Examining the human compulsion to create and fear monsters provides a profound lens into our own anxieties and scientific understanding, a discussion vigorously pursued on StarTalk by Examining the human compulsion to create and fear monsters provides a profound lens into our own anxieties and scientific understanding, a discussion vigorously pursued on StarTalk by host Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-host Matt Kirshen, and "Geek-in-Chief" Charles Liu. These figures, from mythological dragons to modern zombies, fundamentally reflect our attempt to explain the unknown.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, along with Charles Liu, a professor at CUNY Staten Island, posits that human nature, for centuries and millennia, has driven us to explain what is unknown and feared by personifying it as a monster, thereby making the concept more accessible. This ancient tendency is even reflected in the constellations, such as centaurs and Draco the dragon, which are nonhuman creatures. Liu suggests that the concept of a monster potentially began with actual animals in our environment that people knew little about, only showed up at night, and worked their way into legends.
Matt Kirshen joined the conversation, promoting his ongoing tour and podcast, Probably Science. The discussion quickly established that the physics of monsters is a topic with "no end whatsoever".
A key cultural distinction explored by StarTalk is how different societies perceive these figures. Liu points out that the European dragon is often depicted as a menace, whereas the Asian dragon—seen in Liu's Taiwanese and Chinese heritage—is viewed as noble, very helpful, and playful. For instance, in the Chinese zodiac, the dragon is so revered for its potential for wealth and success that people will delay C-sections to ensure their children are born in the Year of the Dragon. Liu asserts that monsters are not inherently good or bad unless we project those facts onto them.
The most culturally compelling monsters are those that embody deep-seated scientific anxieties, as Tyson and Liu explore. Godzilla, the longest-running movie franchise of all time (starting in 1954), is a prime example. Tyson notes that Godzilla, created by radioactivity, appeared in Japan within ten years of the dropping of the atomic bombs. Liu confirms that this was "not a coincidence at all". The monster became part of Japan’s storytelling culture to embody their fears and come to terms with the worst things that had happened, effectively asking, "What did we create?".
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Another crucial example is Frankenstein's monster, considered by many to be the first true science fiction novel in the European tradition, written by Mary Shelley in the early 1800s. The monster was stitched together from long-dead body parts.
Liu explained that at the time, scientists like Galvani and Volta were experimenting by attaching electrical connections to frog legs and making them twitch, demonstrating a connection between movement and electricity. In the novel, the monster is animated by the best source of energy available—a lightning bolt—which, though known to be electricity by figures like Ben Franklin, was still widely viewed as an "act of God" by the general populace. Liu concludes that given the contemporary experiments with frog legs, this was "not such a far-out idea" at the time.
However, applying real-world physics often shatters the fantasy. Liu explains the concept of scaling: if a creature, such as Godzilla, doubled its height, its volume and weight would increase by a factor of eight. But its strength, which scales with the cross-sectional area of the muscle, only increases by a factor of four. For a 400-foot-tall Godzilla, weighing a billion tons, all known bone and muscle would shatter, leaving it a "blob of protoplasmic stuff" that couldn't support itself, never mind walking. This physical impossibility is what makes such monsters exciting: we imagine them doing amazing superhuman things if scaled up, but physics prevents it.
Modern monsters, particularly the undead and zombies, tap into the ultimate human fear: the mystery of death. Liu states, "things that are not alive fascinate us because we are alive and we don't understand them". The lack of understanding about what happens after death makes the concept of the undead particularly spooky. This curiosity led to flawed experiments, such as attempts to weigh people at the moment of death to see if they lost the weight of a physical "soul," and even early attempts using X-rays to see if something left the body.
Contemporary zombie narratives, such as The Last of Us, reflect current scientific anxieties, specifically global warming. The mythology posits that rising global temperatures allow parasitic fungi, like cordyceps, to evolve and survive in the higher body temperature of humans. Liu emphasizes that the fungus is simply "trying to make more fungi", but the true horror is the resulting human behavior: when threatened as a species, humans do "monstrous things like kill and oppress and push away and isolate".
The consensus among Tyson, Kirshen, and Liu is that science fiction’s finest feature is its ability to hold up a mirror to the time in which we live, and that the monster narrative teaches us about ourselves. As Liu ultimately concludes, the thing that makes natural forces and creatures "bad is we is us," making humans the true monsters. Tyson adds that if a story earns the "sci" in the sci-fi label, incorporating physics or biology, it creates deep insights.
