The Advantages and Disadvantages of Being a Giant

Jake Roper of Vsauce3 verbally and visually imagines what it would be like to be a giant and what the advantages and disadvantages would be.

You’d have to be careful when walking because although you’d be fine on most surfaces, you’d sink in soil. Speaking of walking and movement, you’d assume that now that you’re bigger, you’d move faster. Sadly, earth’s gravitational acceleration doesn’t scale up with you so it takes longer for gravity to allow parts of your body to fall. … And that’s not the only thing that’d be slower. Since you’re so much taller, the electrical signals to and from your brain have a much larger distance to travel but “velocity factor”, the speed of electricity, stays the same at about 275mph. So you’d be four times slower at reacting, Think 1 second instead of a quarter second. If you’re a giant you are probably still thinking because you’d be slower at that too. …But let’s talk about the positives here: Firstly, you’d have a pretty deep voice. …The second positive is that according to Kleiber’s Law, how a metabolic rate scales, your metabolic rate is now 22.6 times greater than normal. Now why is this a positive? Because this means I need 22 extra orders of tacos whenever I eat. If that isn’t reason enough to be a giant, then I don’t know what is.