How Long Can You Survive a Bag of Holding? (D&D Science)

welcome before we begin today's program i want to make one thing very clear i have never played a game of dungeons and dragons so everything that i'm about to say in this video comes from a place of casual outsiders perception of this legendary game which i rolled for of course over the course of today's video i'm probably going to say something that's silly or wrong or misrepresents how this game is actually played well too bad it's science time arya activate the dm screen hello there traveler i know you're on a big grand adventure and all but as a elf scientist i guess that's what i'm going for as an elf scientist trapped in your confusingly grid based world i have a query that bag there at your side ever wonder how it works because i have science that says otherwise adventure your party has stumbled upon the facility now inside your party encounters the administrator why hello there traveler your magical bag there it's quite curious may i take a look dexterity check yoink according to the legend of the mass-produced game manual this is a bag of holding with the dimensions it's two feet wide in diameter at the mouth and four feet deep allowing for exactly 64 cubic feet or 1.8 cubic meters of put stuff in its space and then forget about it until you're reminded by your dm a couple weeks later it's also according to legend that a breathing creature can only spend 10 minutes inside of the bag before they well expire what an interesting line to include in legend it probably makes for some interesting decision making but is it true well follow me your party encounters an absolutely gorgeous talking rectangle traveler you appear humanoid to me or maybe even human so we are going to consider humans as our breathing creatures to analyze this most famous of bags now human breathing or respiration is relatively simple at least compared to other organisms like insects or birds now when you breathe you increase the size of your lungs you increase the volume of the lungs with the help of powerful muscles this creates a section of low pressure air inside of your breathy sacky sacs or lungs i guess now once this is at a lower pressure it's at a lower pressure relative to the rest of the atmosphere and so the atmosphere follows a pressure gradient into your lungs the atmosphere is what is forcing you to breathe more or less now once you have that air inside of your lungs it fills all the tiny sacky sacky sac breathy sacks and these sacs are very very close to your actual blood in your bloodstream now the air can follow a concentration gradient into the bloodstream and oxygenates your whole body as it travels around with the help of hemoglobin stuff and it continues uh the thing that you call life i guess that is unless you're a greater necromancer because then we all know what that means we all know what that means especially me perception check nice try kevin you should have specked into mage dum-dum now it's time for some math something that board game players know almost nothing about so if we have our bag of holding with 1.8 cubic meters at maximum of air 21 of that air will be oxygen if it's a normal earth-like atmosphere and if i consult my term of studies for humans you find that 250 milliliters of oxygen per minute is the intake rate for these hairless apes now if we convert our units carefully and we solve this very simple equation you find that the o2 in a normal bag of holding will last for 1500 minutes that's over 24 hours that's a lot longer than the 10 minutes we spent hiding in a bag of holding from the goblin king a red hollow isn't it adventurous don't act like you don't remember that little escapade that was canon the administrator climbs aboard his hyper rail increasing speed plus 20. now if that math seemed a bit too simplistic for you traveler that's because it totally was of course humans don't just intake oxygen they also expel carbon dioxide which is a byproduct of human respiration so if they're in an enclosed space a human will be increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in that bag over time and that could in theory bring the survival time inside a bag of holding way down but did the legendary wizards of the coast do their homework is that all the way down to 10 minutes we'll find out breathing oxygen wasn't always part of life's plan in fact when life began oxygen wasn't really involved with life well it was detrimental to it you see 2.4 billion years ago single-celled organisms called cyanobacteria were happily photosynthesizing away in earth's early oceans as they did so they were producing oxygen as a byproduct like we do with carbon dioxide life at this point in the early oceans hadn't figured out how to really utilize efficiently this highly reactive and basically poisonous element so over the next 400 million years the earth's atmosphere started to accumulate great amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere in what is called the great oxidation event forced as a kind of evolutionary pressure the evolution of multi-cellular life like you and me so take a deep breath and thank some little cyanoboys for it your party encounter is definitely not a super villain and lola who has like so much hp don't even think about it welcome back traveler if you're breathing in an enclosed space over time what's in that air is going to change more specifically as you breathe the oxygen levels in that space will go down and the carbon dioxide levels will go up like the amount of body odor at your local game store on game night and once the fraction of carbon dioxide in the air that you're breathing gets just a little bit above the tiny fraction it usually is bad stuff starts happening to the human body for example at just a tenth of a percent things feel off and you're getting a slight headache at one percent your breathing rate is increasing and you're having trouble concentrating if you triple that rate to three percent things start to get pretty dang bad you are doubling your breathing rate and your dizzy and your panting at and above five percent carbon dioxide concentration in the air that you're breathing and prolonged exposure will lead to death so if we are to science the magical bag of holding as we want to do then i say we leave three percent carbon dioxide in the bag as the target that we do not want to meet so now let's return to the math i cast display equation come on do it i don't want to roll for it again we have 64 cubic feet to work with if you are stored or hiding in it when will the air inside a bag of holding get to three percent carbon dioxide well if i read another inscription in my term of studies humans expel about a third of a liter of carbon dioxide every minute so now our equation looks like this for a moderately stressed human where v is the volume of the space p is the dangerous percentage of co2 you do not want to hit e is the expel rate of co2 per minute and n is how many humans are in said volume if we then plug in the numbers for one human inside a canonical bag of holding we get a survival time of 145 minutes 145 minutes traveler is almost two and a half hours so scientifically we can say then that those legendary wizards who reside on the coast have seriously underestimated the true survival time inside of a bag of holding what were they trying to do design a game that's playable in real time and if the bag was only to allow 10 minutes of breathing time according to the science it should be much much smaller just four and a half cubic feet that's 14 times smaller than is stated in the legends an item that small wouldn't even be able to hold a frost troll's attention span and we are all very aware of how small that is we are all very aware of that fact adventure your party senses that the administrator is approaching a conclusion of course i know what you may be thinking right now traveler bag of holding lore only says breathing creatures not breathing humans specifically and there are a lot of creatures that breathe around here in the land with grid on it so yes it is true that if you were to try to stuff a classic d and d monster like the reverse centaur into a bag of holding yes look at it look at it then it might being as majestic as it is expel a lot more carbon dioxide every minute bringing survival times way down would it be 10 minutes i don't know i would have to study this beautiful beast and think about stuffing a warrior squirrel classic inside of a bag of holding and just you know it's running around in there with its tiny little sword and like an acorn top shield anyway that might expel a lot less carbon dioxide than a human and so it would last a lot longer it's complicated but our adventure is nearing its end so i think we should conclude thusly one sec scientifically speaking the bag of holding can indeed hold and harbor living breathing creatures but any intrepid traveler who wants to know for exactly how long must use this ye oldie equation that this little elf scientist has come up with and not the stated 10 minute value doing so adding a little bit of science to your magic will just add that much more intelligence to your adventures and afford you a lot more opportunities when you're questing through the duke of barbaria's lands he's definitely not a guy and a place i just made up good luck traveler and grab some graph paper on the way out i think you can use it until next time now exiting the facility thank you so much to the very nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of ye oldie video today especially i want to recognize research assistant rudy crabb and visiting scholar flailing tools oh my hammers if you want to get on the facility staff if you want to join us over 1200 of us who every day are getting behind the scenes content talking with me on discord giving me episode ideas having a magic the gathering league all all related wizard there's even uh there's even a dnd group you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and sign up today and if you support the facility just enough you get your name on arya here each and every week and as you can see there's there's over a thousand of you so there's there's no way i can pass all the way wizards wizards of the coast if you're watching this we've worked together professionally before you you have my email i'm not saying the next edition of the dungeons and dragons book has to include some kind of calculation for the bag of holding going forward i'm just saying board game nerds love math d d has a lot of numbers and and then you could just put a picture of some weird-looking health scientist in it and it's a win-win-win-win-win so many wins thanks for watching what is a kobold quick blade really

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 345,080

Rating: 4.926465 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, dungeons and dragons, dungeons & dragons, bag of holding, D&D, critical role, WOTC, wizards of the coast, RPG, dungeon master

Id: Idw_hPnolhg

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020