Why Ant-Man and the Wasp Need Helmets to Breathe

In the 2018 film, Ant-Man and the Wasp, the characters Scott Lang and Hope Van Dyne don suits with advanced technologies that allow them to shrink to insect size and become the eponymous superheroes of the film’s title. While some questionable physics is presented in the film and the earlier associated comic books, here we sketch out a physically realistic picture (also explored in our recent article in the journal Superhero Science and Technology) of some of the significant respiratory problems that would be encountered by humans shrinking to insect size. First, they would experience a rarefied atmospheric density similar to that in Mt. Everest’s “death zone.” Second, Kleiber’s law implies that their metabolic rates per unit mass would increase by approximately two orders of magnitude, greatly increasing the rate of oxygen intake, relative to their sizes, needed to survive. Finally, we discuss how existing microfluidic technologies could bridge the gap between Lang and Van Dyne’s mammalian respiratory systems which function inefficiently at the microscale, and the increased relative oxygen demands they would experience at the microscale.