Saitama, better know as One Punch Man,

is a character designed not to be taken seriously.

His power level goes way beyond 9000

because his strength comes from satire

and not any backstory,

so we've never really seen

this incredibly formidable hero,

though he doesn't look it,

unleash his full potential.

He will simply be stronger, probably,

then the strongest enemy he faces.

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 most 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 few ways we can 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.

It just so happens that if you convert this value,

you get just about

one gigajoule,

which means our numbers from two separate approaches

are in decent agreement,

which means our values get an S ranking,

but this is the low end of the energy on display

during this fight because...

Just a second.

Because next, Lord Boros punts Saitama to the moon

and this would take even more energy.

You've probably heard of the term escape velocity before.

It's the theoretical velocity at which

you'd have to launch something

off the surface of a body, like a planet in space,

in order to move that object infinitely far away.

Such that it is always moving outside of the

gravitational influence of that body,

always slowing down, but never approaching zero

and never falling back in.

On Earth, that value is around 11.2 kilometers per second.

You can use this theoretical velocity

to get at how much energy you would need

to put into something to punt it off the surface

of a planet, like Saitama.

You can use either side of this equation to do so,

either the kinetic energy needed to do that

with the escape velocity or how much work

you would have to do against the pull of gravity

in order to pull something off of a planet.

Ignoring the atmosphere, the amount of energy

Lord Boros would have to put into his knee

and then into Saitama's body is around four gigajoules.

However, if Lord Boros gets OPM to the moon

in just three seconds, as we see in the anime,

this value spikes to 700 petajoules.

That's more energy than the sun hits the Earth with

in total every second.

But Saitama shrugs this attack off too,

which means that his serious move

has to be even stronger than this.

What?

Now?

(sighs) Okay.

One,

two,

three, one hundred.

Boros' final move is a bit harder to put into

real world terms, but it should give us

a point of comparison for Saitama's final fist.

In the final phase of the Lord Boros fight,

the extraterrestrial being unleashes

an incredibly powerful attack, his final move,

but what this final move is supposed to do

depends on which version of One Punch Man

you are looking at or reading.

In the English dub, for example, of the anime,

he says blasting you and this planet to hell.

In the English manga, however, he says

wiping you away along with the planet's surface.

And the same confusion exists in the Japanese versions.

For this analysis, we're gonna focus on the version

where he says wiping away an entire planet's surface.

Simply because it's more interesting to me.

If you were an evil alien looking to

wipe out the surface of an entire planet,

how much of that planet would you actually be destroying?

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.

Now, what does wipe out the surface of a planet really mean?

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