The ONLY Way To Survive Fallout! | The SCIENCE of... Fallout

dear bethesda hi it's me austin i got depressed for no reason that i can think of probably has nothing to do with the fact that i've been more or less locked inside my tiny home for six months not able to work anywhere other than my messy desk at least my hair is growing out nicely although even though i left the awkward stage that everyone talks about i went right into another one nobody told me that there were going to be two awkward stages what the heck this is not fair anyway where was i oh right my isoloft not working too good so i took a break from my worries and played some fallout actually quite a bit of fallout i lost track of time what year is it oh still 20 20. okay so i didn't actually lose track of that much time anyway the video the episode i'm here focused come on zoloft fumes get me to that finish line okay things about me i got long hair don't care and i really really like survival modes when they're implemented well i love it in minecraft so much that i only play on hardcore mode and nothing is more immersive to me than survival style modes in the fallout games if i'm being totally honest i have to say that i do think it's a lot more fun in fallout new vegas than it is in fallout 4. but every time you bring up fallout new vegas the comment section goes berserk so i will not be mentioning it the game that i won't be mentioning for the record is fallout new vegas i don't know why i like survival mode so much honestly maybe it's the role player in me the one that has a head cannon for every single character he makes in every single rpg ever although for some reason all of my fallout characters always end up being like weird post-apocalyptic cowboy shooty mcshoot men who shoot their problems instead of like nerdy science boys i wonder what that says about me as a person in any case i really like the experience of digging through the rubble for safe cans of beans and bottles of dirty water it just brings me right into the radiated wasteland setting i also have a little bit of a fascination with doomsday prepping because like ever since i saw castaway as a kid i've been perpetually worried that i'm gonna end up stranded on an island somewhere with no resources and be forced to survive for who knows how long and for years slowly i've been accruing a specific set of skills and a knowledge base that i will quite literally never get to use so i'm gonna put all of this useless knowledge to good use by conferring it to you because if i disseminate this information among the masses maybe just maybe it'll make a difference and all this stupid nonsense i've been filling my head with won't have been for nothing okay so how to survive in a nuclear apocalypse you've just stepped out of a vault it's either 10 years or 200 years into the future and frankly doesn't make that much of a difference either way because your concerns are a lot more immediate survivalists use a quick rule of thumb to assess their priorities and it's one of the key things that keeps them grounded in stressful situations and this rule is called the rule of threes and it goes a little something like this you can survive three minutes without breathable air or in icy water you can survive three hours in extreme weather unprotected you can survive three days without drinking water and you can survive three weeks without food this list is a quick way to gauge what it is you need to do in a survival or extreme situation and is listed in descending order of importance for example finding food is a really really important thing but it only matters if you have a supply of drinkable water getting water is a really vital thing to be concerned with but if you're out in a blizzard without a coat or a cave to hide in kind of doesn't matter because you're gonna die if you don't find shelter anyway for our purposes we're gonna assume that we're living in a fallout world like fallout 4 and stepping out into the wide world in the middle of the united states in about october it can get chilly out but there's places to hide like abandoned suburban houses so we're going to be skipping past ice water and extreme weather in our list and focus on water which if you think about it is pretty apropos water is a precious resource in the fallout franchise since in many regions of the united states it remains contaminated by radioactive materials and the entire like inciting incident of fallout 3 is the prospect of providing clean water to the entirety of the metro dc area because that place really needs it it is in rough shape the human body needs access to bare minimum two liters of water per day in order to stay fully functional this is an estimate and you'll probably need more if you're out there manually hunting and gathering and you might be thinking great water there's water all over the united states especially boston there's water there there's water there there's water there i'm just gonna scoop some up and don't do that you idiot i forgot to mention the most important thing you are going to die someday yes you right now watching this video you are mortal and you are going to die it's not like super important that you process all the implications of that but it is important that you keep in mind right now with all of our medical advances antibiotics anti-virals hand-washing iv drips shock battles everything you are still going to die what's gonna kill you disease that's right disease the number one killer of human beings since literally forever and since in a post-apocalyptic and or any other survivalist setting doctors and hospitals are to put it mildly lacking the main name of the game is risk reduction and drinking water straight out of the earth even if you ignore all the radioactive waste floating in it is taking a big risk fresh water is full of millions of microorganisms per cubic centimeter most of which are actually harmless but several that can be downright fatal under the right circumstances like yeah maybe if you're feeling squirrely in 2020 you can go out into lake michigan and take a big old scoop of water right into your mouth i wouldn't recommend it but you could do it and you'd i mean like you'd probably be fine and if you weren't you could go to the hospital and heck you may not even have to go to the hospital maybe you'll just be sick for a few days and then recover on your own and in the modern era where you don't really have to do much work to survive where you've got tap water from the faucet and refrigeration keeping your frozen burritos edible in case of disinterior diarrhea or fatigue from your body fighting off an infection is it definitely sucks but it's manageable but when your very survival depends upon your ability to get off the ground find food find water the tiniest hiccup in your productivity could be the thing that snowballs out of control you're too tired to get enough calories which makes you too tired to get more calories tomorrow which makes you too tired to get more the next day and all of a sudden boom you are dead this is the problem you want to avoid at all costs because the stakes associated with failure in a survivalist setting are dramatically higher than they are in your normal 2020 life dysentery dead bit by raccoon rabies you're dead stepped on a nail tetanus son you're dead dead deadly dead dead dead the whole world wants to kill you and you are like a soft little baby so water potable water it is a real challenge in a resource-poor environment there are some things you can do if you can find a waterproof and fireproof container though like a pot or a pan which is you can boil your water over a fire which um starting fires is its own whole thing if you can start a fire you can boil water which if you're at or around sea level a rolling boil for a solid minute will kill pretty much everything in the water this only solves our first problem however which is microbes which will do you for a bit but you have to remember a few things one several types of microbes and algae can actually release toxins as a part of their biology which will make water undrinkable no matter how much you boil it which is one of the reasons you can't just throw moldy meat in the oven for 10 hours and eat it but what's more pressing is the relatively high levels of radioactive heavy metals floating in the water this is bad for you for two reasons one is that heavy metals can accumulate in your body and cause severe neurological damage all on their own and two the radiation these metals release will irreversibly damage nearby cells which at the best case scenario gives you cancer in the long term and the worst case scenario is it causes acute total organ failure boiling water might be a solution for the first couple of days but in the long term you're gonna need a better way to get clean water there's also collecting rainwater and snowfall to drink but that brings with it a whole host of other problems like how clean is your container and you also have to rely on water deciding to fall out of the sky for you which during droughts can mean you're super dead what you need is a way to produce clean water anytime any day and under any conditions which is where the most powerful fire in the entire solar system comes in to save the day the sun the sun is a practically inexhaustible source of energy and even without high technology solar panels we can still harvest it for our purposes by creating something called a solar still which works by taking the raw power of the sun and using it to evaporate water and they are really really easy to build all you have to do is get two bottles plastic glass doesn't really matter and you put your dirty nasty water in one bottle connect it to the other one and then you just angle them slightly and you're done and here's basically how it works the energy from the sun blasts the surface of the water heating it up and increasing its rate of evaporation the water vapor then rises into the second empty bottle and condenses to form water droplets you can actually make this more efficient by putting something dark underneath the dirty water side and covering the clean water side so that it stays relatively cooler and you might be asking but austin won't radioactive materials and bacteria and stuff be lifted up with the water vapor and make it into your clean supply and the answer to that question is absolutely positively not while we like to think of viruses bacteria and dust is very small in light when you're looking at them on a microscopic scale they're not even remotely comparable bacteria are orders of magnitude smaller than dust particles and are orders of magnitude larger than viruses and all of them are orders of magnitude larger than water vapor and it's really easy to see why when you just think about it for a few minutes a virus even a really tiny one is made up of multiple chemicals strung together in a chain water vapor though is just like two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom floating in the air on these scales it's like saying that a freaking i don't know geo metro convertible will be carried off into the air by the updraft caused from a rising helium balloon is the car small almost comically small yes but it's still so much heavier than a balloon filled with helium that's not even useful to compare the two so no matter what as long as there isn't a chemical in there that evaporates faster than water the water in the clean side is only going to be as dirty as the bottle itself which i don't know if you can maybe use your first batch of distilled water and mix it with some white ashes from burnt wood and any natural fat you can find even if it's from roadkill to create a rudimentary soap that would go a long way to making sure your water container was as clean as possible anyway all that aside you can use just the sun to turn practically any water yes even salt water into clean potable drinking water using simply two bottles taped together there i solved your um solved your problem okay you know these bottles are really tiny how much water can you really get out of this though because the rate of evaporation isn't dependent upon the volume of water you have it's dependent on your surface area exposed to the sun meaning that a thin chunky bottle that's gonna be like really inefficient at absorbing sunlight right like let's just use some math to figure it out real quick measuring a nuka-cola bottle in-game near a cross-sectional area we get an area exposed to the sun of about 31 square centimeters with a potential evapotranspiration rate of 3.4544 centimeters per month in boston during october on average that gives us in a 31 day month an average of 1.11 millimeters of evaporation on exposed surfaces per day which given a low surface area of only 31 square centimeters means that a nuka-cola bottle will provide well that can't be right only .0035 milliliters per day of drinkable water that means you need like what over two million bottles of nuka cola working every single day to harvest the water you need well that's garbage okay so what if we use an actual sun still and just like assume the best case scenario going on actual sun stills built efficiently can produce approximately two and a half liters per square meter of surface area with an exposed area of .0031 meters that means that our bottles under ideal conditions would produce eight milliliters of water per day that's that's better but you'd still need about 500 nuka-cola bottles to get even close to the amount of potable water you'd need why are people pushing sun stills made from bottles as though they're a decent source of water they are actual trash okay crap you might die you're you're gonna die i think i think that's clear now there's not really a lot that i can do for you okay okay okay okay think austin you spend years gathering survivalist knowledge to keep yourself alive and these people are depending on you oh okay okay okay we got something this isn't a desert island it's fallout and there's houses everywhere so what you want to do is find a house any house that has an intact window and you want to carefully remove the window from the house hopefully you can find a saw or a hammer and just like bash the frame out then you wanna uh if you can build a box and use the window as a lid but put a bit of a slope on it too while you're at it you wanna make this box as watertight as possible because you're gonna need to fill it with terrible water but the great thing is that if you do it right this really wide surface area is gonna be a lot more efficient at gathering heat from the sun and your liters per hour of harvestable water is going to increase dramatically about one window per person who needs water will do you just about and you slope it so that when the water vapor hits the surface of the window and condenses it will run down hopefully to a bucket or something you have you did remember to find a bucket right uh you're gonna need something to collect the water this will do you for a time but what you really want to do is make your own fire powered still out of clay because that is a cleaner as long as you do it right and b will work no matter what resources you have around you because in order to make clay all you need to do is what's that we're out of time well that's just about to tell them how to make their own kiln for firing clay this episode is already getting too long i mean maybe i could no i've been i've been talking too much about water uh if enough people watch the video i'm allowed to do a video just on how to make your own clay and form it into things like bowls water stills and kilns okay cool and maybe i can even get into how salt glazes work hopefully there's not an actual apocalypse between now and then maybe i can also teach them how to make soap oh this video really went off the rails i guess um the point is uh if the apocalypse happens you're um you're probably gonna die you might be able to build your own solar powered water still for completely clean water but you're probably gonna die anyway i mean there's literally radioactive zombie bears you have no chance just it's like do your best to not get stranded on a desert island or survive a nuclear apocalypse i guess that is the message of the video and frankly you don't need all those complicated water purification devices that you see in a fallout games i guess that's the the two two morals of this story uh sincerely austin and before i go i want to give a personal shout out to my high tier patrons mazer siggy nick patterson nicholas belinger dan rob a damn tp royal gaming 16 francis gangnam draven stanley marissa resnick jared beecher and adam barber [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,519,026

Rating: 4.8846078 out of 5

Keywords: fallout, fallout 76, fallout 4, fallout theory, fallout new vegas, fallout gameplay, fallout 76 song, fallout vegas, nuclear, science, the science, new fallout, new fallout trailer, fallout trailer, fallout mods, game theory, game theorists, the science of fallout, matpat, game theory fallout, game theory fallout 76, matpat fallout, fallout 4 mods, fallout 3

Id: EaOWf5ClN5I

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/dark-prelate]

Is this a hint to the fourth channel? Survival theory ftw

[u/MagicWandering]

I really hope he does another episode.

[u/ragewithoutage]

Don’t go

[u/tundrat]

I thought more about Dr.Stone than Fallout while watching. :p

[u/Shiftyrunner37]

Did this video put anyone else on the thought path of how you would rebuild society? Once you survive it would only make sense too reinvent many of the inventions we take for granted, create a stable economy (I don't play fallout but I imagine the economy isn't that good), and establish a stable government.