The Internet could have become a place of infinite knowledge for humanity, but instead it turned into a dumping ground for fakes and the craziest conspiracy theories. It's not that they didn't exist before the Internet, but the network with billions of readers has taken everything to a new level. One of these conspiracy theories says that thousands of skeletons of giant people are being found around the world, the existence of which the Vatican and the American Smithsonian Institute are allegedly trying to hide.

The IFLScience publication tells the details of this theory, as well as about a fairly simple mathematical law that gives the final answer to the question of whether giant people could ever exist on Earth.

One of these popular theories with photographic evidence appeared a few years ago and was subsequently spread by all conspiracy theorists.

"Giant skeletons are found by the thousands. The Vatican and the Smithsonian destroyed most of them, and some were thrown to the bottom of the ocean. Because the need to explain how they existed would contradict the evolution of mankind from apes. That's what we were forced to believe. And what do you believe?" the author of the post wrote on social network X (formerly known as Twitter), posting a photo that was supposed to prove the veracity of his statement.

Instead, the photographic evidence turned out to be so primitively processed in Photoshop that it only aroused ridicule. Moreover, a search for the source of the photo revealed that it first appeared in 2002. It was discovered that it was created for an online contest in which (ironically) participants were asked to create a fake archaeological find using Photoshop.

However, this did not stop the fans of the theory of giants at all. Posts began to appear about the remains of 24-meter tall people allegedly found in India. As evidence, more and more photos with the remains of giants appeared. And each of these photos was somehow processed to make it appear that the remains were much larger than they actually were.

It even reached the point of absurdity when a painting by Spanish painter Francisco-Jose de Goya called "The Colossus" (1808), which depicts a giant man, was published as evidence. However, it is possible that the author of the post published the picture to mock the supporters of conspiracy theories.

Nevertheless, is there any possibility that 24-meter tall people really existed on Earth? And is it possible that they were once seen, or at least heard about, by the Irish writer Jonathan Swift, who later described the giants in Gulliver's Travels (1726)?

There is a mathematical law that can easily answer this question. It is the law of the square-cube, which was described in 1638 by Galileo Galilei. According to this law, as the size of any object increases, its volume grows faster than its surface area.

This happens because the area grows in proportion to the square of your size, while the volume increases in proportion to the cube of your size. It's a bit complicated, but it will become clearer with an example.

If you increase the scale of a person, its volume will increase sharply (cubically) in proportion to its size. At the same time, the cross-sectional area of muscles and bones will increase in proportion to the square. If a person's height reached 18 meters - 10 times the height of a person of 1.8 meters - the body area of the giant would be 100 times the area of an ordinary person (10 squared).

Instead, the mass of such a giant would increase cubically. So, if a 180-centimeter tall person weighed 70 kilograms, then if they grew to 18 meters, their weight would increase to 343,000 kilograms (70 kg in a cube).

Thus, such a person, if he or she existed, would most likely be crushed by his or her own mass.

This theory is also confirmed by people known to science whose height was more than 2 meters: they all had problems with their backs, which were simply unable to withstand the load, and, as a rule, with their hearts, which were not large enough to transport the required amount of blood.

One might argue that there were dinosaurs that were not destroyed by their own weight. Yes, but their physiological structure was such that it allowed them to grow to a certain size. Besides, we often overestimate the gigantism of dinosaurs. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the largest of the dinosaurs, Dreadnoughtus, was 26 meters long. We are talking about length, because its height along the spine reached about a two-story building, and the rest was a long neck. Its weight was estimated to be about 65,000 kg.

Earlier, OBOZREVATEL talked about what will happen when our Sun dies and whether it can become a black hole.

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