In mid-2016, a strange urban legend from South Korea took over the web: What happens if we throw an ant from a 63-story building? Kurzgesagt asked a similar question… with an elephant. The real goal of the short isn't to put pachyderms on skyscrapers, but to analyze the link between different forms of life, the size they develop, how physics affects them, their benefits, and their weak points.
The experiment begins with three animals in free fall: a mouse, a dog, and an elephant. The "target" is a pile of mattresses, and what we imagine happens. The mouse manages to get out on its own, though stunned and confused after the impact. The dog dies from severe internal damage, and the elephant disappears in an explosion of flesh, blood, and guts. Naturally, this is just an exercise and no animal gets hurt, but it helps us ask a very special question: Why? Why do the dog and elephant die? What advantage allows the mouse to survive?
Why Size Matters
The new video published by Kurzgesagt reduces it to a matter of size, but the answer is actually a bit more complex. From viruses and bacteria to whales and elephants, life has managed to adapt to different scales, and that adaptation includes aspects such as the laws of physics.
The mouse doesn't die because, being a small animal, gravity has less effect on it and the amount of kinetic energy it has during the fall is less. On the other hand, the larger the surface area relative to the animal's mass and volume, the better the impact is distributed, making it softer.
The rest of the video explains some of the risks that smaller life forms must face, and one of them is the surface tension of water. For us it's too weak, the mouse feels it a bit more, but for insects it's potentially lethal (almost like glue), and that's why they developed the ability to repel water. This is just the first short of a new series divided into three parts, and we eagerly await its continuation.
