Dear GameFreak,
Hi!
It’s me!
Austin!
What’s up!?
You still haven’t written back to me about your pokeballs.
That’s okay.
I understand.
You want to suppress the truth about the systematic genocide of an entire species.
I probably would, too, if I were in your shoes.
I wouldn’t want people to know the truth about pokeballs if I were the sole benefactor
of their existence.
But that’s not why I’m writing to you today.
I’ve already said all there is to say about your pokeballs.
No, actually, I’m writing to you to address something I said in my last video that, well--honestly
I didn’t put too much thought into, but definitely, DEFINITELY created waves.
I said that your anime was bad.
And, you know, in my defense, almost everything I loved to watch as a kid is not NEARLY as
charming has NOT AGED WELL.
I’m looking at you, X-Men.
But, you know, I noticed that the miraculous success of Pokemon Go has launched the series
back into the mainstage limelight, and as a result, Netflix has picked the show up.
So I gave it another watch.
And you know what?
I was wrong.
If I’m being entirely honest, Pokemon is actually a pretty genuinely interesting
and entertaining show. And even funny!
Hell, even the western dubbing isn’t bad.
It’s not, you know, great, but it’s totally not terrible.
At least not Sailor Moon terrible.
"I am tuxedo mask"
Of course, watching the show again as an adult ignited my pedantic SCIENCE brain, and I just--I
have a sickness.
I can’t stop.
I CAN’T STOP MYSELF.
I was watching the show, and pikachu blew up a god damned building two episodes in so
I had to ask myself: exactly how fucking strong is Pikachu?
Could a pikachu exist in our real world?
I NEED TO KNOW.
Of course, we’re a video game channel, not an anime channel, so maybe this isn’t the
right thing to talk about.
But fuck you!
I can do what I want!
Plus, there are surprisingly lengthy debates on the Internet about whether or not Ash’s
pikachu itself is particularly special, with most people, generally, concluding that Ash’s
pikachu isn’t all that spectacular--other than spectacularly adorable, that is.
So I think it’s pretty fair to say that, for the most part, in spite of Team Rocket’s
misplaced fascination, Ash’s Pikachu is pretty emblematic of the normal capabilities
of the average, or perhaps even above-average, pikachu in the pokemon universe.
AT LEAST THAT’S THE STORY I’M TELLING MYSELF.
NOW LET’S DO THIS.
Pikachu, like Rattata, is a rodent.
A mouse, though-kinda.
Although, to be entirely honest, it looks a little bit more like a cockatiel than a
mouse, as far as its markings go.
It’s one of the original 151 pokemon, and, actually, is one of the earliest cool pokemon
you could get in Pokemon Red and Blue.
A sparse population of Pikachu inhabit Viridian forest, although they’re incredibly rare,
and most people pass right through the area without ever seeing one.
Pikachus have pretty awesome powers other than being adorable-as-fuck, though.
They’re an electric-type pokemon, and can deliver incredibly potent shock attacks into
their opponents.
The pokedex entry states that they have organs in their cheeks that are capable of, ehem,
“storing electric energy,” and that if sufficient numbers of them are gathered in
one place, they can actually produce god damn lightning storms.
This is bullshit, right?
Well...you’ll just have to wait and see.
Before going into the specifics of pikachu, let’s talk about electricity and animals
in our real world for a second.
There are actual animals in our real world that use electricity as a weapon.
I mean, you probably know this already, but when I was a kid I was convinced that these
things were a fabrication.
I’m talking, of course, of electric eels.
Amusingly enough, electric eels aren’t actually related to eels at all.
They actually belong to the knife fish family.
Regardless, electric eels are fucking incredible.
You see, all animals on our planet actually do produce electricity.
You do.
I do.
My dog does--it’s how our cells work to transfer energy.
We do this through something called the Sodium-Potassium pump process, where a cell pushes three sodium
ions to one side of a membrane and pulls two potassium ions in to the other side.
It does this over and over and over again, which creates an unbalanced charge transfer,
giving the side with more potassium ions a negative charge, and the one with sodium ions
a positive charge.
Fucking cool, right?
Now, in our bodies, this charge is created and dissipated asychronistically, oftentimes
almost as soon as it’s created.
In either case, without this process we wouldn’t be able to flex our muscles, breathe, or even
think.
But while we waste our electric potential powering our oversized brains, electric eels
decided to dump all their attribute points into “badass,” and as a result have bent
this biological process to their fucking wills.
Eels use this same Sodium-Potassium exchange to create a charge in a cell called an electrocyte.
Eels flood these electrocytes with potassium and hold them there until they are ready to
be used.
When an eel is ready to discharge its electricity, the ion gates open, sodium floods into the
electrocyte cells, and let loose a tiny shock of .15 volts.
Of course, that’s just one cell, but an electric eel has THOUSANDS of these cells
all arranged in series and literally wired with nerve cells to a pacemaker nerve cluster
that’s capable of coordinating the release of all of these cells simultaneously, so instead
of a low-voltage charge slowly pissed out of their body, an eel is capable of unleashing
over 600 volts into the surrounding area, fucking murder-fucking every god damned piece
of prey in the vicinity.
It’s an incredible feat of evolution.
So an animal using the powers of SCIENCE to fuck their enemies up isn’t actually unheard of.
So could a mammal do this?
Totally!
Could a pikachu?
Hell yeah!
Of course...well, I mean.
That’s not enough, is it?
“Oh, a pikachu could shock somebody,” what kind of ending to a SCIENCE episode is that?
No, here at the Shoddycast labs, we don’t rest until we have all the answers.
And the answers, say it with me now, are god. Damn. Terrifying.
So we’ve established that animals can shock people, but pokemon don’t just, you know,
accomplish boring everyday feats that can be easily mimicked by sticking a fork in a
live outlet.
No, pokemon are effectively gods that walk among us.
So just how large of a shock is pikachu capable of delivering?
A fucking massive one.
Of course, in the second episode of the Pokemon anime, Pikachu blows up an entire building,
but this actually appears to be due to their electricity igniting volatile gases expelled
by koffing.
The frames of reference are few and far apart, but there are two notable displays of power
that we can absolutely measure perfectly.
In the episode On a Wingull and a Prayer, we see a pikachu blow the god damned top off
of a mountain, and again in the episode Unova’s Survival Crisis a pikachu rips apart a god
damned stone temple.
Jesus Christ.
Okay.
Um.
Shit.
Where to start.
The temple, of course.
Mountains are made up of all sorts of shit--different gradients of rock, minerals, dirt, trees,
fuckall, whereas ancient temples were predominantly constructed from one material in one quarry.
This temple in pokemon most resembles the structures built by the ancient Maya civilization
in Mexico and Central America, which were predominantly comprised of local limestone.
Buried deep in the south of Mexico are the ruins of the giant Mayan city Calakmul, in
which is one of the tallest surviving Mayan temples, uncreatively called “structure
2.”
Calakmul structure two towers above all nearby landmarks at 55 meters and is constructed
with a terrifyingly heavy 3 million kilograms of limestone.
This is our placeholder for the Pokemon temple that’s reduced to rubble by one shock from
a particularly agitated pikachu.
How does electricity even render something this massive structurally unstable?
Simple: thermal shock.
Thermal shock is something a substance experiences when portions of it change temperature dramatically.
A good way to illustrate this while simultaneously irritating anybody you live with is to place
a glass or mug in your freezer overnight, boil some water over the stove, and drop the
glass into the hot water.
The 0 degree glass will come into contact with water that’s 100 degrees, and the surface
of the glass will immediately expand, while the inner portions of the glass will remain
rigid.
This will create internal tension within the glass, which, at these high temperatures,
will overcome the glass’s ability to maintain its shape, and it will fracture.
If you heat the glass up slowly enough, though, this won’t actually happen, because the
material has time to expand and move out of the way of nearby molecules at a much less
alarming rate.
So, easy-peasy, we have to use electricity to heat up the stone until it fractures.
Awesome.
Erm.
How...the fuck would you do that, though?
I mean, electric energy is based on the flow of electrons through a medium, whereas heat
is a form of quantum kinetic energy stored in molecules a la incredibly tiny vibrations--how
on earth do electrons heat something up?
Simple: resistance.
You see, almost every material in the universe, aside from some very interesting and notable
exceptions that aren’t relevant to talk about right now, have electric resistance.
For example: copper has a pretty low electric resistance, especially compared to, oh, I
dunno, rubber, which has an incredibly high electric resistance.
That’s why wires are frequently copper wrapped in rubber--the low resistance of copper allows
electrons to move more freely, whereas the high resistance of rubber keeps the electricity
contained, both for safety but also practical reasons.
That being said, even substances with incredibly high resistance aren’t completely immune
to the flow of electrons.
If you were to pump enough voltage through that same copper wire, eventually it would
override the insulating effect of the rubber.
At the end of the day, resistance is relative.
Everything is capable of transporting electrons, it just depends upon how persistent the electrons
happen to be.
Anyway, whenever an electron passes through something, the substance resists a little
bit, and when this happens, the electric energy that’s held back is transformed into heat
energy.
This is exactly how things like space heaters and electric stovetops work.
Electricity is transported through substances with a high-ish electric resistance, and the
electrons impart heat energy into the medium, creating heat which is used to warm the space
up or cook food.
In order to figure out how our Pikachu reduces a limestone temple to rubble, we need to know
four things: the total mass of the temple, and the specific heat capacity, thermal shock
parameter, and the electric resistance of limestone.
Not all of these things are readily available in your average textbook, but here at the
Shoddycast we STOP AT NOTHING, and thankfully, there’s a very small-yet-detailed segment
of Scientists that have devoted a lot of time and energy to studying limestone.
Limestone is an incredible material, actually.
Limestone is a sedimentary rock, which means it’s formed by various particles that have
been smushed together by terrestrial pressure.
Specifically, limestone is formed by the skeletal remains of ancient coral, shellfish, and other
marine life.
Limestone has really interesting thermal properties in that it’s actually quite resistant to
thermal shock and fracturing.
This is because its specific make up of Calcium Carbonate allows it to easily dissipate heat
energy, and it’s also much softer than a lot of other rock, which allows it to expand
when exposed to high heats very quickly.
For this reason, limestone is used in the production of steel and high-end ceramics.
That being said, it’s not immune to thermal shock by any means, and if you heat it up
by over 800 kelvin very quickly, it’s guaranteed to fracture.
Remember earlier I said that thermal fracturing occurs when one section of a material expands
from heat faster than cooler locations--this means that in order to crumble our temple,
we don’t actually have to heat all of it.
40% will do.
Given a specific heat capacity of .907, that means that our pikachu needs to impart a whopping
1.04 gigajoules of energy into this monolith almost instantly.
Limestone has a resistance of Ten MILLION ohms.
Plugging in all our numbers, this means that our pikachu is blasting this temple with the
power of Zeus himself with over 14 BILLION volts and a current of nearly 1.5 thousand
amps.
This is quite literally like producing a fucking lightning bolt, like, a real one, which has
a higher amperage but also a much lower voltage, ranging in the 1 billions.
The incredibly high voltage is necessary for this current of 1000 amps to actually travel
through the temple and impart its energy directly into the stone, causing it to crumble and
shatter beneath the olympian might of a fucking mouse.
Keep in mind, to produce a real lightning bolt, we need fucking storm systems that extend
into the god damn stratosphere and cover miles of ground in order to build up the energy
to strike the ground--and even then, this pikachu is capable of pushing this electricity
THROUGH STONE, not just at it.
These temples can withstands actual comparatively low voltage thunderstorms, but a fucking cartoon
mouse can wreck their shit.
And remember our electric eel, which produces a current using electrocyte cells and the
sodium-potassium pump?
Yeah, fuck, in order to do this, pikachu would nearly 10 billion electrocyte cells aligned
in a series, compared to the electric eel’s several thousand--but even more terrifying,
pikachu would have to displace over 500 kilograms, or over one THOUSAND pounds of electrolytes
in order to produce this current--in order to maintain this electrolyte balance, pikachu
would have to have as many electrolytes in his system as 6.2 MILLION bottles of gatorade--that’s
over half as many as are bought-and-sold in the entire United States per day.
And that’s just for ONE shock.
For more than that, we’re talking about a pikachu that should resemble a fucking snorlax
more than a giant rodent.
That should be one fat motherfucking pokemon!
FUCK.
No wonder he won’t go inside a pokeball--he’s not only afraid of quantum murder, he probably
can’t even fucking fit.
Jesus Christ.
Sincerely, Austin
P.S.
Hi. It’s me again. Austin.
Here to talk to you about our organization: Stop Killing Pokemon.
Stop Killing Pokemon was originally founded to spread the pokeball-free lifestyle, but
has expanded into all forms of pokemon abuse and death, including electrolyte overextension
by electric-type pokemon, forced self-destruction of voltorbs, and the telescoping of flying
pokemon spines when they’re coerced into flying trainers across the country on their
backs.
Pokemon are living, breathing creatures, and our culture has to join the 21st century and
stop this horrendous treatment of our fellow living creatures.
Except for Shellders.
Shellders are just the worst.
If you want to know more about protecting pokemon near you, head on over to www.stopkillingpokemon.org.
Stopkillingpokemon.org was created using Squarespace, which made it incredibly easy to make an attractive,
professional-and-modern looking website.
With membership comes a free, custom domain name, like StopKillingPokemon.org, and adding
a storefront to buy potions and ethers to care for your downtrodden pokemon is incredibly
easy.
They have gorgeous templates that make it a snap to make a website, either for your
poor electrically-deformed pokemon, or for other things, like a photography studio or
bakery.
If you want to try Squarespace, head on over to squarespace.com/shoddy, or use the promo
code “shoddy” for a 10% discount.
All proceeds may or may not go to helping poor pokemon in an area near you, and help
spread the word about the pokeball-free lifestyle.
Oh!
And head on over to our twitch channel, twitch.tv/shoddycast.
Last week was our first week of the Shoddycast amateur tournament, and we’re taking a week
off to get schedules aligned, so RIGHT NOW I’m going to be streaming Competitive Overwatch.
In my new apartment.
Which is very echoey.
Whatever.
It just means I sound like God now.
Awesome.
That’s twitch.tv/shoddycast.
Come hang out with me while I throw my zen balls into peoples’ faces.