The Big Lie of Animal Crossing Balloons! | The Science of... Animal Crossing: New Horizons

dear Nintendo hi it's me quarantine Austin replete with quarantine hair I'm fine I'm fine we are flying what month is it again September no May I hate myself anyway today I'm going to just this once break one of my cardinal rules you may not know this but I personally have a rule to not ever do a video on a game I've never played myself I think it makes videos better that I do things about games I actually like and I'm more likely to miss something obvious if I haven't played a game with my own two hands but I am going to break that rule this week why would I do such a thing because I cannot play the game that I'm doing my video on why can't I play it because my spouse and somehow my three year old both have a monopoly on the game I can't get near the controller in my apartment and you know what's worse I don't want you messing up my island is said to me by the person that I married like I can't be trusted to not ruin the excellent landscaping and carefully curated aesthetic just because in real life I sometimes forget to close the cabinets when I leave the kitchen and have a collection of roughly 10 half-filled glasses on my side of the bed that said I have definitely watched a metric but ton of animal crossing gameplay so I am going to bite the bullet and it's cute it's fun there's very little to criticize except for one thing you thought I couldn't look past your cute aesthetic Nintendo ensign something to nitpick I've got laser science vision Nintendo my mind was forged in the darkness of nitpick l demolishing franchises like Mario Pokemon and minecraft this game is nothing you hear me you can run you can hide but I will always find something to rampage about in every single game ever made except for a Kerbal space program those cute little green gremlins can do nothing wrong I love them so much okay I don't want to see this video it's less of a nitpick and just looking at something I've always been fascinated with and it's this the floating balloon presents ever since I was a kid I was fascinated with helium balloons at rate I think shared by most children and I always tried to get my toys to fly with them but never found any success but today is the day dang it I'm gonna make it happen but first we got to go over the science and ask the question is it possible to deliver gifts through a floating balloon delivery service the answer to that question may surprise you okay so before we get to the science which is incredible let's get everyone up to speed if they somehow don't know yet every 5 to 15 minutes a box floating on a balloon will spawn on your Island you shoot it down with the slingshot and bought a bing bada boom you get free stuff sometimes it's a piece of furniture sometimes it's clothes sometimes it's money up I mean bells sometimes crafting materials like clay or iron and sometimes it's a recipe that teaches you how to make the items for yourself that's it that's the entire premise so let the fun begin how does a balloon filled with gasses float buoyancy a word I swear to god I know how to pronounce in spite of what my video on fortnight would lead you to believe buoyancy or more specifically buoyant force is a force it is created whenever anything is submerged in a fluid a fluid in this context is a substance that deforms under applied forces gases and liquids and plasmas are all fluids this includes our atmosphere which is a fluid soup made out of nitrogen oxygen argon some water vapor and an ever-increasing amount of carbon dioxide that means that anything submerged in it has a buoyancy force pulling it upward while actually technically pushing it upward and I kind of glossed over how this worked in my Fortnite video but let's get real down and dirty how does buoyancy actually work okay so let's submerge a thing like that I don't know a balloon filled with helium in a fluid like a let's just say a mixture of 78% nitrogen 21% oxygen point nine percent argon and point O three percent carbon dioxide for all intents and purposes this balloon is considered a solid object even though it itself is full of a fluid as well the helium if this balloon is filled with six litres of helium it is taking up six liters or point zero zero six cubic meters of space makes sense this is point zero zero six cubic meters of space that would ordinarily be taken up by the atmosphere but now that atmosphere has to move out of the way now six liters of helium weighs approximately 1.74 grams plus two grams for the balloon giving us a total of three point zero seven four grams of mass but and here's where things get really interesting that volume of air it weighs over seven grams what this means is that the force of gravity on this mass of air is greater than the force of gravity on the balloon meaning that the air that is pushed out of the way by the presence of the balloon Falls underneath it pushing the balloon up this will happen until the weight of the balloon matches the weight of the air it's pushing out of the way which in this example is roughly eight kilometres high or about 26,000 feet this is actually pretty similar to how a hot air balloon works but instead of using a gas is much lighter than the atmosphere like helium which is actually pretty expensive they instead use heat to lower the density of the air inside the envelope and also increase the volume of the envelope so it displaces more of the atmosphere it's because of this that hot air balloons don't typically fly much higher than 3,000 feet or 900 meters it just takes way too much heat energy to rise much higher than that it can be done but like why anyway back to animal crossing as long as the net forces and weights all cancel out a balloon can lift stuff and since a balloon Rises when you fill it with helium that means it has some lifting power to spare and that 6-litre measurement wasn't something I took out of nowhere it's the estimate I was able to get by measuring balloons by filling them with water in my apartment although for reasons we'll get into in a bit it was insufficient and I needed to find a better method we'll get there the buoyancy formula is relatively simple almost embarrassingly simple in truth the force of buoyancy is equal to the volume of displaced fluid the density of the displaced fluid and acceleration due to gravity in this case we have point zero zero six cubic meters times the density at sea level of the atmosphere of one point two to five kilograms per cubic meter times 9.8 oh six meters per second squared which gives our current balloon a lifting force of point zero seven two oh seven four one Newton's which is tiny it takes 9.8 newtons to lift one kilogram so dividing this number by 9.8 or rather just not putting it in the formula to begin with we can figure out how much weight a balloon filled with helium can lift it turns out to be about seven point three five grams minus the two grams the balloon weighs that's only five point three five grams that is really tiny that's about 253 grains of rice even less if you put them in some sort of container no wonder I couldn't get my GI Joes to fly that said I wasn't convinced that my method of measuring the carrying capacity of balloons was really all that great for one thing water puts way more stress on the latex and gases due for a bunch of different reasons so screw it I said I'm just gonna buy a freaking tank of helium and fill some freakin balloons myself and measure it I don't know maybe fulfill a childhood dream of actually getting something into a stable flight using helium balloons and you know what it was a huge pain in the butt [Music] measuring the lifting capacity really was not that hard at all I just filled a cup with salt I mined fresh from the internet and plopped it down on a kitchen scale filled balloons until they were ready to burst with helium and tape to them to the cup to see how much weight they removed and I was right to doubt my estimates before I got an average across all balloons of nine grams of lifting force that's including the weight of the balloon way more than my estimate of five ish grams it was 50% this makes the max capacity of the average latex balloon somewhere in the nine liter range not the six liter one but it's here when I started to run into problems you see I wanted to simulate sending off a gift in stable flight but nine grams in spite of being way more than five is still not a lot of lifting capacity it's pretty much exactly the weight of two sheets of paper but it gets even worse you see my struggle for my entire life trying to get things to fly with helium balloons is stability because in my mind stable flight isn't just going like straight up forever until you've nearly exited the troposphere but rather it's being able to control your height stay level and move forward horizontal travel that's what flight is you know exactly what you see an animal crossing the balloons aren't just flying up and down willy-nilly they have a very stable gentle flight plan across your island at a fairly consistent altitude only deviating by like a few inches or you know centimeters if you don't understand my freedom units and the more I thought about it and the more I experimented the more sure I was that this kind of flight the kind of flight you see in the game is impossible actually built a present box and filled it with a DIY recipe and more or less proved that it is possible for a balloon to carry a really crapoly built present box filled with instructions for how to build a table there are however two major problems and they are both kinda related problem the first actually perfectly cancelling out the lifting force of the balloon is a huge pain in the butt you see in order to keep the box from lifting up essentially forever I have to cancel out all 9 grams perfectly down to the milligram which in this context means that the slightest amount of material makes a huge difference slightly too much scrap ballast paper and it sinks slightly too little and it wants to exit my apartment in order to get a stable consistent height the weight of the balloon and its package has to exactly equal the lifting force technically if it's too light it will lift to an altitude where it eventually becomes stable this could be hundreds or thousands of feet up in the air well at a slingshot range and this is all ignoring the fact that my balloons were cheap and terrible and leaked helium like a sieve I definitely should have invested in some of that high float stuff but yeah well but even if I perfectly balanced the weight which I think I actually got pretty close to doing there's a whole new problem to worry about the air itself fluids by their very nature are unstable and shift around for all sorts of reasons and the very existence of you know everything around you including yourself creates tons of swirling and rising as fluids move around you and these are known as eddy currents you can feel them if you want to even it out like completely still room just extend your arm in front of you like stiff and swing it from left to right as fast as you can you should be able to feel the eddy currents wrapping around your arm and brushing you gently on the opposite side of your arms movement have fun editing that one Tanya there's also all sorts of things like wind and localized pressure differences in fact local pressure changes can be as extreme as two percent in a lot of places all this creates tons of problems for our balloon which not only has a huge surface area but if it's perfectly balanced it only weighs nine grams meaning even if it's designed to hover perfectly in a 100 percent stable atmosphere there's no such thing as a perfectly stable atmosphere a stable flight is very relative and even professional pilots can expect as much of variance as a hundred feet on their target altitudes while flying things that are much much heavier than a balloon this means that even if you get a perfectly stable package flying off toward an island a tiny imperceivable gust of wind can send it crashing into the ground or swoop it up into the sky way way above your head and out of slingshot range and the thing is these air currents are particularly bad in coastal areas like islands where the low-pressure air from the land collides with the higher pressure air from the sea and creates a strong updraft of thousands of meters meaning any balloon floating nearby is gonna get swept up into the sky every single time flight is a lot more complicated than simply cancelling out the force of gravity and it's why there are people who devote their entire lives to learning fluid dynamics in order to design airplanes and the lighter an object is the more prone to these wind forces things are going to be I don't think it needs to be said but while we're at it these balloons would not be able to carry anything other than a few pieces of paper period clay or freaking furniture forget about it even though these balloons do appear to be bigger than standard helium balloons they're likely only capable of lifting 20 to 30 grams at best and I know what you're thinking you've been following me for a long time and you've become very very nerdy and you're like hey Austin isn't hydrogen half the way to helium ergo giving it twice the lifting power and to that I say hey getting pretty smart I like the cut of your jib and also nope you're totally wrong [Music] while helium is twice as heavy as hydrogen in their gaseous forms they're both way lighter than our atmosphere making hydrogen only about eight percent more effective at lifting than helium giving it the ability to lift nine point seven two grams over helium's nine with the added downside of being super flammable so while helium balloons are technically capable of delivering the lightest of items the shortest of distances they're going to be wildly inconsistent with over half of your presents either crashing into the ocean or being swept up kilometers into the sky before ever reaching you what if that means that the ocean is just getting absolutely littered with presents that never actually made it to you take that cutesy game that just wanted to do a cutesy thing you thought you were safe from me but I got ya suck on that Animal Crossing hmm I did it I feel so empty inside should I reflect on whether or not I add anything of value to the world by tearing down things that are clearly just meant to be fun mascar that get dunked on sincerely oh hey there did you know that I have a patreon for this show you probably didn't because I literally just made it I've been waffling on whether or not to make one for over two years now and I finally decided to bite the bullet because well if I can't be honest with you the state of YouTube right now is utterly terrifying to me you see I make money on these videos almost entirely from advertising that appears before the videos I don't have merchandise because I'm awful at that sort of thing occasionally I get a sponsored video but other than that I rely on the capricious whims of the advertising gods and however much money they decide to a lot to me and right now even though viewership across the platform is up revenue is way way down due to the pandemic like over half in some cases it's an even scarier time now to be dependent on ad revenue than it was during the ad pocalypse and it's because of that fear that I decided to stop stalling and finally just like do the thing and I made a patreon every video I make cost anywhere from two thousand to three thousand dollars out of my pocket to make depending upon how you calculate it and how long it is and all that stuff that's money and it's because I tried to pay my editor well and I think she does a really good job and if you hadn't noticed the kind of videos we make are very animation heavy visualising stuff like eddy currents is not easy we have to make a lot of our stuff from scratch and it can take upwards of 200 hours conservatively per video to make it and it's just really harder to work and we love doing it but I you know we also want to be able to eat so if you want to help me keep making these videos you can head on over to patreon comm slash the science eat eat Oh Micah patreon.com slash the science whitey that's short for YouTube and it's really hard to say out loud holy cow and give whatever you want even one dollar contributors get some perks including behind-the-scenes updates early access to some content exclusive live streams and access to a special section of my discord server other contributors get listed in my credits at the beginning of videos and some like Mazer Nikolas Hollow and the Freddy Krueger official get shoutouts at the end of my videos and the highest contributors will get a special avatar for me to use in videos whenever I have to illustrate an experiment and that's it you can help me out in this utterly terrifying and uncertain time that would be amazing and if you can't just know that you watching my videos is really all I ever really wanted to begin with and you've made it possible to work my dream job for almost half a decade now and I am so grateful to you for loving what I do thank you so much that's patreon.com slash the science whitey [Music]

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,360,442

Rating: 4.8586454 out of 5

Keywords: animal crossing, animal crossing new horizons, acnh, new horizons, new horizons animal crossing, animal crossing gifts, animal crossing new horizons gift, animal crossing new horizons island, animal crossing new horizons gameplay, animal crossing new horizons music, animal crossing 5 star island, animal crossing tarantula island, animal crossing new horizons tour, isabelle smash, the science, the science of, the science of animal crossing, game theorists, game theory, matpat

Id: WeIZg1xEWuc

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020

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