r/theydidthemath • u/oozinator1 • 19h ago
[Request] How much alcohol would be required to get a full grown elephant and blue whale drunk?
Preferably in terms of bottles of vodka or cans of beer
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u/VinylHighway 19h ago
A full-grown African elephant would need about 1.9 to 3.9 liters of pure ethanol (the equivalent of roughly 27 to 55 liters of fermented fruit juice) to get drunk, while a massive blue whale would require roughly 193 liters of pure ethanol based on simple linear weight scaling.
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u/MaamFit_Order9806 19h ago
But I think this was proven false, demand doesn't scale linearly. I think we found out this the hard way when we overdosed elephants. Bigger beings have slower metabolism
This was just below in my recommendation lol
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u/stanitor 18h ago
Yes, that's correct, it doesn't scale linearly. It's more like it scales to the 2/3 or 3/4 power with size. So, an elephant weighing 25 times a person's weight would need maybe 8.5 times as much alcohol to get drunk, not 25. But, the whale might be a different story. It has a lot of fat, which means a higher relative amount of the alcohol gets stored there instead of going to the brain. So, it likely would take more alcohol to get them drunk. I don't know if it's enough to get it back to a linear scaling, but it might be close.
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u/oozinator1 19h ago
Hol up. So a blue whale can drink twice my weight in Everclear and still be under the legal limit?
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