How powerful is Saitama's Serious Punch? Saitama, better know as One Punch Man, is a character designed not to be taken seriously. But I think, with a little bit of math, and a little bit of anime investigation, we can at least calculate what happens when Saitama gets serious. (electronic music) For our analysis, we're gonna consider season one of the One Punch Man anime. In it, the foremost serious showing of Saitama's strength is during his fight against Lord Boros, a cyclopic alien invader who carries immense power inside his Ken-doll-like body. Let's take the fight blow by blow until we get to Serious Punch levels to see if we can get an idea of just how strong Saitama can be.
We're gonna go step by step through this fight because, by the rules of anime, whatever enemy attack that you can withstand, shake off, or deflect, you must simply be stronger than. (laughs) Nice try! This is why we have to evaluate all of Lord Boros' attacks, just to see how strong Saitama has to get. And Lord Boros starts out strong. The first attack that One Punch Man has to shrug off is a blast from Boros that the cyclops claims can completely vaporize enemies, bones and all. Since Lord Boros is always talking about the energy bound within him, how much physical energy would it take to completely vaporize a person?
There are a couple of ways we will tackle this question. The most direct approach might be a brute force method, where we take the relative amounts of everything inside the average human body, all the calcium, all the protein, all the water in a human body, and see just how much energy it would take to take those solids or liquids and turn them directly into gas. Going through some tedious calculations that I'm not gonna show you because then we would just be padding out this episode like we were Dragonball Z or something, you get around three billion joules, three gigajoules worth of energy needed to vaporize an entire person, bones and all. This about the amount of energy in your average lightning bolt, but we should at least check this number, our more brute force approach, with a more practical one. According to the Federation of British Cremation Authorities, it takes around 300 kilowatt hours of natural gas and electrical energy to reduce a person completely to ash, to vaporize almost all of them.
Well, I've drawn Earth here to scale, with Earth's crust the thickness of Earth's crust, which I would consider to be Earth's surface. And as you can see here, at 150 millionth scale, the Earth's crust is almost nothing. It's like the skin on the grape that is the Earth. If you were going to destroy a planet's surface, relatively speaking, although it would take an obscene amount of energy, you wouldn't be destroying all that much.
If we're talking about a big anime-style fight, I'm guessing Lord Boros wants to vaporize the surface of the planet like he wanted to vaporize Saitama's bones. If that's the case, we need how much energy it will take to turn Earth rock into sick Earth rock vape. Just like ice can go from ice to water to steam if you add enough heat energy, rock can go to rock vapor if you add enough heat energy, so if you wanted vaporize some section of Earth's crust, you would just need to know the total amount of heat needed. However, the Earth is a very complicated thing with many different materials and many different temperatures and you would have to do an equation like this with specific heats, heats of fusion, heats of vaporization for every single different material and how much mass and it's percentages and it's very complicated. So, instead, we are just going to broadly approximate. Estimating and approximating, I think a decent value for how much energy it will take to vaporize one cubic meter of Earth's crust will be around 25 gigajoules. The numbers are so large here, even if we're off by just a little bit, it won't matter all that much. Now, all we have to is apply our approximation to the entirety of Earth's surface.
If Lord Boros launched an attack to vaporize the entirety of Earth's surface, it would have to have enough energy to completely erase what amounts to about 1% of Earth's volume. Do the math with our values and you'll find that the total amount of energy required to vaporize all of Earth's surface is a million septillion joules, which is a ridiculous amount of energy. Surely, ridiculous enough to be associated with a character like Saitama. But, like we did before, let's just check our numbers. If this is the amount of energy to vaporize 1% of Earth, what would 100% of the energy be? By simple multiplication, the value would then be 10 to the 32 joules and this just happens to be almost exactly the gravitational binding energy of Earth, how much energy you would have to put into Earth to remove all of its pieces out into infinity or destroy it. This is almost the value that you always hear discussed when we talk about the Death Star. So, our value actually makes a confusing amount of sense. And, therefore, this is the amount of energy Saitama's Serious Punch would have to deflect. And so, by the rules of anime, Saitama's Serious Punch has to be at least this strong. Strong enough to evaporate entire sections of a planet like it was nothing. (screaming) One punch! Now that we comparisons for serious punch energies, we can investigate how the move actually works. What? It's not weird. The Serious Punch, unlike other anime-style final moves, doesn't look like some kind of blast of plasma energy, rather it looks like a gust of air.
Or at least this time it looks like a gust of air. The same kind of gust that put a hole in a mountain behind Genos that one time. So now, let's focus on the effect this move actually has, parting clouds across the entire planet. I think there is a real connection to real world energies here. This is a very simple diagram of a volcano. Every so often, a volcano structured like this can start to build up gasses near the top, mostly water vapor and CO2. When the pressure in this plug of air gets high enough in what's called a Strombolian eruption, this air gives way and creates enormous pressure waves in the surrounding atmosphere that, yes, can move and create clouds. Here's a recent example caught in Japan. Look how the air compresses and stretches the atmosphere with the pressure waves, such that it creates clouds instantaneously.
And here's another mind-blowingly beautiful example captured in 2014 in Papua-New Guinea. Look how the pressure waves almost deform the weather exactly like One Punch Man was trying to exaggerate. These are serious punches of air. Looking to the volcano literature, you can use an equation like this to estimate the total energy of an eruption based on the final height of the plume that it spits out. The final height for the plume for that eruption in Papua-New Guinea that we just looked at was 18,000 meters, 18 kilometers. If that's the case, that means that this eruption that moved and created clouds had around 10 petajoules worth of energy. Now, by anime logic, if Saitama can force air around and from his fist more energetically, trillions of times more energetically than this eruption that moved and created clouds, then it's anime plausible that his Serious Punch could do exactly what we see in the anime and the manga.
He would be bald, yellow-suited, volacanoful man who is simply a hero for fun. So, just how strong is One Punch Man's Serious Punch? At least in season one of the anime, behind Saitama's fist has to be an eruption of energy, a gloved volcano of satirical strength that can wipe out entire swaths of a planet's surface at the very least. Imagine if he actually hit something. It would do tons quite just part the Skytama. Because science.
I'm fine with it. (electronic music) Thank you so much for watching, Kristin. If you want to suggest ideas for future episodes, you can follow me and Because Science here at these handles. Also, we are on to episode four of The Science of Mortal Kombat. We just got to the science of get over here! You're gonna wanna check it out because there's rope involved.
We're gonna go step by step through this fight because, by the rules of anime, whatever enemy attack that you can withstand, shake off, or deflect, you must simply be stronger than. (laughs) Nice try! This is why we have to evaluate all of Lord Boros' attacks, just to see how strong Saitama has to get. And Lord Boros starts out strong. The first attack that One Punch Man has to shrug off is a blast from Boros that the cyclops claims can completely vaporize enemies, bones and all. Since Lord Boros is always talking about the energy bound within him, how much physical energy would it take to completely vaporize a person?
There are a couple of ways we will tackle this question. The most direct approach might be a brute force method, where we take the relative amounts of everything inside the average human body, all the calcium, all the protein, all the water in a human body, and see just how much energy it would take to take those solids or liquids and turn them directly into gas. Going through some tedious calculations that I'm not gonna show you because then we would just be padding out this episode like we were Dragonball Z or something, you get around three billion joules, three gigajoules worth of energy needed to vaporize an entire person, bones and all. This about the amount of energy in your average lightning bolt, but we should at least check this number, our more brute force approach, with a more practical one. According to the Federation of British Cremation Authorities, it takes around 300 kilowatt hours of natural gas and electrical energy to reduce a person completely to ash, to vaporize almost all of them.
Well, I've drawn Earth here to scale, with Earth's crust the thickness of Earth's crust, which I would consider to be Earth's surface. And as you can see here, at 150 millionth scale, the Earth's crust is almost nothing. It's like the skin on the grape that is the Earth. If you were going to destroy a planet's surface, relatively speaking, although it would take an obscene amount of energy, you wouldn't be destroying all that much.
If we're talking about a big anime-style fight, I'm guessing Lord Boros wants to vaporize the surface of the planet like he wanted to vaporize Saitama's bones. If that's the case, we need how much energy it will take to turn Earth rock into sick Earth rock vape. Just like ice can go from ice to water to steam if you add enough heat energy, rock can go to rock vapor if you add enough heat energy, so if you wanted vaporize some section of Earth's crust, you would just need to know the total amount of heat needed. However, the Earth is a very complicated thing with many different materials and many different temperatures and you would have to do an equation like this with specific heats, heats of fusion, heats of vaporization for every single different material and how much mass and it's percentages and it's very complicated. So, instead, we are just going to broadly approximate. Estimating and approximating, I think a decent value for how much energy it will take to vaporize one cubic meter of Earth's crust will be around 25 gigajoules. The numbers are so large here, even if we're off by just a little bit, it won't matter all that much. Now, all we have to is apply our approximation to the entirety of Earth's surface.
If Lord Boros launched an attack to vaporize the entirety of Earth's surface, it would have to have enough energy to completely erase what amounts to about 1% of Earth's volume. Do the math with our values and you'll find that the total amount of energy required to vaporize all of Earth's surface is a million septillion joules, which is a ridiculous amount of energy. Surely, ridiculous enough to be associated with a character like Saitama. But, like we did before, let's just check our numbers. If this is the amount of energy to vaporize 1% of Earth, what would 100% of the energy be? By simple multiplication, the value would then be 10 to the 32 joules and this just happens to be almost exactly the gravitational binding energy of Earth, how much energy you would have to put into Earth to remove all of its pieces out into infinity or destroy it. This is almost the value that you always hear discussed when we talk about the Death Star. So, our value actually makes a confusing amount of sense. And, therefore, this is the amount of energy Saitama's Serious Punch would have to deflect. And so, by the rules of anime, Saitama's Serious Punch has to be at least this strong. Strong enough to evaporate entire sections of a planet like it was nothing. (screaming) One punch! Now that we comparisons for serious punch energies, we can investigate how the move actually works. What? It's not weird. The Serious Punch, unlike other anime-style final moves, doesn't look like some kind of blast of plasma energy, rather it looks like a gust of air.
Or at least this time it looks like a gust of air. The same kind of gust that put a hole in a mountain behind Genos that one time. So now, let's focus on the effect this move actually has, parting clouds across the entire planet. I think there is a real connection to real world energies here. This is a very simple diagram of a volcano. Every so often, a volcano structured like this can start to build up gasses near the top, mostly water vapor and CO2. When the pressure in this plug of air gets high enough in what's called a Strombolian eruption, this air gives way and creates enormous pressure waves in the surrounding atmosphere that, yes, can move and create clouds. Here's a recent example caught in Japan. Look how the air compresses and stretches the atmosphere with the pressure waves, such that it creates clouds instantaneously.
And here's another mind-blowingly beautiful example captured in 2014 in Papua-New Guinea. Look how the pressure waves almost deform the weather exactly like One Punch Man was trying to exaggerate. These are serious punches of air. Looking to the volcano literature, you can use an equation like this to estimate the total energy of an eruption based on the final height of the plume that it spits out. The final height for the plume for that eruption in Papua-New Guinea that we just looked at was 18,000 meters, 18 kilometers. If that's the case, that means that this eruption that moved and created clouds had around 10 petajoules worth of energy. Now, by anime logic, if Saitama can force air around and from his fist more energetically, trillions of times more energetically than this eruption that moved and created clouds, then it's anime plausible that his Serious Punch could do exactly what we see in the anime and the manga.
He would be bald, yellow-suited, volacanoful man who is simply a hero for fun. So, just how strong is One Punch Man's Serious Punch? At least in season one of the anime, behind Saitama's fist has to be an eruption of energy, a gloved volcano of satirical strength that can wipe out entire swaths of a planet's surface at the very least. Imagine if he actually hit something. It would do tons quite just part the Skytama. Because science.
I'm fine with it. (electronic music) Thank you so much for watching, Kristin. If you want to suggest ideas for future episodes, you can follow me and Because Science here at these handles. Also, we are on to episode four of The Science of Mortal Kombat. We just got to the science of get over here! You're gonna wanna check it out because there's rope involved.
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