Pokemon Evolution Would KILL YOU! | The SCIENCE! ...of Pokemon

dear gamefreak hi it's me Austin your worst nightmare don't you remember me you should I'm the one responsible for bursting your pokeball conspiracy wide open yeah I saw your press release by your paid lackeys a Kotaku saying that pokeballs are just fluffy pleasure domes where Pokemon get jerked off by Jigglypuff's all day but I know better I know the truth I did the math and I know what you're hiding but today is not about that today though is about you and honestly knowing that your pokeballs are quantum murder meat grinders hasn't come even remotely close to diminishing your luster in my eyes I've been completely hooked on your games ever since you released pokémon red and blue for the regular Gameboy in 1996 what was once just a tiny plastic cartridge sporting 151 cute little monsters that you could force to fight for your amusement has exploded into the second largest video game media franchise in history second only to Mario because apparently Nintendo owns literally everything now we've got over 800 of these little pieces of crap to keep track of and Christ it is making me feel old last month you and leash Pokemon Sun and Moon into the universe and of course like every other Pokemon fan in the world I wanted to play it so I grabbed the son of a as soon as it dropped ha wrong I've been locked out of new titles from the Pokemon franchise for years I think I have a regular D s laying around somewhere and a copy of heart gold but the fact of the matter is ever since I introduced more vegetables and prune juice into my diet I don't spend enough time on the John to justify buying a new handheld but that doesn't matter what was good and fun about the original red and blue has been preserved through the ages capture mystical monsters and a coconut for sin the commit mass murder in order to gain levels rock-paper-scissors your way through the world's humiliating other dog fighters and eventually after leaving a trail of retina corpses behind you a mile long your Pokemon will evolve from an adorable baby with cute wittle cheeks into a horrifying Goliath that has replaced all of its memories of cuddles with the desire to REM the flesh off the face of anything that stands in your way fun for the whole family all that's changed is more creative recruits to the roster and shinier animations strangely they decided to keep the 56k modem Pokemon noises through the ears for reasons that are beyond me anyway instead of crying about my inability to play Sun and Moon I booted up a copy of the objectively superior version of the original Pokemon Pokemon Red and you know Game Freak it was just after leaving Viridian Forest as I was walking in circles in route to killing rat tattoos and piggies by the barrelful so I could get my Charmander a high enough level so I could shame brock by pissing all over his face with a fire-type Pokemon I reached level 16 my Charmander evolved into a Charmeleon and it hit me Pokemon evolution makes no goddamn sense now I know what you're thinking yes Austin I know you're on the game theorist you know where game theory is they covered pokemon evolution a hell of a lot already especially pointing out that pokemon evolution actually resembles metamorphosis more than actual bona fide evolution to which I say hahaha my sweet summer child you have no idea you don't know what I know but when I tell you haha when I tell you then you'll finally understand the truth and you will realize that there's no place to hide from the terror yes matpat was right in his video from 2011 that I recommend you definitely go watch now because holy is so adorable four to three ratio chunky as hell animations anyway the process of Pokemon evolution just like Digimon evolution resembles more closely the biological process of metamorphosis than it does actual evolution evolution is a lengthy process wherein biologically advantageous traits are passed down through generations and exaggerated until eventually a species no longer resembles where it started but a morph is this by contrast is just a normal part of an animal's life cycle where it moves from stage to stage fulfilling new roles in the ecosystem like a caterpillar that gives up eating metric but tons of food to become a butterfly so can book a one-way ticket to bone city or a tadpole that gives up beating a metric but tons of food to become a frog so can book a one-way ticket to bone city your living City sensing a theme here me to mother nature you filthy filthy beast anyway this is what Pokemon do they aren't spending thousands of years slowly shaving off inadequate traits and slapping on new ones they're undergoing sudden drastic changes to their Anatomy in order to accomplish bigger and better things the jury's still out on tickets to bone city but I'm guessing that has something to do with the ESRB ratings more than anything else nobody really wants to see that so what pokemon undergo metamorphosis what's the big deal well I'll tell you the big deal because while this may be true the poke a process of poke a metamorphosis is at its heart the key to the entire puzzle that's what makes the Pokemon universe truly utterly mortifyingly yeah mortifying sorry I have a newborn sometimes the words just come out the way they come out where was I all right metamorphosis there's a bit of a problem with this pokemon evolution equals metamorphosis theory though true in almost every conceivable way it is an organism moving from one stage to another advancing along a path toward maturity and new biological roles however there is one key factor that makes all the difference in the world time you see pokemon evolution happens nearly instantly unlike metamorphosis which actually takes days weeks or even months to be fully realized metamorphosis requires a huge huge investment of energy I mean look at how goddamn fat this caterpillar is and how freakin tiny the butterfly it turns into is by comparison well what does this have to do with Pokemon in order to understand that we're gonna have to talk about conservation of mass put simply conservation of mass means you can't get something from nothing and you can't turn something into nothing if you take our whole wide universe and accept that inside this thing we call everything there's a set amount of stuff you can't get more you can't get less and inside this thing called everything if you want to make something bigger you gotta take stuff from something else if you want to make something smaller you got to put that mass somewhere it's why teenagers have unstoppably voracious appetites they're growing a rate unprecedented in their lives and therefore need more stuff to make their bodies into more stuff and it's why caterpillars get so goddamn fat they've got an absurd amount of work out of them literally melting their bodies into a caterpillar soup a sentence I really wish I hadn't read at 4:30 a.m. and rebuilding it into a thing that can fly and bone every other butterfly in the vicinity Pokemon metamorphosis in seconds and almost always get larger than they were before which means the energy and materials other animals would gather over days Pokemon are sucking up in mere moments this instantaneous huge requirement of energy and stuff cannot according to three law physics we know of be circumvented all Pokemon are different but in order to understand the terrifying implications of this process we're gonna look at one of my favorite Pokemon of all time Magikarp magic harp is amazing because it goes from being easily the most useless piece of garbage in the entire game to being a freaking dragon with the flick of a switch and I have to admit when I was a little kid I foolishly paid the con man at the entrance to mount moon five hundred bucks to get this totally useless trash pokemon damn it and that bastard offers no return swindler if you're patient though and you're able to raise this Magikarp to level twenty it turns into a freakin Gyarados a Pokemon badass enough to chew its way through the Elite Four of so inclined Magikarp is based on you know carp the garbage rat of the fish world weighing in at a respectable ten kilograms upon evolving this piece of rejected sushi grows to an immense 235 kilogram dragon over five hundred freakin pounds that's a mass increase of over 2,000 percent in order to figure out what this means in real world terms we're gonna have to build a working model of what the heck a Magikarp and by extension a Gyarados is made out of taking the real-world rat fish carp is our substitute since it's the closest thing in real life to an actual Magikarp we can actually figure this out and after combing through no less than six different academic papers published over the past 60 years I finally have all the answers and the answers are god damned terrifying I'm gonna go through this really quickly because this is complicated boring and I have a tendency to talk too much and I really really really want to keep this under 20 minutes so here we go piecing together chemical analysis had been run over the common card for decades we can surmise it on average two common carp and by extension of Magikarp is comprised of approximately seventy eight point one five percent water six point eight five percent tissues five percent blood and trace minerals in ten percent skeleton for the sake of simplicity we're gonna presume that a fully grown cure dose is comprised of the same ratio the same materials lets you know if a real-life river dragon I could compare two but no not that one that's a cartoon starting with the easiest water water is comprised of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom and is easily one of the simplest molecules we'll find inside our little magical beast next the skeleton which is mostly calcium hydroxyapatite an incredibly complex molecule comprised of ten calcium atom 24 phosphorus atoms 26 oxygen atoms and two hydrogen atoms believe it or not that was the easy part now the tough stuff I don't have you blood and trace elements next because believe it or not this is actually the next least terrible aspect carper comprised of dozens of different compounds some organic and some inorganic the difference between inorganic and organic molecules is obviously pretty arbitrary and inorganic what is just stuff that's already in the universe water oxygen and iron organic compounds are essentially these very same inorganic elements and atoms rearrange to form complex structures designed for complex roles and the bodies of living things we just call them vitamins scarpered comprised of primarily nitrogen calcium magnesium sodium potassium phosphorus sulfur iron manganese vitamin A carotene vitamin C nicotinic acid riboflavin and pantothenic acid with nicotinic acid vitamin C nitrogen and sodium making up the largest percentages of trace compounds in parts per million adding a whole new mess of stuff we need to make our fish but this is bad as it looks isn't even remotely close to the worst part the most complex series of compounds is nested in this deviously small little section the 6.8 5% of body's tissues specifically these body tissues are split into two broad categories proteins or amino acids and lipids aka fats amino acids are simply speaking meat and there are over eighteen of them in a Magikarp alanine argonite aspartic acid cysteine clued amine glycine histidine isoleucine leucine lysine methionine philony trollin centering threonine tryptophan tryptophan tyrosine and valine amino acids are just differently arranged carbon hydrogen nitrogen and oxygen and sometimes sulfur thankfully there's only 15 lipids in carbon they're just carbon hydrogen and oxygen ristic merest oleic palmitic palmitoleic stearic oleic linoleic and linoleic alpha linoleic Aiko senio ik arachidonic Aiko sympathetic and taco safer to Noah and this one is imposter [Music] taking all these atoms and compounds and modifying them by their requisite percentages we get a really close approximation of exactly how much of what stuff is needed to take a little itty-bitty Magikarp and turn it into a PMSing Gyarados remember something doesn't come from nothing nothing comes from nothing we see that the biggest draw of materials is gonna be oxygen and hydrogen which makes sense at 78% water and with almost every single compound in the body being made from some combination of oxygen and hydrogen it makes sense that together they make a 58% of the required atoms by mall next is phosphorus with a really steep drop-off into calcium and carbon and the rest really aren't worth talking about there's only one way that a tiny 10 kilogram Magikarp can explode into a 235 kilogram Gyarados in mere moments by gobbling up over 200 kilograms of garbage in the near vicinity I'm talking about dirt atmosphere grass trees and buildings most of the things that are on this list are in our world in abundance carbon sulfur calcium potassium sodium magnesium iron and manganese are all in dirt alone the real problem comes from hydrogen and oxygen which unfortunately make up most of our colossal pokemon here but austin you may be saying water is everywhere so it's oxygen it's in the atmosphere it's what we breathe you're not totally wrong but the truth of the matter is that the air we breathe is mostly nitrogen less than a quarter of it is oxygen and at sea level there's only a quarter of a kilogram of oxygen per cubic meter meaning that in order to get enough oxygen to build all those molecules you're looking at are Gerudo sucking in all the available oxygen within a radius of 6.5 meters in a matter of seconds and hydrogen things look incredibly dour you see you may think oh it's no big deal there's water vapor that'll take care of it yeah even on the most humid days you're looking at 200 Piko grams of hydrogen per cubic kilometer that means in order to get enough high to build this freakin dragon in mere moments this Magikarp is gonna have to pull hydrogen from every available nearby source and nearby is relative any hydrogen source within a two hundred and twenty three billion kilometer radius is fair game and since there's very very little hydrogen and open air it means you better hope to Christ that there's a barrel of water between you and that Magikarp but it decides to poke evolve or guess what you're the most water rich source available and that Pokemon is gonna squeeze you dry like a sponge and your dose is just an extreme example any pokemon undergoing an extreme growth spurt in fractions of a second would be like a goddamn hand grenade going off as it immediately sucks in all available nutrients and elements in the vicinity bursting pipes and local buildings to get at their water killing other Pokemon in the area as it robs them of the vital vitamins and minerals bursting eardrums from the massive pressure differentials formed by huge volumes of the local atmosphere immediately collapsing blasting holes in the ground six meters deep and sending all rejected elements flying out in all directions that high fractures are the speed of light ionizing nearby atoms and sending gamma radiation and flying debris into anyone foolish enough to not hit that b button to cancel the evolution as quickly as possible the world of Pokemon should look less like a beautiful rural Japanese landscape and more like the post-apocalyptic hellscape of fallout full of irradiated craters nutrient thirsty monsters and idiot humans who weren't smart enough to murder every Pokemon in sight with lead pipes after the first one exploded into its next form forget dogfighting analogies and forget quantum murder from pokeballs Pokemon themselves are black holes of voracious destruction ticking time bombs just sitting there looking adorable to keep you off-guard just long enough for them to turn into implosive tiny nuclear bombs before emerging is something stronger meaner and altogether more terrifying Jesus Christ game freak you scare the ever-loving crap out of me sincerely Austin [Music] PS hey don't know who I am I'm Austin I just joined the game theorists some of you may know me and my series from the channel shoddycast do you want more of this sort of thing well then you know subscribe to the game series if you haven't yet oh and you can go over to shoddycast right now I have a whole nother science episode going up today and dozens of other topics I've already covered you have any questions about video game science that you want answered some things that make no goddamn sense to you ask me in the comment section below and maybe I'll get to it or you know shoot them to me on Twitter and AR horrigan [Music]

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 5,408,229

Rating: 4.5402498 out of 5

Keywords: pokemon, Pokemon red, Pokemon blue, pokemon theory, pokemon red and blue, pokemon sun and moon, pokemon sunmoon, pokemon evolution, evolution, evolve, physics, secret, dangers, dark, solved, pokemon game theory, game theory, matpat, game theorists, pokemon sun, pokemon moon, Science, The Science, the Science!

Id: tOzMUw6owe0

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 21 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/blond-max]

I've been follow Austin on Shoddycast for so long (like the first FO4 podcast) and I'm just so glad I had two SCIENCE videos today :D

The crowd here doesn't seem to be sold and I don't get why. Sure the intro was particularly long on this one, but I'm guessing that it's just a first episode thing, to set the tone and impress those you have no clue how successful this as been on Shoddy.

Other than that, as always, these videos get down to business and god it's beautiful. It brings way too much math and science to the table over precise gaming elements. Overanalyzing video game has always been this channel's business right?

[u/xidreamofpegasus]

I legitimately enjoy science theories (being in a science field myself) so this was awesome! But three suggestions to make it better:

1) there was a LOT of prologue and banter at the beginning. Intros are 1000% fine, this just seemed like it dragged on and to be completely honest I was losing interest by the time the science stuff actually started (at which point interest went back up), Maybe cut back on that a bit, which would then give you more time to talk about the science at a mildly slower pace - WIN WIN FOR EVERYONE WOOT;

2) I have come to realize that even though I myself have a sailor's mouth, that part of my brain shuts off when I'm doing educational things. Maybe dial that down just a tad?

3) This goes back to #1, but I think some of the science might be going a little too fast.I know I could keep up because I knew about everything you were saying, but if you spoke that fast for something like history I would be totally lost. Again, this is super tied to #1, so take itt as you will.

Otherwise I REALLY enjoyed this content and I think it's what a LOT of theorists have been wanting for a while. Please take it as constructive criticism, I really don't want you to lose yourself trying to please us, I just think there are a couple of little tweaks (especially with this being the first video on the GT channel!) :)

[u/Insomniacwithnolife]

I oddly felt like I was watching the ravings of a madman and I loved it. Like watching "A Beautiful Mind" of Pokémon. I liked the video and hope there will be plenty more like it :)

[u/Kaihatsu]

I have to admit, I'm not a very big fan of the way this Austin guy presents his videos... I much prefer MatPat.

[u/RandomRedditor44]

1. Why the fuck is this guy yelling?

2. In the intro, he says "Hi Game Freak, its Austin! Don't you remember me?" I'm pretty sure Game Freak has no idea who Austin is.

3. Why hire a new channel for the Game Theorists? Why not just hire a new editor for Game Theory?

4. Whats the difference between this Shoddycast thing and Game Theory?

5. Will this show be better (research-wise and script-wise) than Game Theory?

/u/MatPatGT

[u/MarlinMr]

The explanation of organic compounds are not correct at all. Organic compounds are compounds that have carbon in them.

[u/Pitboyx]

Disclaimer, I don't play a lot of pokemon, but I do think there'd be another plausible explanation.

Pokemon eat, right? You feed them poffins or something and I'd assume they drink water throughout their life. Poffins seem to be some sort of pastry with fruit in it (berries). In the show I've seen them eat something that resembles kibbles. These would likely contain the phosphorus and lots of vitamins, minerals, and such which they could store along with the water they drink. Since in the pokemon universe huge pokemons can be condensed into a pokeball, I'd assume there could be a similar mechanism to store the ingested compounds for the "evolution" without the pokemon becoming huge and fat. This just seems like the most obvious answer since animals that go through metamorphosis also eat until they've gained enough built up nutrients to "evolve."

Alternatively, if the pokemon is going to suck in matter from a 223 billion kilometer radius, why not draw the matter from the nearest underground aquifer instead? It'd probably expend less energy than drawing from this absurd volume of space.

If I'm blatantly wrong, please correct me. I get that the storage mechanism is pretty far fetched, but it seems more realistic than the pokemon absorbing the matter around it at the time of evolution.

[u/Maniacbob]

Pretty stoked to see Austin doing a science theory on game theory.

[u/MasterYinan]

As far as I cann tell, Austin is completely wrong with his "200 picograms per km³" of water vapor in the air.

Based on everything I can find it should be something around 17 grams per m³, which would mean that Austin is off by around 19 orders of magnitude...

Where the hell did he get the 200 picograms per km³???