Harry, Time Travel and Sue

[groinkick]

Conservation of mass-energy kind of gets in the way. It's one of the plot holes in Jurassic Park; a T-Rex simply couldn't have eaten enough to get that big in the amount of time since Hammond had cloned it.

How long did it have to grow?  T-Rex reaches full size at around 18 to 20 years of age according to scientists.

[groinkick]

Sue is big. But, she is not Godzilla big. Even when you toss in 1950s Godzilla. I think that is when the battleship or aircraft carrier comes in.

Kaiju doesn't always mean Godzilla.  Nothing in Earth's history was that big.  The foot print on the beach sounded like something big, but not Godzilla big.  If Sue was used against something say 50 feet tall, she could still be used to deliver a big bite to the monsters hamstring, or ankle resulting in it either falling down, or simply drawing the attention away from Dresden so he can finish a big spell, or something. 

"The models suggest that an adult T. rex was capable of a maximum bite force of 35,000 to 57,000 newtons at its back teeth. That's more than four times higher than past estimates and ten times as forceful as the bite of a modern alligator."

I don't care how big you are, something with that kind of bite force will damage you, even if it's just your ankle.

[Kindler]

How long did it have to grow?  T-Rex reaches full size at around 18 to 20 years of age according to scientists.

No more than five years in the book. InGen clones their first prehistoric animal in 1984 (doesn't say what animal), and the Jurassic Park incident happens in 1989. A little girl is attacked in the prologue (which they used for the opening of Lost World) some time before Grant is brought in to tour the park.

To really mess with the physics, imagine a herbivorous brachiosaurus getting to be that size on only plant matter. You're talking about adding, what, a forty, fifty pounds a day to their mass for a decade or two? They're something like thirty-forty metric tons, if memory serves. You also have to deal with thermodynamics, as there's no way to prevent loss of energy during digestion.

For them to be the size they are in Jurassic Park, they'd have had to eat nonstop for years, at nearly 100% efficiency, with little room for muscular and skeletal development.

It's one of the reasons there's a big theory that none of the dinosaurs were cloned, and that Hammond was pulling a giant dog and pony show to bilk his investors. He brought on a paleontologist to see if he could be fooled. He even mentions (in the movie, can't remember if it's in the book) that his first attraction was a flea circus, and that the park was just a big budget version. (Also, how was he able to clone extinct plants? Mosquitoes wouldn't have ingested their DNA, at least not enough to replicate them, and DNA only has a half-life that's measured in centuries, not Epochs, so how is any of this possible anyway).

Too Long, Didn't Read: Michael Crichton made a rare mistake in his meticulous research, or else it was a clue to an alternate character interpretation.

[wardenferry419]

I was most interested in the chaos theory parts than the genetics.

[Kindler]

I was most interested in the chaos theory parts than the genetics.

Yeah, plus dinosaurs rampaging across a closed system is pretty boss.

[groinkick]

To really mess with the physics, imagine a herbivorous brachiosaurus getting to be that size on only plant matter. You're talking about adding, what, a forty, fifty pounds a day to their mass for a decade or two? They're something like thirty-forty metric tons, if memory serves. You also have to deal with thermodynamics, as there's no way to prevent loss of energy during digestion.

Alright first off we are obviously discussing a fictional book/movie.  We can all agree on that.  Second the dinosaurs being cloned could not grow to that size because the oxygen today is much thinner than it was at that time, which allowed for their massive growth.  That being said you trying to use physics, and thermodynamics doesn't calculate.  We are talking about biology.  A blue whale adds sometimes over 200 pounds a day as it grows, and reaches full size in most cases around the 20 year mark.  That's 4 times the weight being added that you cited as going against physics.  Now the diet is different, it's not plant based.  Still that doesn't matter.  Animals can grow very quickly from plant based food.  A bull will go from 50 pounds to over 2000 pounds in a few years while a human by comparison isn't even remotely close to that kind of growth.  A bull isn't capable of reaching 100 tons, but another plant eating animal that has evolved to reach that size would absolutely put on the amount of weight you cited, in the distant past.  Today?  No because of the oxygen, and different climate.

I will also add that although it is absolutely impossible with current technology to bring back dinosaurs, in this fictional world there was major genetic manipulation.  Combining frog dna for example.  If other alterations were done to increase the dinosaurs growth rate by sacrificing it's life span, and if they were exposed to growth hormones then it is conceivable albeit not very likely that there may be a chance an animal like this could reach incredible sizes in 15 years.

[Kindler]

Alright first off we are obviously discussing a fictional book/movie.  We can all agree on that.  Second the dinosaurs being cloned could not grow to that size because the oxygen today is much thinner than it was at that time, which allowed for their massive growth.  That being said you trying to use physics, and thermodynamics doesn't calculate.  We are talking about biology.  A blue whale adds sometimes over 200 pounds a day as it grows, and reaches full size in most cases around the 20 year mark.  That's 4 times the weight being added that you cited as going against physics.  Now the diet is different, it's not plant based.  Still that doesn't matter.  Animals can grow very quickly from plant based food.  A bull will go from 50 pounds to over 2000 pounds in a few years while a human by comparison isn't even remotely close to that kind of growth.  A bull isn't capable of reaching 100 tons, but another plant eating animal that has evolved to reach that size would absolutely put on the amount of weight you cited, in the distant past.  Today?  No because of the oxygen, and different climate.

I will also add that although it is absolutely impossible with current technology to bring back dinosaurs, in this fictional world there was major genetic manipulation.  Combining frog dna for example.  If other alterations were done to increase the dinosaurs growth rate by sacrificing it's life span, and if they were exposed to growth hormones then it is conceivable albeit not very likely that there may be a chance an animal like this could reach incredible sizes in 15 years.

First, biology doesn't get to ignore physics. It still matters. Thermodynamics absolutely plays a part in digestion. It's conservation of mass and energy—and none of it is lossless. Blue whales eat between 2,000 and 8,000 pounds of krill daily to gain that 200 pounds, for instance.

I also think you're missing my point. It's not that these creatures couldn't have existed, it's that they couldn't have been hatched within the past five years, the time period stated in-universe. That's the problem with the conservation of mass.

My point about plant matter was that the loss of energy and mass from consumption plays a big part, as the plant matter they're eating offers less than animal matter (lots of fats and proteins, for instance). A bull takes fifteen-twenty months to grow to full size, and eats about 25 pounds of hay per day to reach its full average weight of 2,000 pounds. Round that down to 2,000 pounds in a year as a best case scenario, and you still have fifty years of growth to reach the size of a brachiosaurus. Even at double or triple the rate of growth, which seems unlikely, you still have well over a decade necessary to grow to full size.

And yeah, I'm well aware about the oxygen content of the atmosphere's importance; it's another reason why I like the theory that Hammond wasn't making actual dinosaurs, but things that were different altogether. The whole amber-ed mosquitoes thing was just a fiction he sold his investors, and he made these things out of whole cloth.

It's ignored mostly by the movie canon, which acknowledges the differences with the dinosaurs in Jurassic World (which I appreciated). But the books never dealt with this sort of thing.

Personally, I think you and I are in violent agreement. Mostly, I just want to live in a world with megafauna so I can ride a ground sloth to the grocery store, and I'm grumpy that it isn't possible.