Someone please make the bugs go away

I suffer from a moderate case of entomophobia. I think insects are a horrible mistake of nature. They're so terrifyingly ugly that just thinking about them gives me serious creeps, and actually seeing them makes me want to tear my eyes out. And yes, this includes butterflies and ladybugs.

This condition also means that I get almost physically ill when for whatever reason I happen to catch a glimpse of one of those horror movies that feature gigantic, cattle-sized insects running around, usually doing very bad things to creatures much prettier than they are, like cows, dogs or human beings. I cannot control this feeling, even though on a rational level I know perfectly well that physics says six foot tall insects cannot exist (at least not on a planet with Earth-level gravity).

Here's why they can't. Weight of a body is proportional to its volume. Volume of a body is proportional to the cube of its length. Thus, holding things like tissue density constant, when you increase the length of a body by a factor of two, you increase its weight by a factor of eight. (Give or take.) So if insects were to be six feet tall, they'd have to look very different than what they look like when they're half an inch tall. For one thing, their legs would have to be much thicker in proportion to the rest of their bodies, or else they'd crumble under their own weight. Note that the bigger an animal is, the thicker its legs are in proportion to their whole body size. This is precisely because weight increases with the cube of length. Insect legs are tiny compared with the size of what they carry. Cats' legs are bigger than that. Human legs are bigger still. Elephant legs are even thicker than that. (It's one of the ways in which physics constrains the maximum size of critters. A land animal much bigger than an elephant would basically have to be nothing but legs.) Insects as big as horses would also need internal skeletons. External skeletons are much too heavy in proportion to the entire bodyweight to be sustainable beyond certain upper weight limits.

This is the mantra I keep repeating to myself whenever I get stuck having to watch CGIs (Computer- Generated Insects).