Could Giant Sandworms Exist? [Dune]
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- Опубліковано 20 лют 2024
- Is it even possible for a sandworm the size of those shown on Dune's fictitious "Arrakais"? Why not? What are invertebrates? How could a giant sandworm exist? Dr. Anna Allen, with the U.S. National Science Foundation explains all things invertebrate.
- Наука та технологія
Looking at fiction through science should be its own series! This is great!
there is no real science left to do
Isaac Asimov wrote a terrific essay once where he tried to apply real-world biology & physics to make sci-fi monsters like giant insects or skyscraper sized lizards. Bit by bit, feature by feature, they necessarily morphed into being regular-sized elephants & dinosaurs since they needed the required skeletal system, lungs & circulatory systems at sizes that already worked in nature.
I think if you did the same with giant sand worms you'd end up with large (but not giant) eel-like creatures, maybe with mole rat faces and teeth., closer to the monsters in Tremors.
I remember reading a sci-fi story about a scientist who fixed a heart defect found in either gators or crocodiles and ended up with a dragon. I don't remember how they dealt with all the resulting problems.
so this "Worm" is closer related to a snake in structure?
In the sense of having lungs, dry skin and bones? Yes, but their biology is so alien that water is actually toxic for them, so, it's unlike any creature on earth
Agreed nowadays no big.. but on earth millions year back there are so many big insects on earth..
That's because during the Carboniferous period the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere rose to 30-35% for about 50 million years. So organisms with no lungs could grow larger and still get enough oxygen in..
After seeing a platypus, I would have a hard time imagining an organism that could NOT exist.
And why couldn't a worm evolve an exoskeleton?
Or lungs, for that matter. If the question is only could you scale a common worm to 747 size w/ no changes? The answer is no. Could a worm-like thing exist at that scale? Maybe ... and the necessary changes to make that work would have made a more interesting discussion.
It's an alien, not a worm, it could evolve anything, but an organism that size moving through sand like it's water is impossible unfortunatelly, but yeah, this video was to teach us about worms, not to speculate the biology of the sandworm, after all, there are worm like creatures with lungs and bones, they're called snakes
what definitely is impossible for dune worms is to travel at such high speeds in sand. it defies logic and physics, it's just ridiculous.
Yep, it's a very old book and the trope of animals swimming through sand like it's water is a cool idea even if not realistic
Very thorough discussion of why Dune’s creatures could not plausibly be terrestrial worms.
However, this fictional tale is set on another planet. The ‘worm’ that creates the spice might only be an analogy to terrestrial worms species and might have totally different biological features. Perhaps they are more like reptilian species - much like those that inhabit earth’s waters. And as for the ‘sand’, perhaps it is not at all like the silicate sands on earth, and for that matter, perhaps the gravitational force on Dune is different from that on earth, making possible that movement through such an environment?
Physics and biomechanical constraints on the body would still apply though.. like structural integrity, weight vs strength of the material from which it is built, how to oxygenate such a huge body, etc. Let me put it this way. There has been a 3.5 billion years of evolution on Earth across multitude of various environments and there's a reason why we don't see such worms in real life. ;-)
You're right about the sandworm not being a worm in the earth sense, but the sand in Arakis does behave like earth's sand, and the gravity doesn't seem that different judging by the human characters interacting with it, so yeah, no whale sized worm swimming though sand
Light on imagination.