Rice Growth

Warning, this text contains MATH, YAPPING, and DEPICTIONS OF BIG CHARACTERS.

If you don’t like any of those, why’d you come here in the first place..?

A while back, I came across one of Sarath16’s characters. They’re this small, sushi-themed humanoid insect called Rice. They have a cool gimmick, where they grow in size when their body absorbs water.

I like this idea, it could do for some fun pool-time scenarios, but then I started thinking…

How big could he really get?

His only real limitation is the amount of water he can reach, so in theory we could just keep giving him water indefinitely.

To accurately depict his size, we first need to find out how much water actually makes him grow. This is where the fun begins.

I had the pleasure of meeting with Sarath16 to discuss Rice’s original, unaltered size. He starts out at 22.3 cm tall with a volume of 474.4 cm^3, with his sushi abdomen contributing a whopping 80% of his total volume. For comparison, he’s about as tall as a water bottle and his abdomen is the size of a baseball.

(Fun fact: assuming Rice’s body is made entirely out of sushi (with its fish, seaweed and other things), he would weigh nearly 400 grams. This would be 572 calories, or 29% of your daily caloric intake)

Because of the square-cube law, it takes more and more water to make Rice grow by the same amount. If we wanted to double his size, his height would increase by a factor of 2, but his volume would have to increase by a factor of 8. This means that we’ll need a LOT of water to make him grow by a considerable amount.

Side note: the exact formula to calculate Rice’s size is available later.

Let’s start out small and work our way up.

The average bathtub can hold up to 180 liters of water, or 0.18 m^3.

Dropping Rice into one of these average bathtubs filled to the brim will quickly enlarge him to a height of 1.61 meters, which is within the human height average (1.6 - 1.8 m)!

At this scale, he can do basically anything a regular human can, with some exceptions. His abdomen would be just over half a meter wide, around the size of a yoga ball. I don’t know about you, but I think it’d be pretty hard not to bump into things while moving and turning with a yoga ball attached to your back. Rice would definitely have some trouble moving around with his new size.

Let’s –literally– dive right into our next body of water.

Depending on the size, most pools can hold between 10.000 to 30.000 gallons of water. For our sake, let's go with a nice 30.000 gallon pool. This amounts to 113.562 liters, or 113.6 cubic meters of water. Dropping him in he would quickly suck up all the water, leaving the pool dry with a very big sushi bug inside.

Standing at 13.8 meters, Rice would be 4 stories tall and easily dwarf anyone standing near him. Forget about going back inside, as he’s now over double the size of a standard house.

Rice is now about as large as a human was when compared to his original size, (~8 times larger). If the pool was in a suburban neighbourhood, anyone would be able to see him from several blocks away.

Let's try to get him to his theoretical maximum size. Truth is, I lied. Sarath16 stated that Rice does indeed have a limit of being about 8 times taller than the over-water part of an oil rig, or 280 meters. To put this into perspective, it would look kinda like this:

Das a big bug.

Fun fact: at his current size, he’s visible from the ISS!

For the sake of science, let's remove this limitation altogether and let him absorb as much water as he can.

Past this point, there's not a lot of well-known large bodies of water, so lets answer what everybody’s been thinking:

What if we dropped him in the ocean?

If you didn’t know, the world’s oceans are all connected to each other. Dropping him anywhere would cause 96% of all water on earth to be absorbed. This amounts to 1.338 × 10^18 m3, or in other terms, becoming really really big.

Rice would now be standing at 3.150 kilometers tall. To put that into perspective, here's him sitting at where we originally dropped him.

Well, at this scale we would already be breaking some rules of physics, but lets ignore them for now.

The moon is 3.474 kilometers in diameter, which makes rice about the size of our moon. That’s pretty big!

He seems to be quite embarrassed… Makes sense actually, practically anyone on that hemisphere can see his… enormousness~

Anyways, since almost all the water on earth has been absorbed, its safe to say he wont be getting any bi-

Well, man in a hat from xkcd’s comics, if you insist.

The solar system is home to many moons with a lot of water in them, mainly Enceladus, Ganymede, Europa and many others. Not to say there’s also ice on comets, asteroids, and some water vapour floating around.

Adding all of these up, we would get a total of 5.139 × 10^19 m3, including all of Earth’s water. A sphere of that size would be 32% bigger than our own moon.

Rice would now be 10.630 km tall, or 80% of Earth’s diameter!

At this size, he’s bigger than most objects in the solar system. there's actually only 7 objects larger than him, those being Venus, Earth, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and the sun.

… really?

23.6 billion light years away lies APM 08279+5255, a giant quasar and elliptical galaxy with a supermassive black hole the mass of 23 billion suns at its center. From Wikipedia, it is the largest mass of water in the known universe– 100 trillion times more water than that held in all of Earth's oceans combined (Although some articles say 140 trillion times, and one even says much more).

Doing a quick calculation reveals that after absorbing that much water, Rice would become about 10^32 meters tall or nearly 1 astronomical unit, which is the distance from the Earth to the sun.

At this point, Rice is truly and absurdly HUGE. The sun is basically a bright marble at this size, meanwhile the planets appear more like specks of dust. Even the speed of light slows to a crawl at these scales, taking 8 whole minutes to traverse Rice’s body. Anything we put near him instantly gets dwarfed, showing off how big he really is.

…

Ok, let's forget all about physics and really look at the big picture.

The observable universe is hypothesized to contain 10^80 atoms.

We would just need to find out what percent of the universe is water, right? This sounds like a good idea, but it comes with some problems. I propose a different approach.

The Eddington number is the theorized number of protons in the known universe, and by extension, also the number of neutrons. Let's suppose that the universe is electrically neutral, meaning it has the same amount of protons as electrons. Uncoincidentally, the Eddington number is also 10^80, since it assumes the universe is composed entirely out of hydrogen.

Now we have 10^80 protons, electrons and neutrons. A single water molecule has 10 protons, 10 electrons, and 8 neutrons. 10^80 divided by 8 neutrons per particle gives us 1.25 × 10^79 total water molecules, with some protons and electrons left over. 

We just converted every subatomic particle in the known universe into water to fulfill our fetishist fantasies. Wow!

A quick search in Wolfram Alpha tells us that this many water molecules would be 3.75 × 10^53 liters, or 3.75 × 10^50 m3. Feeding this through our formula gives us the grand total of…

2 × 10^17 METERS TALL

In other words, thats:

• 200 trillion kilometers tall

• 22 thousand times bigger than the solar system

• 21 light years long

Don't get me wrong, but that's not really that big– even if that sounds insane. Practically all matter in the universe has been condensed into water molecules, and yet Rice is no bigger than a galaxy. This goes to show how big and empty the universe really is.

Now, I know you’re begging to see the picture of Rice being unfathomably big and such, but there's a problem: there's nothing to compare him to. He’s far too large to draw him next to the solar system, and far too small to draw him in the Milky Way galaxy. There really isn't anything else between those scales either, so we’re stuck in limbo.

If anyone else is up for the challenge of drawing Rice’s final size accurately, go ahead! (Although, I’d ask Sarath16 first before doing so.)

There were some details I intentionally left out in some parts so it wouldn't be as boring. With that being said, I used Desmos to make a pretty fun interactive graph that you can play around in right now! It allows you to set a custom water amount, and the graph automatically calculates Rice’s height and draws it. The link to it is in the description, alongside all the sources used for the info and calculations in this text.