on the water and on air like Ben did, I focused on land mostly. And I started out with the fastest land animal, which is the cheetah, which can run up to 80 miles per hour, so it would be able to run a little faster. And then I realized that was a dumb place to start.
Marcus Lehner:
Can we take a moment to appreciate that the cheetah is actually the fastest animal? It's not some BS like, "Oh yeah, cheetahs are really fast, but here's four random species you've never heard of that are faster." Cheetah, known as the fastest, is actually the fastest. Good job basic education, I guess.
Chris Yee:
So next, I decided not to look at fast animals. I thought that was dumb, and I focused on slow animals. So I looked at turtles and sloths and that kind of thing and basically concluded that it would be fun and weird if they move fast now. But also, really not that interesting to do a deep dive on, but the thing is with these animals, they're smaller animals. So instead of looking at the smaller animals, I wanted to look at the ones that would be scary if they could move super fast, and those would be the big, heavy animals.
Chris Yee:
So I focused on the elephant. The largest elephant species is the African Bush Elephant. It's actually the largest and heaviest living land animal. And the largest recorded one has a shoulder height of 13 feet, and it weighs 10.4 tons.
Marcus Lehner:
Jesus!
Ben Storms:
Wow!
Chris Yee:
Yeah. So it's big. It's a big boy.
Marcus Lehner:
The thing is 13 feet. Most people right now are sitting in an eight or nine-foot-high ceiling.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Imagine halfway up the next story is the top of the shoulder, and it's still got a head above that.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, and I think it's usually longer than it is tall. Right?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, I think so.
Chris Yee:
So I was just imagining something of this size and weight charging at me at 100 miles per hour. Not a fun image. To add to that, they also have tusks. And the longest recorded tusk of these types of elephants is 11.5 feet long. So they have this giant spear in front of them charging at you. Now, to compare it with something else, I looked at an arrow to see how fast arrows go. And a recurve bow shoots an arrow up to 150 miles per hour, so the arrow does go faster. But the elephant is also 10.4 tons with a 11-foot spike. So I would choose the arrow, personally.
Marcus Lehner:
I'd rather get shot by this arrow than this elephant, please.
Ben Storms:
Right?
Chris Yee:
So normally, African Bush Elephants, they can run. They can run up to 25 miles per hour, but they don't usually do it for long periods of time. And there's actually a reason behind this. And that is because elephants are endotherms, which means that they produce their own heat through metabolism, just like all of their mammals. That's compared to ectotherms which rely on external heat and ambient heat to live. And endotherms, the elephant, produces heat through metabolism, and metabolism is actually affected by your activity level. So if you're doing something active, then your metabolism goes up.
Chris Yee:
So if you're doing something like running 100 miles per hour, your metabolic rate skyrockets. And the reason this is a problem with elephants is because this overheats them. It's actually a thing where smaller animals are a lot better at expelling their metabolic heat than large animals. This is because of the square-cube law. We've talked about the square-cube law a few times on the show, but it's basically if you have a 3D shape, and you size it up, the volume of the shape grows faster than the surface area of the shape.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's why ants are always like, "Oh, wow!" They're a thousand times stronger than this compared to their body weight. But if you scale up an ant, you wouldn't have an ant that is crushing skyscrapers. You'd have an ant that collapses under its own weight.
Chris Yee:
Right. Yeah. So the body volume is actually the thing that produces the heat. The inside of your body produces heat, and then the heat escapes through the surface area of your skin. So smaller animals, for an example, a Etruscan shrew is the smallest mammal in the world. It can get as small as three centimeters long as an adult, and it has a body mass as low as 1.3 grams. And due to its small size, it has a very, very small body surface area, compared to the amount of volume it has. Other way around.
Marcus Lehner:
Yep.
Chris Yee:
So it has a very small volume compared to its surface area, so it creates a lot less body heat, and the body heat escapes a lot faster. And to make up for this, in order to live, it has a very, very high metabolic rate. So its heart rate is actually super high. It's 25 beats per second, which is actually higher than a hummingbird's heart rate.
Marcus Lehner:
That's insane.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I forget if this is true or not, but I think it is the highest heart rate of any animal. And in order to live, it has to eat 1.5 to two times its body mass every day. If it goes four hours without eating anything, then it starves to death. So if this Etruscan shrew ran 100 miles per hour, its metabolic crate would go up really high. It's already really high, but it would go up higher, and the shrew would basically just die of starvation pretty fast. So that is the Etruscan shrew.
Chris Yee:
But what happens to the elephant? The elephant is obviously a lot bigger, so the elephant has a lot of volume. And compared to the volume, it doesn't have a lot of surface area to escape the heat. And to make up for this, instead of a high metabolic rate, it has a low metabolic rate. And there's some other ways that it releases its heat that it's evolved to do so. The reason it has its big ears is because it increases the surface area. And there's a lot of blood vessels in the ears, so when it flaps, it releases heat. It also uses water to cool down and stuff like that. But the main reason that it's able to prevent itself from overheating is the low metabolic rate.
Chris Yee:
Now, if an elephant ran 100 miles per hour, like I said before, the activity level affects metabolism. How much would its metabolic rate actually increase from this running? So I found a study that looked at the relationship between metabolism and the speed of running in humans, not in elephants, but in humans. And they said that the traditional method of estimating this was assumed to be linear, and they found that it wasn't quite linear. It can be assumed linear if you're looking at a very narrow range of speeds. But as you get faster, saying that it's linear is actually underestimating the amount that the metabolic rate increases.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. So it's actually getting a lot more than ... If you double your speed, you're getting more than double your metabolic rate.
Marcus Lehner:
That's a good deal.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Well, not for elephants.
Marcus Lehner:
Gosh.
Chris Yee:
So how much heat will this actually produce in our elephants? I found another study that studied activity level and metabolic heat storage in Asian elephants, not the African elephant. But I think the whole point of the study was to compare their temperatures during the day and at night when they're active to see if they can adapt their behavior to avoid overheating. But they looked at two specific elephants and their core body temperatures during exercise. And they said that exercise was basically just them walking around the sanctuary or wherever they were for a certain amount of time. And they said their average walking speed was 2.2 miles per hour.
Chris Yee:
And during this active exercise, they found that in the cooler months, so around 55 degrees Fahrenheit, they would be producing two times as much heat as they are losing heat through their skin. And then, in the warmer months, so around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, they'd be producing more than five times the amount of heat than they're losing. So obviously from this, their temperature is going up if they're active and doing exercise.
Chris Yee:
And they found that a normal elephant walking in the sun on a hot day for four hours could result in lethal core temperatures in the elephant. So if the elephant reaches a core temperature of 109 degrees Fahrenheit, then they would die. That's just from them walking. So like I said, they can normally run up to 25 miles per hour, and they'll usually only do it for short distances, like 100 to 150 feet. And it's probably to avoid overheating. But in the study, they actually did confirm that it has the same relationship between the speed and metabolism that I found in the study with humans. So it is more than linear, the relationship in elephants. It's not exactly the same, but it's similar. And it turns out that if an elephant runs 100 miles per hour for 30 seconds, it would die.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, no. How hot does the elephant get?
Chris Yee:
Well, it would reach the 109 degrees Fahrenheit. It's the lethal temperature. But if it managed to somehow survive past that, and it ran for 100 miles per hour for five minutes, then the water inside its body would reach boiling temperature, and it would explode.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, shit. Oh, man.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. And this would happen for more than just elephants. It would happen for other mammals as well, anything that produces its own heat. And the amount of time it would take to explode depends on its size, I guess. So there would be a sweet spot for size. So if you're too small, then you'd just starve to death like the Etruscan shrew. If you're too big, you'd explode like the elephant. Probably the cheetah would be fine.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's probably the cheetah who already does it.
Chris Yee:
But yeah, I don't exactly know what the thresholds are for that size, but things would explode.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, man. I've never been so happy to imagine an elephant exploding, but also still a little sad. I also can't get the image out of my head when you said lethal core temperature, that the elephant is like a robot spaceship inside. And there's a dude. They're walking at three miles an hour, and it's like, "What are you doing? You're crazy. The core temperature! Stop!"
Ben Storms:
I just see the cartoony steam gauge with the needle breaking up against the right side of it. You know?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Slow it down! Slow it down!
Ben Storms:
The glass cracks on it.
Marcus Lehner:
You'll kill us all. That's amazing, absolutely amazing. And with that, I'm going to move us over to our would you rather question because we're not talking the exploding elephant.
Chris Yee:
You can't. It's impossible.
Marcus Lehner:
Chris?
Chris Yee:
Yes.
Marcus Lehner:
You explode the elephant. You get the first question here.
Chris Yee:
That's my reward.
Marcus Lehner:
It's your reward. Would you rather be an experimental patient for cryogenics or for human cloning?
Chris Yee:
Hmm. So what's the fail state for the cloning?
Ben Storms:
It's really just that you don't get a clone. Right?
Marcus Lehner:
Should we say that both the fail state is death on both? Or maybe not. I guess just a tissue sample, right?
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Ben Storms:
Technically you could die from them taking a tissue sample if they do it really badly.
Marcus Lehner:
Or you get hit by a bus on the way in. Right?
Ben Storms:
You trip going down the stairs. Yeah. Right.
Chris Yee:
But the cryogenics, you're going to die.
Ben Storms:
Right, yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Well, they're already on human trials. I mean, if it's just going to be like one's going to murder me, and one is going to be whatever, if you just assume I'm going to die in cryogenics, it doesn't really make it much of a would you rather.
Chris Yee:
Well, it's like, what's the chance of it failing versus if it succeeds, then I'm in the future, and that's cool?
Ben Storms:
Right. That's what I was going to say is that the cryogenics is basically, to you, time travel, which is, I guess, also bad.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Let's do no chance of death. We can bring it back into the equation later. But let's say you're a test patient, but they're successful. You're the first cryogenically frozen or the first cloned person.
Ben Storms:
Do I want another me?
Chris Yee:
Yeah, what are my clones ... Does he have all my memories, and does he think he is me?
Marcus Lehner:
I think we go like modern-day cloning. There's a new you that's now a baby. It just has all your genetics the same.
Chris Yee:
So none of my memories.
Marcus Lehner:
None of your memories. It's just a new thing that's you, But yeah, it does not have your memories.
Chris Yee:
And it's a baby version of me.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Or is that less interesting as a hypothetical? Should we go with the, it's exactly you?
Chris Yee:
I think it's exactly you is more interesting because it makes-
Ben Storms:
It is.
Chris Yee:
If it's not exactly me, then I think it's an easy choice. Then I would choose the cloning.
Marcus Lehner:
All right. Let's go with it's exactly. It is a new exact you. It knows it's a clone. Let's avoid that plot hole.
Chris Yee:
Okay. It knows it's a clone, but it has all my personality, all my memories. And there's no mistaking that I am not the clone.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. You got a tattoo or something. We'll go with that.
Chris Yee:
Foolproof plan.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, he's got a tramp stamp that just says clone that he can't remove. I'm the clone.
Chris Yee:
See, the thing with the cryogenics is it would be cool to see the future, but all my friends would be gone. All my family would be gone. I wouldn't have any connections.
Ben Storms:
Well, I guess, how far ahead in the future are we talking here? Probably not far enough ahead for it to be cool.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Either it's not cool enough or-
Ben Storms:
Or it's cool for like a day, and then everyone's dead that you know.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, these are both negative. It's got to be at least like what, five, 10 years for the cryogenics, minimum.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Let's pick a time.
Ben Storms:
Let's say five years.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, five years is a good amount of time because I think both of these, for me, are negatives. I think both are not good.
Ben Storms:
I think I agree with that, actually.
Chris Yee:
Actually, it depends on what your relationship with your clone is. If they're friendly, which I think my clone would be friendly to me, then you could ... Do people know that you have a clone?
Marcus Lehner:
Well, that's the one thing that's going to be like, yes, I think absolutely. If you went to a lab and they cloned you, it's going to be in the news.
Chris Yee:
So it's not a secret. Hmm, so you can't fool people.
Ben Storms:
But you are probably a celebrity now.
Chris Yee:
That's true.
Ben Storms:
Or your clone is the celebrity.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Who would be more famous?
Ben Storms:
No. People remember Dolly the sheep, not Dolly 2.0.
Chris Yee:
I don't know. I think the clone would be more famous than me.
Marcus Lehner:
You'd probably have to go together with your clone because they want the visual of both of you side by side.
Ben Storms:
That's true. It would be both of you. You're right.
Marcus Lehner:
I'm digging what Chris said, though, about if the clone was my personality, my clone would be pretty damn chill. I think I'm a good person, which I think most people think. I think we'd both be able to deal. We'd probably start a podcast or something. People can't tell voices apart anyway on podcasts.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. It's not like we would try to murder each other or anything.
Ben Storms:
God, it would just be so weird. I don't know.
Chris Yee:
It'd be weird at first, but you'd get used to it.
Ben Storms:
I feel like both are incredibly weird, and I don't know which is less weird. Obviously, the downside with the cryogenics one is that everyone else in your life goes on for five years. But in the cloning one, everyone else in your life suddenly has another you.
Chris Yee:
See, I think the cryogenics, if it's only five years, I don't think that's much of a difference. It's basically the same as normal life. It's just you lost five years, or you're five years behind everyone.
Marcus Lehner:
That's a lot, man.
Ben Storms:
That's a lot.
Chris Yee:
That's not that much. As an adult, it's not that much. If it happened when you were a kid, then all your friends would be older than you. It would be weird.
Marcus Lehner:
Well, someone in a serious relationship, five years, that's got to be weird to come back to. That doesn't work great there.
Chris Yee:
I mean, the person isn't going to be drastically different, though.
Marcus Lehner:
They'll have had five years of life without me, though.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think the difference is way smaller than if you have a clone.
Marcus Lehner:
I think the opposite.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
I think being gone for five years has messed my life more than ... or would mess with my relationships more than having a clone would.
Chris Yee:
We're basically talking about Endgame because they were gone for five years. Right?
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
I don't know. I haven't seen it.
Ben Storms:
All right. Marcus has seen no movies.
Chris Yee:
I didn't know you haven't seen Endgame. Well, you know what I'm talking about.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I just think my clone would be chill. The slight thing I'm worried about is they cloned you. Are they going to stop at one?
Ben Storms:
Right. I thought about that too.
Chris Yee:
Probably not. You'll be the first one, and then ... I mean, you'll be famous, and then they'll start doing it more, and you'll be less of a novelty.
Ben Storms:
Oh, no. What Marcus means is there's going to be more than just the one clone of you, most likely.
Chris Yee:
Oh. I don't think they're going to keep on cloning you. I think they're going to clone other people.
Marcus Lehner:
Man, the five-year cryogenesis, for me, is just too much. There's just such downside.
Chris Yee:
I honestly don't think it's that much of a downside, but whatever.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Well, and like I said, for me personally, I think if I were to stop my life for five years and try to come back to it, I think it would be tough. So I'm going to go with the clone. My clone is going to be chill. All my clones are going to be chill. I'm leaning to live it, baby.
Chris Yee:
Ben?
Ben Storms:
Oh, I am also going clone. I'm in the same place as Marcus, where I just feel like, yes, five years isn't a long amount of time relative to your life. But thinking about how much my life has changed in five years and the lives of people I know, that feels like a lot. I can deal with the clone thing.
Chris Yee:
So I don't think that the five years is that big of a downside, but I also think that the clone isn't a downside. I actually think I would like having a clone. It's not like they have to live with you. They can be their own person. It's just every once in a while, you see your clone. It's just like your really, really good friend because you have the same personality. So I think that while cryogenics is not bad, clone is better. I'm going clone.
Marcus Lehner:
We've all decided, but one last thing that I just thought about: how much will it ruin you emotionally if five years down the line when the other Chris wakes up, even though we picked clone? What if your clone is just doing way better than you are in life? You start in the same spot, and five years later, your clone is just living it up, and you're doing other stuff. And you're like, "Oh man. I'm really jealous of my clone." And it's worse because you know they were in the exact same spot you were with all the same memories and skills. The only thing that's different is that they made different choices.
Chris Yee:
That is pretty much inevitable. One of the clones is going to be jealous.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's just got to be a psychological blow. That said, so was skipping five years of my life. So, still going with the clone. And there you have it. We're going to get ourselves some clones. So, listeners, it's important for you guys to also start getting yourself some clones so that we increase our viewership that way. And make sure that your clones go get jobs so that they can go get dollars, so that they can go give it to us through our Patreon, www.patreon.com/absurdhypotheticals.
Marcus Lehner:
You can go there and support the show directly with your hard-earned clone dollars. If you are a clone, you are more than welcome. If you are not a clone, go get some, but also come yourself. There's just one tier. It's just $1.00 a month. And with that, you get access to all our bonus content that we produce each month for our Patreons exclusively, so super cool. You want to hear more of us? That's where we are. That's where our clones live.
Chris Yee:
We'll get $2.00. The clone ...
Marcus Lehner:
And keep cloning. Have your clone make a clone. And then your clone makes two clones. And then your clone makes three clones. And now you have a pyramid scheme, but it's all you. So it's all bonus, and nobody gets hurt.
Ben Storms:
Isn't that also what happened in that Fantasia thing with Mickey Mouse and the broomsticks and the water?
Marcus Lehner:
I don't know. I haven't seen it.
Ben Storms:
Of course not. That's a movie.
Chris Yee:
I'm pretty sure he chopped them in half with an ax.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, that one got dark a little bit, actually. Yeah, Fantasia is great.
Marcus Lehner:
Just make sure that happens at the bottom of your clone pyramid on the eighth generation clones.
Ben Storms:
Exactly.
Marcus Lehner:
That way, your top seven tiers can still go to that Patreon, or they can leave us reviews. Leaving a review is a great way to help the show. It doesn't cost a dime. It doesn't require clones. It helps more people find the show if there are good reviews. And if you want to be involved directly, send us a question. absurdhypotheticals@gmail.com Is probably the best way to reach us. And you have a cool idea for hypothetical, let us know. Or if you just think we screwed something up, we are happy to take constructive criticism, especially if it's aimed at Chris or Ben.
Chris Yee:
We know the elephant would die first and not explode.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, or you are a scientist with a degree in biology. You're like, "Chris, that's not how that works. Here you go." Anyway, feel free to join us next week where we try not to mess up the following question: What if it rained nonstop for a year?