Godzilla Pees A Lot, Guys
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Godzilla will finally hit theaters in less than a week, after what feels like the longest waiting period ever assigned to anything. Thankfully, the anticipatory stress has been purely mental instead of physical, like the agonizing wait that precedes being able to urinate after drinking the equivalent of a medium-sized wavepool. Say, that sounds like a flawless segue leading us to a story about how much urine Godzilla would produce!
It’s undeniable that part of science fiction’s appeal is applying real-world science and statistics to imaginary situations, and sometimes closer looks can lead to breakthroughs that bring our world just a little bit closer to those of the genre’s most prescient authors. That said, I’m almost certain our daily lives won’t be changed by knowing how much Godzilla pees, but at least it won’t be curiosity killing us cats.
These hypothetical totals come from Dr. Craig McClain, of the website Deep Sea News, whose focus on urine production is admittedly the slightest part of the article. The story is more concerned with Godzilla’s massive evolutionary climb in size from his 1954 origins, and compares it to patterns of real lifeforms over the course of Earth’s history. Everything gets bigger with time, but Godzilla seems to be growing by the minute.
Basing his info on the Kaiju urine production chart (because that’s always handy), McClain deduces that at, his current height of nearly 500 feet, Godzilla creates around 12,921,400 gallons of pee per day, which is around a quarter of the liquid cargo inside the world’s largest oil tankers. If we assume people drink 64 ounces of water a day, that means an average person who lives to be 80 years old consumes about 14,600 gallons of water in their lifetime. That’s pretty much what comes out of him when he shakes. (If Godzilla shakes more than two times, you probably still shouldn’t accuse him of playing with it.)
To offer a couple of other comparisons, an Olympic-sized swimming pool is about 660,000 gallons, while Lake Michigan holds over 1.3 trillion gallons. I’m starting to get bladder envy over here.
Of course, this is all assuming that Godzilla needs to pee to clean his system out. Since we never really see him relaxing and knocking back a six pack, it’s possible that he gets a lot of that bacteria out through his atomic breath. Or in other ways that include giant, city-swamping piles of kaiju poop. (If anyone ever decides to estimate those totals, I won’t be the one writing the story.)
If I had been one of the people in the office building in the below clip, I probably would have excreted at least a quarter-gallon of scaredy-pants juice in my pants.
The King of the Monsters will wage war on MUTO monsters and possibly humanity when Godzilla hits theaters on May 16.
