Timeline for How tall can a humanoid creature be without alerting the rest of the planet with earthquakes?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 23, 2021 at 22:18 | vote | accept | Pink Sweetener | ||
| Jul 18, 2018 at 9:08 | comment | added | Monty Wild♦ | Don't forget ground pressure. Enough of that, and your giant won't be walking so much as wading... or sinking like a rock in jelly. | |
| Jul 17, 2018 at 16:55 | comment | added | Kyle A | @Pod, It looks like this upper bound is based on the energy of a medium scale earthquake (magnitude 4.0). This energy release is all (or at least mostly) in the ground. The bombs dropped on Japan were exploded above the ground, so a large portion of the energy went into the air, not the ground. The later tests are more relavent as some of those were underground, but I don't know the energies of those tests. Besides, this is meant to be a ballpark figure where an order of magnitude in the height is not considered that far off. | |
| Jul 17, 2018 at 13:21 | comment | added | Pod |
So steps that produce 6×4.184⇒25.1 gigajoules of energy are an upper limit. -- why is this an upper limit? The Little Boy bomb dropped on Japan was 63TJ and no one in Europe would have known if the news didn't show it. The same goes for later nuclear tests -- they released huge amounts of energy that were devastating locally but mostly irrelevant globally. (Other than pollution and politics)
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| Jul 17, 2018 at 13:20 | comment | added | Murphy | If the giant is about 50000 metric tons then that puts him in the ballpark of the weight of the titanic. For serious devastation that feels too small. | |
| Jul 17, 2018 at 11:02 | comment | added | Suthek | @Daron Which is actually funny, because in dutch, 'Loper' means 'someone who walks'. The Giant Loeper, He-Who-Walks. | |
| Jul 17, 2018 at 7:08 | comment | added | Lofty Withers | Coincidentally, the tallest Imperator Titans in the 40k universe are 140m tall. Probably a bit denser than fleshy giants, so even a smaller model would have this effect. A Bolo Mark XXXIII weighs 32,000,000 Kg; it has less impact in tracked operations, but a rough landing after counter-grav flight would do the trick. | |
| Jul 16, 2018 at 20:18 | history | edited | Alexander | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Corrected math
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| Jul 16, 2018 at 19:17 | comment | added | Tyler S. Loeper | Feel free to make edits to the answer. | |
| Jul 16, 2018 at 18:56 | comment | added | Alexander | Upon additional review, the "h to m" formula should look like m = 15h3. So the main formula is 25GJ = 9.8*15*h4, and the height is actually a fourth root of 170M, which results in a "dwarfish" 144 m height. | |
| Jul 16, 2018 at 18:39 | comment | added | Daron | For comparison it would have about 15 Earth diamaters to fall before the impact. | |
| Jul 16, 2018 at 18:35 | comment | added | Daron | I'm not sure about this figure. It seems like if you took something heavier than the Earth you could drop it from a lot closer than half way to the moon and still completely wreck the place. | |
| Jul 16, 2018 at 18:30 | history | edited | Frostfyre | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Corrected exponent
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| Jul 16, 2018 at 18:25 | history | edited | Tyler S. Loeper | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 13 characters in body
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| Jul 16, 2018 at 18:16 | history | edited | Ender Look | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Math Latex always makes numbers more beatiful.
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| Jul 16, 2018 at 18:15 | comment | added | Pink Sweetener | This is a superb answer, thank you! The fact that it's a ballpark doesn't matter: by showing that there effectively is no upper limit, you provided an answer that is precisely as exact as I needed it to be. As it so happens, "Loeper" seems like a pretty good name for a giant - hope you don't mind being an antagonist in my dnd world. | |
| Jul 16, 2018 at 18:10 | history | edited | Tyler S. Loeper | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
edited body
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| Jul 16, 2018 at 18:05 | history | answered | Tyler S. Loeper | CC BY-SA 4.0 |