Apple TV’s “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” continues the earth-shattering story introduced in the MonsterVerse movies. Season 2 dives deeper into the clandestine history of the mysterious Monarch organisation and its connection to the Titans – especially the giant radioactive one with the million-dollar smile known as Godzilla.
As demonstrated on the show and the movies, when Godzilla strikes, the world feels the rumble, with poor San Francisco finding out the hard way in his 2014 outing. It’s a destructive event that rivals an alien invasion or an asteroid strike. So, to celebrate the arrival of “Monarch” season 2, we spoke to some of the world’s leading scientists and experts to ask the question: If Godzilla attacked, could we survive? And could we co-exist?
A big problem
“Godzilla’s presence would definitely be a biome-destroying event,” monster scholar and “Monstrum” host Dr. Emily Zarka tells Space.com about what would happen if the Titan stepped through the rift and stomped into our world. “Due to the size of Godzilla and the other kaiju, there would be physical effects. I think that it would completely change life as we know it.”
Dr Hans-Dieter Sues, senior research geologist and curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, believes that Godzilla’s existence would have a major effect on the environment. “If Godzilla existed, its biggest impact would be the tremendous damage caused by its occasional excursions on land,” Sues says.
“If that happened frequently, vegetation would favor plant species such as ferns that could quickly repopulate affected regions. Although Godzilla has huge teeth and claws, its standard version subsists only on radiation. However, some versions have it consume large quantities of marine animals while it spends time in the sea. That could lead to a local or regional collapse of ocean food chains.”
Today’s shipping forecast: Godzilla
For Dr. Deby Cassill, associate professor of the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of South Florida, Godzilla’s presence could also affect maritime travel – but not as drastically as one might imagine. “Maritime disruptions would be real but localized,” Cassill says.
“Whales already reshape shipping routes. We reroute vessels around their aggregations, spawning grounds, and seismic zones. Assuming Godzilla has radioactive elements, we could trace that – not quite with the same radar that we use now, but it’s a traceable source of energy. If he were in a deep environment, we wouldn’t need to, because our ships don’t have that deep a draft. It wouldn’t really be a question of collisions, unless he were in the shallower areas.”
Cassill adds that there’s already a plethora of previously undiscovered biological creatures, such as the 500-year-old Greenland shark, living in the deepest and darkest parts of the ocean. Resultantly, it would be entirely possible for Godzilla to also be down there and not bug anybody.
The experts agree that, unless provoked, most of the damage that Godzilla would cause would be incidental. This wouldn’t come from a place of hostility, but due to his clumsiness and trailing tail. Even so, Sues believes there’s only one solution when the Titan arrives on land. “The only effective response would be rapidly moving away from the direction in which Godzilla is traveling and hoping that it does not change course,” Sues says. “Stay away from Japan, especially the Tokyo region!”
No one disagrees here. Spotting Godzilla calls for rapid knees-to-the-chest movements, not casual strolls. “If hypothetically there was some kind of early alert system, then obviously heeding those warnings would definitely be effective,” Zarka says. “But I would say, yeah, run as fast as you can in a perpendicular direction. It’s usually the best effort that works for a zombie apocalypse, and it works in any kind of panic situation.”
Yet, this terror might not last as long as the first act of James Cameron’s “Avatar” movies. “If he’s run by radioactive furnaces, a creature that large can’t move that fast for a long time,” Cassill says. “As we know from Chernobyl, if the radioactive part of a nuclear power plant doesn’t cool down and have some way of dissipating heat, it erupts, which is hugely dangerous.” Given how much time he spends in the ocean, it stands to reason that this is how Godzilla cools down, and he’d likely require regular dips to keep his temperature down.
A living nuclear weapon
This weakness provides an opportunity for humans to escape from the danger zone and figure out their next move. “Godzilla isn’t going to go on an hour-long rampage because it might just explode,” Zarka says. “Also, considering the size of Godzilla and the other kaiju, a lot of them are inspired in part by dinosaurs and real predatory creatures. From what I understand as a non-palaeontologist, for dinosaurs of this size, their sheer volume and mass would make being fast, and for a sustainable period of time, unlikely. Dormancy would definitely be something that would be required, and we see this in the MonsterVerse, as Godzilla and the other kaiju take little catnaps.”
Sues finds it more difficult to categorise or compare Godzilla to other creatures because of the Titan’s physical make-up being affected by another factor. “Godzilla is a unique kind of being,” Sues said. “Given its extremely high radioactivity, it could not have regular DNA, which could potentially be combined with any other DNA.”
Essentially, this raises serious questions: What would be the effects of encountering a living, breathing nuclear reactor? And would everyone need to start wearing hazmat suits? According to Professor Eric C. Schirmer from the Institute of Cell Biology at the University of Edinburgh, this all comes down to whether Godzilla has shielding within himself to protect himself – and us – from the nuclear radiation.
“Godzilla would need to have some sort of shielding around his reactor in order for him to be able to maintain himself,” Schirmer says. “That shielding should similarly protect the humans around him, except to the degree that the fire he spews would also be highly radioactive. In his wake, he would leave whole areas with sufficient radiation that humans, who were directly exposed to it, might suffer considerable radiation damage. If human populations didn’t move away from the areas where he has damaged buildings with his radioactive fire, then the humans would be getting long-term exposure to the lower levels of radiation maintained, and likewise would suffer radiation damage.”
It’s probably a terrible idea to even attempt to stop or kill Godzilla, since a nuclear apocalypse could materialise and doom us all to a greater world of pain and suffering. However, as Cassill explains, humans will inevitably try at some point. “Anything that moves and looks threatening, triggers fear in humans,” Cassill says. “It’s a survival strategy.”
Godzilla in spaccccceeeeeeee!!!!
The military could try blasting the monster with non-nuclear weapons. However, even the most intense of firepower and airstrikes seem to be ineffective against Godzilla. What did work in one of the older movies, though, was the Oxygen Destroyer device, which effectively suffocates the creature. Now, whether one of those actual devices exists in the real world is a different story. Maybe the only option is to tie him to a few rockets and send him out into space.
Doing a little napkin math here, sending the King of Monsters into space would be no mean feat. The highest payload capacity rocket we currently have is SpaceX’s Starship, which can carry a theoretical maximum payload of 250 tons into low Earth orbit. According to Legendary Pictures, Godzilla weighs 90,000 tons in the 2014 movie, so we’d need at least 360 Starship rockets to put him into orbit (if we ignore the myriad of other problems related to strapping 360 rockets to a giant lizard).
We don’t know exactly how much each Starship rocket costs, but following estimates of 100 million dollars per launch, it would cost 36 billion dollars to yeet Godzilla into low-Earth orbit. Realistically, though, we’d want to send him further than that; we don’t want him crashing back down to Earth in a few years.
Maybe not such a great idea then, especially given he can survive in space too, as shown by several adaptations. But at least that’ll make him the universe’s problem and no longer the Earth’s. A problem blasted into the cosmos is a problem halved – that’s the saying, right?
Putting the God in Godzilla
The only other reasonable and sensible option here is coexistence. The solution would be to figure out smart and non-confrontational ways to survive. “Humans would have to adopt ways of life where they would be unlikely to encounter Godzilla,” Sues says. “For example, they could live deep under large mountains.”
For Cassill, the ability to live in harmony rests more in humanity’s camp than Godzilla’s, explaining how most conflicts arise because humans can’t accept that other species’ priorities differ from ours. Godzilla doesn’t want to eat us, so he would likely leave us alone, but would we be able to resist the urge to poke the monster? “Coexisting with Godzilla wouldn’t require taming him,” Cassill says. “It would require that we stop provoking him, and we have a terrible track record with that.”
While Zarka believes we could learn from our historical relationships with other apex predators and not interfere with them to ensure our survival, there’s another possibility that could arise. “In terms of long-term effects and coming from a folkloric perspective, we’d have to think about how our worldview would change in terms of understanding non-human life and intelligence, as well as how these giant creatures change spiritual practices,” Zarka says.
“We see this a little bit with Mothra that she’s worshipped as a goddess and protector. I think we would not necessarily worship the kaiju per se – although, I do think that could happen – but it would just force a lot of people to think about life and the world around us in a completely different way than we have.”
To slay or to pray to; it’s an interesting perspective to ponder. Since the former isn’t really an option and Godzilla is already the King of Monsters, maybe he could take Jack Dawson’s title as the King of the World next. All hail the Titan, we guess…
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” roars onto Apple TV on March 27, 2026.
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