Game Theory: You KILLED the Planet! (Subnautica) #TeamSeas

hello internet thank you for stopping by today is no ordinary day and this is no ordinary video because today we're going to help save the planet sorry uh was that intro too creepy i planned these scripts way in advance and so my brain was still in halloween mode when i wrote it anyway two years ago my good friends mr beast and mark rober you might have heard of them they're kind of popular on the internet had massive success with a charitable movement called team trees raising 20 million dollars to plant 20 million trees and now they're at it again this time their goal is to raise 30 million dollars to remove 30 million pounds of plastic and trash from the ocean according to national geographic there are 548 million pounds of trash in the ocean including a 1.6 million square kilometer trash island just sitting out right in the middle of the pacific ocean i think it goes without saying that's kind of a problem and the thing is that problem isn't going away or getting any better plastics take a long time to degrade 450 years in fact which means that it's gonna continue existing in the oceans for centuries after being washed into the water this affects marine life which can get caught up in the plastics which leads to stuff like starvation and drowning but it also affects us humans too if fish aren't ingesting plastic the toxins are broken down and enter the body the body we then consume when we fancy a bite of sushi it's not a great situation for anyone most of all for planet earth and so jimmy and mark are trying to do something about it and they aren't doing it alone there are hundreds of youtubers over the next couple weeks all posting videos to help raise awareness for the cause cause if this is gonna work we need your help 30 million dollars is not a small amount of money unless of course you're luigi and you inherited a haunted mansion but we are not luigi and so we need your help loyal theorists go to the donation link in the description below and give whatever you can a hundred percent of your donation is going directly to ocean conservancy and the ocean cleanup non-profit organizations that have partnered with us to help achieve this goal one with the goal of picking up existing trash in the ocean and the second with the goal of stopping the problem from getting worse using machines as a preventative measure to help catch the trash in rivers before it escapes out into the ocean preventing the problem from getting worse in short every dollar translates to one less pound of plastic in the ocean after 10 years on youtube ruining your collective childhoods it's time for me to take the opportunity to redeem the childhoods for the generations to come so please follow the link down in the description below and donate if you can today if we don't help solve this now who knows what's gonna happen in the future oh wait we do know because subnautica reveals a heck of a lot about this exact thing even though the story kind of skims over it get it skimming skimming the trash off the top ah and with that seamless segue let's get to the episode hello internet welcome to game theory the show that's willing to dive deeper and deeper and deeper to clean out the tiniest ounces of lore believe me there was a lot of diving and searching involved this game is mostly water after all regardless i've found something a bone in fact a bone that i have to pick with subnautica's developers unknown worlds entertainment dear unknown worlds entertainment hi it's me austin nope austin no go home we've talked about this you can't keep interrupting my recordings sorry about that where was i um oh yeah unknown worlds entertainment as amazing as your ocean planeted subnautica is did you really expect everything to be fine when a massive spacecraft crashes in from orbit for those of you who have no idea what i'm talking about back in 2014 the world was stunned by an early access game called subnautica an open world survival action adventure game i wish i was just making that genre up but it is literally pulled from their wikipedia page it's like they used a random word generator for their game description regardless what was impressive about this game was that it took place primarily in the ocean of a far off alien planet now a game built as one big water level is going to be a tall order i've played through enough sonic and water temples in my day to know that water plus the video games equals big suckage but subnautica is anything but that this game plays like a dream and is absolutely gorgeous the spectacular water graphics the colorful plant life the wonderfully creative creatures when they're not trying to eat your face off the game even has a bit of story the ship we're on the aurora crash lands on an alien planet with us as the only survivor we try to piece together what happened use scraps from the wreckage to survive and ultimately escape you know your usual survival tropes but of course it wouldn't really be complete without some kind of human saves the alien storyline while on the planet we learn of an incurable and deadly disease which was being studied by other hyper-advanced alien life-forms called architects well before we got there this disease actually wiped out the architects and it's predicted that the same would happen to the whole planet if a cure wasn't found but in we fly with our crash-landing ship a non-essential systems maintenance chief from earth and of course we figure it all out within a couple days saving an almost extinct species that were key to the planet's long-term survival suck on that super advanced alien species we solved your problem in a couple days humans humans it's a good thing we have to crash land there right guys or is it see there's something that's always bugged me about subnautica something that's never really addressed in the game and that's our impact on the planet's ecosystem sure we stopped a deadly disease but have we caused more harm than good just by being here i believe in actuality we might have doomed this planet even before we set foot out of our life pod we're talking about the aurora the crash and the devastation left in our wake wake it's the waves that follow your boat these puns are not going to get any better as this episode goes on i can promise you that spoiler alert for the episode a spoiler alert for the channel they do not get better we wake up on this alien planet and see that our ship the aurora has already crashed there's a massive trench where it initially impacted the water is dusky and sandy and there's no natural flora in the surrounding area so far this all seems pretty accurate on the surface we know from shipwrecks that when boats collide with ocean floor especially near coral reefs that we see damage and destruction to those environments but when you look closer the math doesn't quite add up here's the map that we're given in the game that sandy section on the bottom right of the map is known as the crash site biome here is the placement of the aurora in that biome notice anything strange to me it's odd that the biomes to the left of it don't seem to have been impacted by the crash at all back in the year 2000 there was a container ship called the bunga teretai satu which unfortunately crashed into the great barrier reef immediately destroying a fifteen hundred square meter area that's about five thousand square feet but that wasn't all it also dispersed the toxic paint from the hull up to 250 meters or 820 feet away thanks to the abrasive impact with the sandy seafloor the bunga teretai satu is only 184 meters or 600 feet in length but the aurora spaceship in the game is 1280 meters or 4200 feet long nearly 10 times the size based on that factor alone we would estimate that the initial damage would have a radius of 10.5 square kilometers or six and a half square miles which is not the kind of damage that we're seeing on this map this kind of damage would occur to the aurora's left right in front that's basically the entire map of the game totally destroyed by just the impact alone that's not all the negative impact that our crashing spaceship would have caused either with that amount of earth being dug up and water being shifted it's likely that it would have caused a tsunami tsunamis are a series of large waves caused by a big displacement of water leading to what appears to be rapidly rising tides rather than traditional waves tsunamis are usually caused by things like earthquakes or volcanoes but sometimes they can be caused by underwater detonations things that are man-made and a ship of this size crashing at high speed from space yeah i think that's got a real possibility of having a similar effect or if not that then definitely the explosion that comes later a tsunami would obviously be devastating to any civilizations on land but we don't have any of that in subnautica so what do tsunamis do to ocean life i mean they're underwater anyway what's the big deal though the 2004 boxing day tsunami in india gives us some insight naturally a tsunami is going to displace a lot of water but also a lot of sediment as it rips up the sea floor in india they learn that this leads to breakages and suffocating of coral reefs and the death of seagrass beds thanks to the sediment blocking both sunlight and oxygen these coral reefs and seagrass beds are homes to many species especially in their early stages of life with these suddenly gone marine life finds it harder to survive plus the tsunami itself will flush algae and bacteria into neighboring ecosystems ecosystems which maybe aren't adapted to deal with this new invasive species for a really wacky example of it check out this concrete block it was transported by a tsunami in 2011 from japan all the way over to the oregon coastline when studying that block researchers found that algae and microorganisms had survived the trip allowing them to establish new communities in oregon's coastline and disrupt the natural balance that existed there and all of this is just talking about the initial impact it gets way worse from here i mentioned earlier how in order to survive we have to scavenge around for materials around the crash site of the aurora we find some very useful supplies there's lots of scrap metal that's broken off from the ship upon impact but there's also things like batteries as well as food and water floating around and while all that garbage floating around is gonna be good for us and our survival it's not gonna be so good for our ocean planet's survival batteries and e-waste in general are unfortunately pretty common sites in ocean cleanup in 2019 53.6 million tons of e-waste was collected worldwide and only 17.4 of it was recycled that leaves 82.6 of it being disposed of by dismantling incineration or being dumped in the ocean as batteries degrade they release toxic chemicals this can be because of their use of cadmium nickel and lead all of which leach into the ocean over time and lead to fish absorbing these toxic chemicals as they try to get oxygen out of the water now in the game batteries don't use letter nickel hooray but the good news doesn't last because the batteries use copper yet another heavy metal and likewise toxic if ingested swinging a miss their unknown worlds entertainment we have a similar issue with the food and water supplies that we find the food and water itself aren't really the big deal here it's their containers that are causing the problem stuff like water bottles in 2017 the ocean conservancy did an international coastal cleanup of the 20 million 834 689 items that they collected plastic bottles came in as the third most common source of trash 1.5 million collected with plastic bottle caps coming in at number four 1.1 million collected and that's just the bottles other plastics like bags straws food containers lids all of them took up spots five through nine on the 10 most common trash pieces collected plastic is the most common thing that you'll find in your ocean trash americans alone throw away 35 billion empty water bottles every year and that's americans alone and that's also not including soda bottles which is crazy that's just a heck of a lot of plastic and when it doesn't end up being collected by 700 000 volunteers it ends up forming what's known as garbage patches there's actually one of these off the west coast of the us a plastic bottle discarded from california takes the california current south toward mexico there it may catch the north equatorial current which crosses the vast pacific and ends up settling into one of these vast garbage patches which could mean traveling over 000 miles these plastics prove ridiculously harmful for sea life turtles mistake the plastic bags for jellyfish albatrosses mistake plastic pellets for fish eggs and we've all seen those pictures of seals getting caught up in abandoned fishing nets all of these end in starvation ruptured organs or drowning for innocent sea life and it doesn't end there either thanks to the ocean currents it gets broken up into tiny pieces which start affecting the plankton and algae by blocking out large patches of sunlight which means they can't photosynthesize this means a decrease in population which in turn decreases the population of everything up the food chain all the way up to sharks and whales it is like one massive awful set of dominoes all of this is to say that having plastic water bottles spread all across the crash zone is going to have some dire consequences for the local flora and fauna if our planet is anything to go by because here's the thing friends the aurora crash has released a ton of garbage into the ocean the aurora was sent to build a phase gate on the other side of the galaxy a construction plan that according to the ship status log will take three years and according to that same log there were 157 people on board the ship with that amount of crew you're gonna need a lot of supplies how much well we can figure it out using the international space station as a guide rehydrated food eaten in space initially comes dehydrated if that wasn't obvious and those dehydrated foods need to be contained in order to keep them safe for consumption typically food on the international space station weighs in with 0.27 pounds or 0.12 kilograms of packaging weight we know the aurora's project time we know how many people were on board so let's do some quick calculations we'll assume a standard three meals per day per passenger so that gives us 127.17 pounds or 57 kilograms per day in packaging waste then we have to multiply that by the amount of days in a year 365 and then multiply that by the three years of the mission giving us a grand total of 139 251 pounds of trash 63 000 kilograms of packaging just released out into this ocean planet overnight and that's not even considering anything else like parts of the ship floating around other storage containers things like that referring back to that 2017 coastal cleanup food packaging tends to get caught up in ocean currents moving them up to 5 000 miles away which when the map that we have is only a few thousand meters means that we're now affecting areas that go well beyond the scope of our crash site this has suddenly become a planet-wide issue fortunately the aurora doesn't seem to have any hydrocarbons like crude oil on board so that's good at least we don't have to deal with a huge oil spill but we do have to deal with a huge radiation spill if you try to swim near the aurora at the start of the game you'll find radiation in the area detecting increased local radiation levels this will start to deplete your health until you die and respawn later on we're informed that the aurora's drive core isn't in good shape warning local radiation readings suggest the aurora's drive core has reached critical state quantum detonation will occur within two hours in other words big ship about to go big boom and big boom it certainly does the game describes it as a quantum explosion which doesn't really tell us that much quantum is just one of those science fiction words that gets added onto things when they can't explain the science behind it but that is not how we roll here what sort of explosion are we talking about upon impact we know that there was clearly damage to the drive core and that led to radiation pouring out into the environment even before the explosion takes place this to me screams nuclear reactor and it's not that far fetched either nasa actually uses radioisotope thermoelectric generators for long-haul missions to places like mars this is because radioactive substances release heat as it breaks down over time that heat is then converted into electricity which can power the spacecraft this would also mean that if there was a breach in the protective casing of the radioisotope then we would see radiation leaking out into the atmosphere around it and an explosion would probably cause more damage creating more breeches for more radiation to leak out hence the nearly 1000 meter radius of radiation that appears after the explosion why does any of this matter well if the radiation is indeed nuclear in nature you can bet your bottom dollar it ain't gonna do the planet much good we know that if you the player are in close proximity to the aurora upon its explosion you die instantly so it's likely that any other sea life be it flora or fauna would suffer the same fate the radiation radius then increases massively to 940 meters which is nearly the size of the aurora itself this isn't just affecting the crash site biome but also the koosh zone mushroom forest safe shallows kelp forest and grassy plateaus all of these ecosystems are now in grave danger and not just the current residents but the next generations are the ones that are going to get hit the hardest as found in the japanese seas near the fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant explosion this is because eggs and larvae are still developing and so the radioactive atoms can start to replace atoms in their bodies altering their dna and causing cancers as well as other weird mutations and physical deformities and just to be clear no i'm not suggesting that you're gonna start seeing two-headed fish like the cows in fallout 4. these physical mutations usually result in deformities like smaller or misshapen limbs disrupted camouflage things like cataracts causing eventual blindness as seen in the mice near chernobyl because of these deformities the young fish don't tend to survive for very long their mutations giving a massive disadvantages in the food chain which in turn can cause radiation poisoning in those bigger fish that decide to eat them sure we do eventually fix the leak in subnautica and after three days the radiation subsides but in a sense that doesn't really matter fukushima's nuclear accident managed to transport radiation all the way from japan to canada's continental shelf in 2.1 years it continued to remain high until 2016. this shows us that the explosion of the aurora is gonna have potentially global effects for the next five years and if we look at chernobyl 35 years on we're still seeing massive repercussions of that explosion researchers looking into plants like wheat rye oats and barley that are near chernobyl are still showing high levels of radioactive contamination making them very dangerous for consumption by humans and animals the radioisotope that tends to be used for radioisotope thermoelectric generators in space is typically plutonium-238 which has a half-life of 87.7 years meaning that the planet could be dealing with the effects of radiation for centuries after the crash so while yes we managed to stop a mystery illness affecting the planet we also introduce destruction to a delicate ecosystem between the trash that we brought the tsunamis the radiation it's likely that we're not a net positive for this planet we completely wrecked the world of subnautica and we're not done because two years later altera decides to do some more research on the planet bringing with it more people more waste and more damage to the environment planet 4546b just cannot catch a break enjoy the tranquil world of subnautica while it lasts because humans are about to destroy it like we tend to do but hey just because we're doing it to subnautica's world doesn't mean that our planet has to suffer the same fate today's episode may have been about a spaceship crashing into an alien planet but the science we used about marine ecosystems is very real so what are you waiting for go to the top line of the description to click the link to become a part of team c's help us reach that 30 million goal i really admire how much thought and care has gone into this two-pronged approach for saving the oceans firstly by removing garbage from the oceans and coastlines one pound at a time and secondly by stopping garbage from getting to the oceans in the first place don't know how trash gets to the ocean well turns out eighty percent of the ocean trash starts in rivers so team seas is going to be putting trash-eating robots into the world's most polluted rivers to eat up all that garbage before it ever reaches the ocean how cool is that could have used those sorts of things on planet 4546b so once again please head down to the description to donate whatever you can to the cause and tell your friends and family too they've made it super easy to remember for every one dollar donated that's one pound of trash out of the ocean simple as that let's all band together to help save the planet so hopefully when the future does arrive we've not only saved our own planet but we're able to save all the others as well but hey that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 5,430,113

Keywords: subnautica, subnautica below zero, subnautica trailer, subnautica below zero trailer, subnautica theory, subnautica mods, subnautica gameplay, subnautica below zero gameplay, team seas, teamseas, subnautica lore, subnautica lore explained, game theory, game theorists, matpat, game theory subnautica, #teamseas

Id: ETj8kP0rj0o

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TrueBlueCorvid]

Well this was a uh... very nice advertisement for cleaning up the Earth's oceans, I guess, but it's pretty clear nobody involved with this actually played the game, much less did any sort of "deep dive" into the "lore." lol

1. "Some human guy just came in and solved the whole problem because humans rock!" No? First: the Architects didn't cure kharaa for reasons that are explicitly stated in the game lore. (They couldn't hear the Sea Emperor, perhaps because they were partially inorganic or because they were networked to each other; the Sea Emperor herself refused to help them because if her children hatched in containment they'd never be free; and their primary research facility was destroyed by a sea dragon when they tried experimenting on sea dragon eggs.) Second: humans came to 4546b before, but not all of them landed in the vicinity of the crater. The Degassi logs do explain why they didn't manage to cure kharaa. (Even aside from the fighting going on between Paul Torgal and Marguerit, Bart Torgal was contacted by the Sea Emperor and believed her messages to be hallucinations brought on by the infection.)
2. I'm not gonna argue exact realism. It's a video game. Realism takes a backseat to playability. Even if "realistically" the Aurora should have made a 10-square-kilometer impact, hand-building a map that big as indie devs isn't realistic, and neither is traversing it as a player. So... I don't care. Things in games are meant to represent the real world in an abstract, not exact way. If you're doing that much math to figure shit out, you're just doing games wrong.
3. The Aurora didn't just fall out of the sky. Keen's logs show the captain staying aboard the ship so that he could pilot it as long as possible to minimize the damage. In his broadcast, he describes the ship as being "in a controlled descent," and says the survivors will need the ship (specifically its long-range comms) intact to contact Alterra for rescue. The fact that everything nearby isn't obliterated isn't an accident.
4. There's no evidence that Alterra is using non-biodegradable fossil-fuel Earth plastics anywhere in the game. Swing and a miss, Game Theory. (Edit: for anybody reading this who didn't watch the video, I'm not just being snarky. He follows up a snipe about how the batteries used in-game are probably still toxic despite not containing things like nickel with, "Swing and a miss, Unknown Worlds." So I'm just riffing off of that, haha!)
5. Speaking of which, there's no evidence that the Aurora's reactors are using any current Earth technology. The fact that the game straight-up tells you that you've averted an extinction event when you repair the Aurora's drive core doesn't seem to be taken into account in this video lol. I know hand-waving stuff as "it's just future technology that doesn't have those problems" is unsatisfying if you want to nitpick, but... it's probably just future technology that doesn't have those problems.

Conclusion: entire video just clickbait. Even watching it just to argue with the "facts" he puts forth is just doing exactly what he wants. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and remember that corporations and not individuals are responsible for 99% of all environmental harm. Have a good night, reddit~

Edit (again): Oh! Thanks for the award! :') I know this is a big post and it seems kinda salty, but the thing that bothers me most about that video is that it frames the environmental impact of the Aurora's crash as this "gotcha" that the devs and the players either didn't think about or didn't care about. In fact, people did think about it. Early access players cared so much about the environment in the game that the devs built in a side-quest where it's addressed so that players can fix it. The associated achievement for completing that side-quest is "Extinction Event Avoided" and it is one of my favorite things about this lovely game. 4546b is not doomed after the Aurora's crash because real people cared about it. Why anyone would make a Subnautica video promoting environmental awareness and choose to condescend to people instead of leveraging that genuine care for the environment that already exists... just boggles my mind.

[u/SpaceStuff_321]

It it wrong, I'm sorry he's usually better than this

[u/Ehh_SmiteMe]

And it promptly ignores the story and makes some far fetched assumptions about the alien eco system...

Normally I can enjoy his stuff, but this is just eco-pandering using a game I so dearly love.

[u/King_cuddle_fish]

The tsunami,explosion ,crash and radiation is all good but the waste stuff doesn’t make full sense. Here’s a roght calculation of what would happen : first the impact would have forced most of the the stuff into walls or doors not going ricocheting out the ship roughly taking away 1/3 of the rubbish , next the explosion would have destroyed 1/2 have the remaining rubbish so we are at 10,000 kg of rubbish after that for the player to survive let’s say 50 days on 50% fish and they rest water bottles and nutrient blocks they would need around 130 bottles and 109 nutrient blocks meaning norms there’s only 9900 kg left secondly more than half of the original would have been gone meaning that the actual total so far is only 4450kg , after that is the fact that the koosh zone has lava pits meaning roughly through how big it is another 500kg is gone so now we should be at 3950kg left but we aren’t done yet because of the fact that there is a jelly caves entrance near the aurora another 300kg should be gone to it’s lava pits so now we have 3650 after that there’s the fact that a huge chunk of food blocks and bottles are stuck inside closed wrecks they they won’t get out of meaning after recalculating we have only 748 kg of rubbish left now considering the superheating of the crash with more recalculation we are down to only 57 kg of rubbish and that’s everything to consider meaning his estimate was off by around 63,800