Out of all the MARVEL superheroes, one of the most well known is our favourite mean, green fighting machine: the Hulk.
A question we comic book lovers constantly ask is “Could that support hero be real and could I become him/her?”. Well I don’t know about some of them, but here’s what I know about the Hulk.
The Hulk is the result of a horrible accident. A failed experiment resulted in Bruce Banner being showered with gamma rays. After this, whenever Bruce gets angry he grows in size, turns green and gets super human strength. Combined with his rage, things can get pretty nasty very quickly.
But enough sweet talk, let’s cut to the chase; could the Hulk really exist? Here’s what I think:
Although his story may sound pretty far fetched, it may not be as much of a fantasy as you might think. Gamma rays are a high energy particle, powerful enough that if you are struck by one it can destroy parts of your DNA.
Your DNA is the reason you are the way you are. It’s basically an instruction manual of how to make you. If you change the instructions by, say, destroying parts with gamma rays, it changes what makes you, you.
If you were pelted by gamma rays accurately enough your DNA could well be changed in the same way that the Hulk’s was. Well, maybe not exactly like the Hulk but to a very similar point.
There’s still quite a large problem though; where does the Hulk get his strength from? Your strength doesn’t come just from the size of your muscles, it also depends on the density. The Hulk grows in size, yes, but he’s not getting any heavier. He’s just expanding! His muscles are bigger but less dense so he should only be as strong as he was before, surely?
Before we move onto that let’s talk about you. Hi, how are you doing? Great! Now let’s get more invasive: did you know you’re actually a lot stronger than you think you are?
Over the course of time there have been many reported cases of everyday people achieving amazing feats of strength. One such case was a woman lifting a car to rescue someone underneath it. Another case was when a man peed on an electric fence and the shock tensed his legs which threw him several meters away from the fence.
One of these acts was considerably more heroic than the other but I’ll leave it to you to decide which one.
These things happened because these people were able to access their true strength. Normally your brain prohibits you from using your full capabilities in order to protect you from injuring yourself but with the aid of adrenaline or high electrical currents you can overcome that limit and access your true potential.
As seen in the movies and the comics, after Bruce has turned into the Hulk he’s almost impossible to reason with as the rage takes over. When he’s the Hulk his brain seems to work in a completely different way. What if one of the ways his brain changes is that it no longer prohibits him from using his true strength?
Perhaps the Hulk is actually only as strong as he was before the transformation but now he’s able to use the strength that his brain had subconsciously prevented him from using when he was in the form of Bruce Banner.
So yes, I do think the Hulk could exist in real life. But before you go out and try to catch some gamma rays, just remember that it’s only really possible to do with absolute pin point accuracy to change the right parts of your DNA. What’s more likely to happen is you’ll end up getting yourself killed by radiation poisoning or mutating slightly which could end up being pretty gross either way.
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