Mathematically Proving which Pokémon Should Learn Fly

remember back in Pokémon red and blue when you finally got fly from that girl west of Celadon City and you were ready to teach hmo2 to a member of your party and who else but Charizard I mean Charizard's been there with you since the beginning you picked Charmander because you love dragons and fire breathing lizards and un unable okay what about my long blue Leviathan flying water type garados surely he oh he can't he can't either okay wait well who in my party can learn fly P Pidgey but Pidgey is 1 foot tall and weighs 4 lb how can it carry a 10-year-old child across the Kanto region are all of my childhood dreams being crushed is this the Grim eventuality of adulthood health insurance premiums unstable job markets inflation Gyarados can't learn fly no I can't let this happen I did not take out student loans to get a master's degree in physics just to sit idly by while we let Charizard stay on the ground I'm putting this this playground debate to rest once and for all according to math and physics which Pokémon should be able to learn fly and which ones shouldn't let's do this maybe I'm just putting the disc in the in the in the wrong [Music] place okay first of all I'm going to need that spreadsheet that I asked you for last week the one with every single Pokémon and tons of their physical data and whether or not they can already learn fly in the games oh you didn't do that oh no that's fine no I I'll do it that's okay hey guys ADF from the future here just wanted to take a second to acknowledge the fact that my outfit is insane I don't really know what I was thinking I kind of just you know went into my closet and pulled out some stuff and said yeah this is interesting this works wasn't until I started editing this video a couple days ago that I realized wow this is bad I feel like I look like that guy from stranger things that girl's older brother who like shows up to Finn wolfhard's mom's house and is like what's up babe I'm 15 now I have some good news eventually it got so hot in my apartment while I was filming this video that I was forced to take the jacket off thank God but until then I'm going to put this little timer in the top left of the screen and we'll check in on it every once in a while just to see how long until the jacket comes off okay a cool calm tons of hours later and I finally have a spreadsheet that has every single Pokemon listed and their height and their weight and whether or not they have wings and whether or not they can learn fly and in which games and tons of other relevant data as of scarlet and violet there are well over a thousand Pokémon if we filter down just to the Pokémon that can already learn fly in the games neglecting Mega Evolutions and alternate forms were left with a list of just 94 join me as I take you down this very dumb rabbit hole that has completely consumed my life for the last two months those of you who saw my video on the math behind Wind Waker speedrunning glitches we'll already know a good amount about vectors in physics we use vectors to represent quantities that have both magnitude and Direction most often in physics we use these vectors to describe forces forces will be things like pushing a block or the tension in a rope or gravity acting on a falling object renowned incel Isaac Newton wrote a bunch of stuff down about forces in a really old dusty book called the philos philosop the princip the prip the prip mathematic you know what it doesn't matter basically he bottled up forces into three really nice Laws of Motion Newton's second law states that all the forces acting on an object are equal to its masstimes its acceleration this means that for an object with constant Mass like you know a bird the net forces acting on the object are proportional to that object's acceleration okay time to check in on the jacket progress oh there's a lot left deep breaths guys we can do this the movement of every single thing in the universe no matter how big or how small can on some level be broken up into these so-called free body diagrams and net force equations let's take our Newfound knowledge and apply it to something within Pokémon let's take wheezing wheezing has the ability levitate which allows it to hover just above the ground and be unaffected by ground type attacks like anything on the earth with mass wheezing is affected by the pole of Earth's gravity in physics we call the acceleration due to the gravity of the planet you are on the weight Force since it's based on the gravity of the planet on different planets your weight would be different however no matter where you are the weight force is equal to the mass of the object times the acceleration due to gravity according to the Pokedex wheezing weighs 9.5 kg according to Earth's Pokedex uh which is scientists the acceleration due to gravity at Earth's surface is 9.8 m/s squared the unit for force fittingly is the Newton so if we multiply these two numbers together we get 93.1 Newtons downwards for wheezing weight Force for us silly dumb stupid humans who just walk around the earth instead of floating around like wheezing our weight force is opposed by the so-called normal force of the ground pushing back against us this normal force is what prevents us from accelerating through the Earth's surface straight to the core and melting into a hot goop never to be seen by our loved ones ever again however in weezing's case he is able to just float so this means that there must be some kind of other force that opposes his weight force is it the gas coming out of him or maybe it's the gas in him what about the wheezing who don't have levitate you know what I don't want to know all right we've got forces down nice that seemed pretty easy now it's time to look at the physics of flight how complicated could that be oh no all right one final check in here to report that we are finally almost there please take that jacket off thank God okay all right well my job here is done it's uh time for me to disintegrate now bye-bye okay let's start with the basics for a creature or object to be able to fly it needs to overcome its weight Force just like wheezing did to levitate in the physics of flight we have four primary force vectors first we have the weight Force which we already know about then we have lift which is the force that opposes the weight Force to allow objects to fly there's thrust like an airplane engine causing the object to move forward and finally there's drag which is the air resistance pushing back on the object as it attempts to fly in the case of something like an airplane some of this is fairly obvious you know the thrust from the airplane engines causes the airplane to move forward but what about lift how do you achieve that airplanes achieve lift via something known as Bern's principle this principle relates a fluid's speed its height and its pressure basically speaking the faster a fluid is moving the lower its pressure is and vice versa if there is ever a pressure difference in a system the fluid quote unquote wants to reach equilibrium in pressure this means that the fluid in the area of high pressure will move along the path of least resistance towards the area of low pressure now when I say fluids I'm talking about the physics definition of fluids which includes both gases and liquids both of these things can be described using the same physical equations in fact when we talk about fish swimming through the sea and birds flying through the air the equations that dictate these forms of motion are actually pretty similar it's not even wrong to say that really a fish is just flying through a more viscous fluid or a bird is swimming through a less viscous one so you science is it over as the airplane picks up speed with thrust the shape of the wing and the material it's made out of on top and Below naturally causes there to be a different flow of air above and below this causes you guessed it a pressure difference conveniently pressure can be expressed in terms of force it's equal to palal F A or force over a given area we can rearrange this equation by just multiplying it out to get FAL P * a meaning that the force on an object is equal to the pressure over a given area on that object this means that as we generate a low pressure flow above the wing and a high pressure flow beneath the wing the air naturally wants to go from the area of high pressure to the area of low pressure pressing into the bottom of the wing as the plane travels down the runway going faster and faster and faster it hits a certain Sweet Spot based on its weight and what material it's made of and so forth to have enough air pressure difference to generate enough lift Force to take off if you think about it there are a lot of different forms of bird flight whether it be a hummingbird or a seagull or a crow or a condor all four of these birds fly via almost completely different mechanisms whenever a bird is gliding like say the Condor which is a bird that flies largely via gliding because it is so massive the physics is essentially identical to that of the airplane wing the tldr here is it is hard to take off if you've got a lot of weight birds in general have hollow bones very thin bone structures and they have incredibly strong breast muscles and very low musculature anywhere else because their goal is to minimize weight and maximize efficiency but this still raises more questions why do they flap their wings so much how do they gain height while staying in place how do hummingbirds hover I don't really know I reached out to like five or six staff ornithologists at various museums and universities and some of them kind of got back to me but never were willing to really do an interview and that's fair I'm like a weird YouTube guy and I'm emailing them why do birds can you Pokemon if you are a PhD in Ornithology sound off in the comments please tell me what is going on or provide for me your contact and I would love to get in touch and get to the bottom of this I've probably already said like 10 or 20 inaccuracies in the last 5 minutes about bird flight alone because there are so many things online that are just like how do birds fly they just do silly head they've been doing it forever why do you want to know idiot stop asking questions where do you live what I can tell you is that broadly the physics of flight is the same as with an airplane that's a very broad stroke thing to say but generally speaking it's true the big things that matter are wingspan and weight we want the bird to be non-massive so it doesn't have to overcome an incredible weight force and we want it to have big wings in order to have a bigger surface area for the those pressure systems to press up into the wing allowing the bird to achieve lift but this raises a difficult problem about our question which Pokémon should be able to learn fly being able to learn hmo2 isn't just about being able to fly we can see that probably plenty of bird species in the world of Pokémon should be able to fly but hmo2 implies that once you've got the right gym badge that bird should not just be able to fly but should be able to carry you a 10-year-old child to any destination in the country very easily so on unfortunately it's not just the weight of the Pokémon that matters we're going to have to tack on the weight of our protagonist apparently the age of the protagonist in Pokemon varies a bit in the original anime ash leaves pallat town when he's 10 but in the various video games it sort of jumps back and forth between like 14 12 and so on so for these calculations I'm going to use 12 years old shockingly a quick Google did not bring me the weight of a 12-year-old Japanese child I can't imagine why certainly that's not a thing that my FBI agent is going to be looking at me for forever American child weight data was incredibly easy to find which I found very troubling but the bottom line is we're going to estimate the weight of our 12-year-old protagonist like this I was able to find that the average weight of a 20-year-old adult in Japan is about 1285 lb and the average weight of a 20-year-old American adult is about 141.5 lb the average weight of an American 12-year-old is about 90 lb which is 41 kg so if we imagine that the growth rates of American and Japanese children are relatively similar then the ratio that compares the adult weights for Japanese people to American people should hold for their younger counterparts I feel insane calculating this anyway 128.57 gives us our ratio of 981 so if we multiply 90 by 981 we get 81.7 lb so that means that every single Pokemon on the list needs to be able to carry their own body weight plus 81.7 lb to be incred incredibly generous let's assume all of the Pokémon protagonists are 70 lb so I've cut an extra 11.7 off the top just to try to give them a fighting chance okay so basically in my spreadsheet I need two relevant pieces of information first of all how massive is the bird literally what is its weight and second of all what is its wingspan unfortunately the Pokedex doesn't provide us wingspan they only provide us height to try to make this as scientific and not as handwavy as possible instead of going through the images one by one and trying to estimate the bird's wingspan based on its height I'm just going to say that roughly speaking a Pokemon's wingspan is proportional to its height and that scales linearly with all of the Pokémon so I went through the entire Pokedex and I decided which Pokémon were likely to be able to fly just based on how I felt about it in this list I included every single Pokémon with wings and then a bunch of other outliers we'll talk about later I'm really trying to give Pokémon a fighting chance here so I've got the height and weight data for the Pokémon great but now what do I do with that how do I generate a force equation for the lift of a fictional creature when I can't even really do that for real birds here's my solution there are tons of birds on Earth and we have tons of data about these birds I'm going to catalog their heights and their weights and then compare the two if I plot the height and weight data for a bunch of birds I should be able to create a basically line of best fit that shows me what the ratio roughly needs to be for a creature to be able to fly if I place a Pokémon on that chart how close it is to that line of best fit should tell me realistically whether or not that creature should be able to physically fly so now I just have to find out how to get a ton of data about a ton of real birds all right let let me turn this light on okay uh I am I've been I've been searching desperately for websites that have bird data turns out this is harder than you'd think scarcely will a Wikipedia page include all these things for one specific bird species I have found a website and I am trying to collect as much as I can but uh this Cornell lab of ornithology birds of the World website is a subscription service there are a few birds you can look at for free those are the bird teasers okay for instance the grey-headed Fish Eagle free you can look at him no problem beautiful bird problem is if I want to look at more birds than this one I I have to pay for it okay well against all better judgment I paid for it I got a 10% discount for it being my first month of being a subscriber on birds of the world a website I am sure to renew my subscription for for many months to come for I just love birds so much I'm a big bird Guy Bird boy some have called me now something this website has that's wonderful for our particular use here is that I don't want to just pick a bunch of birds that I know because if I do that then I'm going to wind up with very North American Heavy bird stuff but turns out that like any good $8 a month subscription service to a bird website this bird website has a surprise me button surprise [Music] me p p pated ped piled it's a parrot but now if I go to field identification boom we've got height and weight right here can I be surprised again red rumped bush Tyrant bro this is already a Pokemon we are looking at a Pokemon right now I logged height and weight data from that website for over 50 birds all of varying sizes and I plotted them all with weight on the x-axis and height on the Y AIS since this data is nonlinear a so-called line of best fit won't really work here so instead we'll use something called a power series basically this is a nonlinear equation that the spreadsheet uses to approximate a function that can follow the moving average of the data as best as possible though not perfect you can certainly begin to see a correlation here so if I use the equation from that power series I got from that chart and I just plug in Pokemon's weight data into the X variable the result the Y variable should be its expected height doing this process for every single Pokemon should give us an idea of which Pokemon are tall enough and thus have a wingspan big enough to be able to fly I ran the numbers for every single Pokemon on this list not just for its own weight but then also for its weight plus the weight of the child I then compared the heights of the Pokemon given by the Pokedex to the expected height needed to fly dividing these two numbers gives me a ratio that I can then convert into a percentage this percentage basically tells me how likely this Pokemon is going to be able to fly going down the Pokedex there are a few problems right away Charizard can't carry a child or itself Charizard can't fly I'm really sorry you guys I was really hopeful that this one would work out but it just didn't it's not even it's bad it's bad in fact we have to travel quite a ways down the Pokédex before we get to our first even sort of viable candidate Pidgey and Pidgeotto both don't make the mark despite the fact that they can both learn fly Pidgeot is our first viable candidate coming in at 76% of its needed height and wingspan Pidgeot just barely doesn't make the cut but when it reacts with pidgeotite Mega Pidgeot can fly it now has a value of 103% meaning it definitely can fly but can it carry a child no still no it's 133% shy of being able to carry a child shoot okay next up you may be disappointed to know that we have to go another 112 Pokedex entries deep before we find our next viable Pokémon and I am so excited to report that it is Gyarados Gyarados sits comfortably at 100 80% of its expected height or in this case length to be able to fly this is amazing one problem my calculations are based on the assumption that a Pokemon has wings Gyarados doesn't have wings really at all I'm not really sure what to do with Gyarados so we'll just set it aside for now but I'm going to give you a little spoiler here and tell you that things do not look good for the next stretch of Pokedex next up zatu okay so not Crobat not Aerodactyl none of the legendary birds none of those guys okay but zatu but zatu can fly okay sure zatu is at 106% of its expected height meaning that it can fly can it carry a kid though nope so ultimately no go our list is still just garados great shocking no one we get to the end of the Johto decks before Lugia and ho are up to bat and both of them are good to go we now jump more than 130 slots down the Pokedex again oh the way sweeping across hoen which is apparently a depraved land where no birds can actually fly and we wind up at Rayquaza or Rayquaza or however you want to pronounce it Rayquaza passes with flying colors literally being over 200% of its necessary value but we have another Gyarados situation here cuz uh Rayquaza is a noodle it doesn't have wings just like Gyarados but I don't know it's a magical space Dragon grow up it can fly we then skip all of CNO and go straight to gutina which can only fly in its origin form but can carry a child so that's a win next up is surprisingly sigil this Gen 5 inclusion is our first non-legendary since zatu to be able to fly which is nice but unfortunately though I think is good news to every child in the world it can't carry a person thank God thean form Thundurus is next which just sure it doesn't have it's on all four I don't know Yveltal comfortably makes the list and then we jump straight to the alola region we go now to reporter ADF in the field thank you ADF this is AD reporting live from the alola region bad news for all alolan biologists apparently there are no birds in our country that can actually fly from beak and dartrix be damned we don't have any actual Birds oh what's this breaking news it's okay that we don't have any birds because we actually have interdimensional aliens coming out of portals left and right that can fly this is great news for all alolan residents please grab your bags get canned food from the stores and hunker down you are about to be overrun by interdimensional aliens capable of flight in a country where no one can fly please God help us gen 8 is not so lucky with only two representatives dragapult and eternus eternus makes sense I guess it's terrifying and its base stat total is like a million but dragapult really doesn't even really have wings and it's a ghost but it's one of the only non-legendary non- Mega Evolution non alternate form Pokémon on this list and we need to take wins wherever we can get them so we're taking it last on list is the literal only rep from generation 9 flutter man another ghost and it cannot carry a child I am so sad so that brings our final count to all Pokemon that should physically be able to overcome their own weight force and fly to 17 now if we just limit it to the Pokemon that could conceivably carry themselves and a child and thus learn fly and you know fly you around the region there from we've got 11 and if we remove the ones who don't have wings we're left with six according to the laws of physics and The evolutionary trends of ornithology as we understand them here are the Pokémon that can fly Lugia hoo origin form gutina Yveltal lunala and naganadel woohoo this this doesn't feel right okay what what if I open up the criteria just a little bit these are video games after all they aren't meant to be per perf examples of physics right after all bruxish exists and no real world God would ever allow this Abomination to exist so let's widen the percentage range a little bit instead of limiting it just to Pokémon who score a 100% or higher let's allow any Pokemon that scores 80% or higher on the can it carry a child score the ability to learn fly this opens up the door to quite a few newcomers we've got Mega Pidgeot Mega Latios Gliscor surprisingly km White rampa for some reason tapu Coco and Miron it just added seven so that brings our total list out of over a thousand Pokemon to 13 wait there's something I haven't mentioned yet there is a Pokemon in generation five that in the games can learn fly and I really didn't want to talk about it but he's just it's just you know fine let's talk about that that's right goer a Pokemon that looks like this can learn fly in the games I don't know goar's pokedex entry in Pokemon Black States it flies across the sky at Mock speeds removing the seal on its chest makes its internal energy go out of control well that's terrifying but Gooler being able to fly in the games begs the question are there more weird cases like this I've made a list of Pokémon that seem like they can fly in the anime or the games or should be able to fly based on some other mechanism I call these Pokémon The X Factor Flyers it's time to introduce you not just to them but also to the most empirical scientific part of this entire video the ADF number the ADF number is created by multiplying together a series of scores based on a few criteria I've come up with first can it already learn fly if so we give it a multiplier of two if not we give it a one next does it have the ability levitate if yes we give it a multiplier of two and if not it stays as a one even though it doesn't have wings in the technical sense does it pass the length versus weight test from earlier when carrying a child if so a multiplier of four is added lastly The X Factor this is the intangible I know it's not highly scientific but I'll only apply it in scenarios where it feels completely Justified otherwise it'll just be a one and won't change the number at all if all of these integers multiply together to give a number of eight or higher it's a pass and should absolutely be able to learn fly now now let's move down the list of potential xfactor Flyers you can pause the video now and look at my entire list of xfactor flyers and whether they pass or fail but I'll spare you having to listen to me narrating every single one so I'll just give you the big highlights first of all wheezing is a pass with a score of eight thanks to levitate and passing the weight test I guess it's gas is gous enough Gyarados is a pass because we all agree Gyarados should fly so based on the court of public opinion and the fact that in Legends archus you can literally watch Garett fly I'm going to give this one an xfactor score of 1,000 giving it a final score of 8,000 which is the second highest in the list right behind archus which has a pass of infinity because it is God up next passing is Rayquaza this one surprises nobody Latios and Latios both pass they're using jet propulsion and that seems plenty good to me I gave every legendary Pokemon an xfactor score of two just based on the principle that they're legendary but I've given Genesect an X Factor of four just because you know it has a jetpack celesa frighteningly passes with flying colors at a score of 16 and our final entrant rounding out the entire National Pokedex is eternus with a score of eight so if we add our list of nine xfactor Flyers onto the existing list of 13 Pokémon that can learn fly that brings our final count to 22 that's right out of all the Pokémon with wings and those that don't have wings only 22 should be allowed to fly and carry a person I think ultimately most of the mid to small siiz Pokémon that have wings in these games probably should be able to fly the Pokedex number probably isn't a perfect estimation of how big they are after all in games like Pokémon go and the more recent entries in the series you can get Pokemon of varying sizes like you could get a massive Pidgey or a really tiny Charizard so I think there's a lot of variability in a good case that most Pokemon with wings should be able to fly whether or not they should be able to carry a person though I think pretty definitively the answer for almost all of them is no absolutely not oh my God you will die thank you so much for watching and please consider subscribing these videos take hundreds of hours to make from research to shooting and editing and I do everything by myself I'd love to make more stuff like this and the bigger this channel gets the more realistic that becomes thank you so much and see you next time

Channel: adef

Views: 308,322

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Id: 3VZcZJ9GJ98

Length: 27min 21sec (1641 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023