Hello Internet, welcome to Game Theory!
Can you finish watching this episode without touching a coin?
No.
No you cannot.
You know, over the years we've explored the Super Marioverse from a number of different angles.
We've looked at the sciences, from the biology and psychology
to the psychics and astronomy
We've examined the humanities!
Through Mario's communist leadings and the economics of the Mushroom Kingdom's real estate market
We've looked at the heroes, the villains, the side characters
and the blurry lines that divide them all!
However, after all those years of analysis, one question remains:
Well, actually a lot of questions remain
I could dig deeper and deeper into this series forever
But let's just say one question remains, for dramatic effect
ONE QUESTION REMAINS
A question about the single most important item in any of these games
The driving force that compels Mario to go forth on adventure after adventure
Today, we're looking at the primary MacGuffins of the series,
The Power Star
Or, more accurately, the Power Moon
Since, Mario Odyssey is the most recent and the most topical game.
Seriously, though! Why is Mario collecting these things?
What exactly do they do?
In past games it was always a bit unclear
Their power lets you...
open doors?
Okay...
For being such an overly elaborate locking system,
it didn't really stop Bowser, did it?
Super Mario Sunshine, they make the sun shine brighter.
Awesome!
I'm glad the random shine sprite I found,
hurling my body through your trans dimensional pachinko machine, got you a better tan.
But its Galaxy and even more so in Odyssey,
that their purpose finally becomes clear.
As expected by their names, Power Moons and Power Stars are used as fuel
In Galaxy the Grand Stars charge up Rosalina's space station.
In Super Mario Odyssey,
the literal butt ton of Moons that you collect are the gas that enables you to chase princess Peach from kingdom to kingdom.
Which then prompts the question
Just how powerful are the Power moons?
If these moons and truly fill an airship's gas tank,
how much punch does each one pack?
For the lengths that Mario goes to collect these things,
they must be pretty darn good right?
Right?!
Oh ho ho ho
Dear sweet summer theorists,
you don't know the half of it.
But you will, in a little over ten minutes.
So, how do we determine how much energy is contained in each individual Power Moon?
Well, my first impulse was to see how many Moons it took the Odyssey to travel any set amount of distance.
The problem is, the number you collect in the game doesn't correspond to actual flight power.
For example, Mario only needs five Moons to travel from the Cascade Kingdom to the Sand Kingdom.
But he needs twenty to reach the Snow Kingdom. (???)
It's... arbitrary
And then once a kingdom's visited Mario can just return as often as he wants without needing additional moons.
Uh...
Conservation of energy much guys?
Imagine if you car required an increasing amount of gas for each new city that you visited,
but then you could return to the previous cities without burning any fuel.
Forget plumbing,
Mario's got himself a future in perpetual motions machines.
Lucky for us though, Moons are shown as a power source in not just one, but two different locations.
Sure, there's the Odyssey spaceship,
but in a mission mid way through the game we see them as a fuel source in the bowels of the Metro Kingdom.
A mid game mission requires Mario to fix the power plant that drives New Donk City and,
as you can see here Full Power Moons enter the reactor,
and empty Power Moons are dispensed on the other side.
Timing it out, this generator ends up consuming
one Power Moon per second
Now, I don't know about you, but this is a weird scene for me.
In a game where, you're traveling the world looking for anyway possible to nab these up to rescue your kidnapped girlfriend,
It's uncomfortable to see so many Moons just sitting there,
right out of reach.
And then getting devoured so quickly by the reactors.
Screw New Donk City, Mario!
Break that pipe, grab yourself the 124 moons you need,
(Seems like they have plenty to spare)
and go save your girlfriend.
Talk about speed runs, the game would be over in a little over 2 minutes.
Anyway, we're told my Mayor Pauline at the start of the mission,
that the power plant in necessary for the kingdom's festival.
Now that's a bit unclear.
Is it only generating electricity for the extra lights at the festival?
Is this the only powerplant in the city?
Does it fuel the section of New Donk City that we play through?
Or is it responsible for this whole city that we see,
surrounding the play area?
Unfortunately Nintendo, for some reason ,
didn't program functioning electric meters for every building in the game
So we're going to have to make a few assumptions here.
First, let's assume this is the only power plant in New Donk City.
Now we know for a fact that that can't be true,
as prior to this mission we see devices that are actively using electricity.
Including stop lights, marquees and even the stage lights inside of city hall.
And when we first get to the kingdom, we see the entire city lit up in the night sky.
So, something has to be giving these building the juice.
That said though, we can balance out that first assumption,
by making a second one.
That the New Donk power plant that we repair only provides energy for the main elevated section of the city that we play through,
as well as the two side areas to the east and the south.
Now, why am I including the side areas to the east and the south,
but not the one to the west?
Well, notice how power cables connect the main area to the side platforms on east and the south but not to the western one.
And how does that balance things out?
Well think about it, we're saying its the only power plant in the city,
but we know that there must be at least one more.
That would be over estimating the amount of power this one is generating.
But by restricting the area it's giving power too
to only the playable area of New donk
and ignoring the out skirt territories we see in the distance,
we're under estimating its potential energy output.
So in total, it should give us a reasonable approximation.
With all that out of the way,
we can now determine an estimate of the energy contained within each moon,
by calculating the total electoral consumption of New Donk City,
the area of New Donk City can be calculated relativity easily
by using some basic geometry in the Luigi's balloon world minigame
as a measuring stick.
Doing this we learn that the main elevated area measures
36,700 square meters,
while the eastern platform measures 1,090 square meters
and the southern platform measure 2,025 square meters.
In total the explorable area covers about
39,800 square meters
or around 10 acres of land.
That's about the size of two big city blocks in New York City.
And speaking of New York I'm going to go out on a limb and say that
New Donk city has a similar power consumption density
as the real life New York city.
Think about it, New Donk is clearly inspired by New York.
If the names weren't obvious enough,
look no further then the New Donk City hall,
which is modelled after the Empire State Building.
Both cities feature a relatively even mix of sky scrapers,
high rise developments, industrial buildings, and public parks.
And they even have a similar population density,
with around 10,000 residents per square kilometer.
and you might think that I'm making that up, but I'm not.
I put my census taking skill to the test and counted how many residents are in New Donk City, and the math checks out.
And I point this out specifically because I know a lot of people out there,
give us crap when we make mistakes
but I hope you realise how hard we're trying here,
we literally counted everyone in a fictional city in order to scale to the population density of a real world local
all for the sake of measuring the fictional energy output
of a fictional power generator utilising fictional moon fuel.
If that doesn't deserve a subscribe right now, I don't know what does.
And it gets even more ridiculous.
Thanks to New York City's local law 84
Mayor's office of long term planning and sustainability releases an estimate
of energy consumption every year.
According to that data New York city as whole consumes
one quadrillion British Thermal Units
or about 1.055 Exajoules of energy each year.
But of course none of that means anything.
Just like when we deal with force siting of a big number of BTU's
tells us literally zero.
So lets simplify things a little bit shall we.
We can convert those dumb meaningless number into
33.36 Gigawatts
Which is a number that means something to me because
it's 27 times the power required by the flux capacitor to travel though time
in Back to the Future
(1.21 Gigawatts!!)
So New York City every year is using 27 times the energy needed
to break the laws of physics.
Sounds like it might be time to go green there New York.
In all seriousness though, 1 Gigawatt is the equivalent of
a hundred million L.E.D. lightbulbs
so the city is using 3.3 billion L.E.D. lightbulbs of energy per year
According to the U.S. census bureau New York City has an area of
783.8 Square kilometres
So dividing the total energy consumption by the total land area
provides us with the average power density of the city
Which comes out to be
42.56 Watts per Square Meter.
Multiply that by the area of New Donk City and we finally arrive at
an estimate of the cities total energy consumption of
1.7 Megawatts of power used by New Donk City per year.
Again, meaningless number.
So let's try to turn them into something that makes a little bit more sense.
The problem with watts, and the reason no one can read their own electric bill,
is that they're a rate, they measure energy consumption over time.
I mean seriously if you look at your electric bill
or you buy an appliance and it's like
this refrigerator uses 200 watts of electricity per year
You're like, sure I guess 200 doesn't sound that big
it's not like a million, so I'll take it. (??)
But what that watt number really means is that that refrigerator
uses 200 joules of energy per second that its turned on and plugged in.
And you're like
wooo, hey now!
That seems like a lot of energy
200 joules per second
maybe my Go-Gurt doesn't need to be that cold, you know.
But before you start defrosting the thing, turns out its not that much energy.
In fact the energy in a single calorie of food
is over 4000 joules.
So the energy needed to power that refrigerator is nothing
compared needed from the food that exists inside of it.
So, if joules hold that much energy, what does that mean for our Power Moons?
Well, they're still stuck in useless watts over here
So, if we're going to make anything of them we got to convert them
to a more useful unit
So a watt equals a joule per second, right?
And it just so happens that New Donk City consumes moons
at a rate of exactly one per second.
Which makes the math really easy
1.7 Megawatts of energy equals
1.7 Megajoules of energy per second
times 1 second just equals our total number of
drum roll please
*Drum roll sound effects
1.7 Megajoules of energy per Moon
Now again, that may seem like a lot
It's got the word mega in it so it must be good right?
But going back to our calorie example 1.7 Megajoules
is around the amount of energy that you get from eating
A medium Fries at McDonalds.
Carrying it even further to power your own body
for a 2000 calorie per day diet,
you'd need to consume 5 Power Moons every day just to get enough energy.
So, I may of been predicting that Power Moons would have
the energy of a nuclear bomb at the beginning of this video.
But all they really have is the power do is give you a nuclear tummy ache.
It's no wonder Nintendo literally crammed these things everywhere.
Here we all were thinking this was some sort of special collectible.
When in actually they are no more powerful then a candy bar or two.
Throw another 500 Snickers bars into the Odyssey kids
we're flying to the moon.
But this seriously can't be right.
Right??
It is such a low power level.
It's under 9000!
Which is why I wanted to verify this math using a different technique,
by trying to figure out the composition of the Power Moon.
You see in version 1.2 of Mario Odyssey
Nintendo added a neon filter to the game,
Now that might not seem like such a big deal.
Just some cool filter to make everything look like Earthbound's Moonside,
which we all know was one of the coolest levels in all of gaming history.
But if you dive a little deeper into that neon filter and how it works,
you discover something that's pretty interesting.
Take a look at what happens when I point the in game camera at the sun,
and then turn on that neon filter.
For some reason the sun appears blue,
rather then yellow or orange
Why would that be?
There is actually a shocking reason.
You see in real life, scientists use a tool called a spectrometer
to determine the composition of light emitters.
Spectrometers work by using a lens to filter a light though a prism
Which then separates the light into individuals wavelengths
across the electromagnetic spectrum.
This tool is super cool and super useful because each chemical element
emits light at a unique frequency when it's excited.
These unique wavelengths are called its spectral signature
Because just like a real signature on a document
they are unique to whatever produced them.
For example if we have a far away star we can compare
Its spectrometer reading with the known wavelengths of the elements
we have here on earth, to determine what elements
that star is made out of
Which then leads us back to Super Mario Odyssey
Why would the sun in the game produce this specific shade of blue or teal?
Well many stars including our sun are made of mostly hydrogen
And if you look at the spectral signature of Hydrogen
one of the most prominent wavelengths produced is
486.1 nanometres
a wavelength of light that produces close to the
exact shade of teal that we're looking at
in the Odyssey's neon filter
Which honestly is Mind Blowing
I mean think about it, someone at Nintendo actively programmed
the neon filter to turn light blue when it was directed at the sun.
Either this is the randomest piece of Mario trivia ever found
and is a complete coincidence,
or it was intentionally added to the game as a nod to real world science.
Now, let's look at the Moons!
In General when you look at any Power Moon the neon filter
primarily shows you the color the corresponds to each kingdom
Green for the Sand Kingdom
Pink for the Lake Kingdom
Blue for the Wooded Kingdom
and so on
However the moons also are surrounded by these colored sparks
And it makes sense that these sparks related in some way
to the composition of the Power Moons,
because the colours appear consistent
regardless of what Kingdom they're found in.
So using the neon filter, I took a screenshot of a few of the moons
surrounded by these sparks and then uploaded those photos onto a computer.
I then used an eye dropper tool to find the specific hues
of the 4 colours that you see emanating outside of the moon
Specifically red yellow green and blue
with wavelengths of 700 nanometres
585 nanometres
500 nanometres
and 485 nanometres respectively.
And wouldn't you know it, this almost perfectly aligns with
the 4 largest emission signatures of the element helium
Now Helium itself is a noble gas
And therefore it doesn't form any significant bonds that could hold energy.
That said an isotope of Helium could.
Specifically Helium III
Now the interesting thing about Helium III it's very rare here on earth,
but it's believed to be abundant on the moon.
More importantly its been theorized as a possible source of nuclear fusion.
In Super Mario Odyssey, Cappy hints that Power Moons
and Power Stars are made of the same materials
saying, "Apparently Power Moons come in other shapes, I had no idea."
This would explain why power stars in Super Mario Galaxy
form a sun in the centre of the common observatory.
In order to harness the true power of the Helium III
that exist within the Power Stars and by proxy the Power Moons
they have to undergo a fusion reaction.
And that's also the reason they're so weak in the Metro Kingdom
Humans don't understand fusion,
but future space princess Rosalina over here, does.
Meaning that there may just be more power hidden inside these things
then we originally thought.
We just need to unlock the power of fusion to get there.
Until then we're just going to keep using them as glorified keys.
BUT HEY-- (Subtitles By loyal theorist: Matthew Bagas)
Before we end today's episode I have a quick announcement, that's your chance to win some new never before seen merch prototypes.
Early edition of theory wear, that's coming out later this year.
You will literally be the only person in the world to have these things.
So, today's episode was obviously a theory. Right?
No big shocker there.
A theory that has made it all the way through the production.
But not all our ideas for episodes do, in fact,
a lot of topics that we try to make into theories, just don't have enough there for a full episode.
Either they aren't long enough for a full episode or they go off the rails at a certain point, in all the best ways possible, I swear.
So, why am I telling you all this?
Well, it's because of our sponsor for today's episode,
TikTok
Yes, as of today I am officially on the TikTok app. (Link to download is in the top line of the description)
You can find me @MATPATGT
M-A-T-P-A-T-G-T
And sure most of you probably know TikTok as the place where pewds (SUBSCRIBE TO PEWDIEPIE) finds all the cringe he reacts to,
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Giving you short riddles and brain teasers to solve to test your mental metal.
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Game Theory Shorties? (Nope, try again)
Q-QUICK TAKES
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Flex my musical theater skills, after all these years.
Embarrass the theorist team by forcing them to dance with me.
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Which, I gotta be honest, is actually freeing from a content standpoint.
Each platform has its own culture and feel, and TikTok, quite honestly, just embraces all the fun, dumb, off the wall stuff that the internet was built for.
Which is pretty great for someone like me who usually just takes fun stuff and make it way too serious for its own good.
So, when they asked if I wanted to give TikTok a try, I said "Yeah! Let's do this."
So download the app and join me on my fun little experiment.
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Just like it is on twitter and instagram.
Like I said, I'm experimenting with a lot of different things, gaming related, game theory related, and otherwise.
So, if you like this channel, I guarantee that you're gonna get a kick of what you're seeing me do over there.
And to commemorate all the new stuff that's happening over at TikTok, two of my new followers on the app will win themselves those new never before seen merch prototypes I mentioned earlier.
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That makes you, literally the only people in the world who will have these things, period, ever, and stop.
So, come on over for your chance to win the merch, and stay for the riddles, musical theater serenades, dancing, GT Quick Takes, and whatever other cringe I can come up with.
Download is in the top line of the description, search for @MATPATGT. (Subtitles By loyal theorist: Matthew Bagas)
I'll see you over there. (Subtitles By loyal theorist: Matthew Bagas)