Theorizing: the science of nitpicking,
deconstructing, and reconstructing
plot lines. However, it is not an all-powerful art.
It is impossible to create a theory out of nothing. if one wishes to gather evidence for a theory,
all arguments of "it's just a movie, bro" must be thrown aside.
This is the law of "of course this wasn't what the creator intended, but damn it, were exploring it anyway".
The basis of all theorizing. In accordance with this law there was a taboo among theorists:
Anime. Anime theories are strictly forbidden.
For what theory would not anger the die-hard fans? Perhaps the theory
calculating the worth of a human soul.
Nah, that'll probably get people mad, too.
(Music)
Hello, Internet! And welcome to film theory!
The only show on YouTube that can ruin your childhood faster than a botched attempt at bringing
your dead mother back to life.
You know, it's been a while since we last talked about Full Metal Alchemist (FMA),
and a lot has changed in the world of anime since
we corrected Ed and Al's biochemistry homework.
A brand new season of Attack on Titan has come and gone,
My Hero Academia has stolen our hearts, and Naruto has a...
Kid now? Apparently? Man, life moves fast. I mean one moment
you're in school, wearing a metal headband, making hand signs,
and running around with your hands behind your back even though scientifically speaking,
the drag that creates would only make you slower,
and the next, your old buddy Naruto is a dad.
Makes you feel kind of old, doesn't it?
Makes you kind of worry about the inevitability of death?
Well, it's that kind of existential crisis that makes a guy want to pursue immortality.
And anime has plenty of potential solutions: vampirism, wishing on the Dragon Balls,
But it's Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood,
The 2009 reboot of Full Metal Alchemist that more closely follows the story of the original comics,
that has the solution to immortality that I want to explore today.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, strap yourselves in because today it is my goal to
calculate the strength of a human soul.
And be warned, because there are some pretty intense spoilers for FMA: Brotherhood up ahead.
9 different characters in Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood are functionally immortal: the seven homunculi,
artificial humans named after the seven deadly sins, their creator, Father, and von Hohenheim,
the dear old dad of our two heroes Edward and Alphonse Elric.
Now. all of these characters can and do in fact die in the series.
but only when someone goes out of their way to kill them. and even then it takes a lot of effort.
The homunculi are shown to be able to regenerate their entire bodies instantaneously
and without anyone trying to murder them, it's implied
that they could live for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years.
So what's the secret to their impossibly long lives? Well, each of their bodies holds what's known as a
Philosopher's Stone. A magical item that amplifies an alchemists transmutation abilities.
The Elric brothers actually find out what it takes to make one of these stones pretty early on in the series.
Episode 7. But the truth that they uncover is pretty horrifying
"The main ingredient for a Philosopher's Stone is human life."
"In order to manufacture even a single stone, you have to make multiple human sacrifices."
The Philosopher's Stone is people!
More specifically, each Philosopher's Stone is made from human souls. Sacrificed,
extracted, and refined to the delicious red liquid. Throughout the series,
we see the Stone fuel the homunculi's superhuman physical abilities
and regenerative powers, and also allow for alchemical transmutations that produce more
matter than goes into them. To put it another way:
"Those souls were reduced to mere energy."
So what the Philosopher's Stone is, essentially, is a
supercharged alchemists battery running on human souls, and if we can figure out how much raw
energy that battery stores, we can figure out how much
energy each human soul contains. And from there, calculate how many human souls it would
take to put a few extra 100 years on a little MatPat's clock.
Maybe then I'll finally have time to watch all of One Piece.
To figure this out, we're gonna need two things.
One, a way of comparing a philosopher's stone to a real-world source of energy and two, a measure of
exactly how many human souls the stone contains.
Fortunately for us theorists, FMA: brotherhood gives us the chance
to calculate both. In episode 19, one of the homunculi, Lust,
stabs Colonel Roy Mustang in the gut and leaves him for dead.
Surprise, surprise - Roy actually isn't dead
and sneaks up on her later, burning her to death with a broken lighter and a transmutation circle carved
into the back of his own hand. She tries to fight back via repeated regenerations
but eventually succumbs to the flames. What a casual viewer might see is one of the most exciting and badass
moments of the show, is a moment I see as the key to this entire theory.
As I established in my last episode about Full Metal Alchemist, human bodies in this
fictional universe are made of the same stuff as human bodies in our universe.
They give us the explicit formula in the show and it matches real life - one for one.
So if we can figure out how much energy is contained within a human body, we can extrapolate from there
how much energy it would take Lust to regenerate that body after Mustang
serves it up extra-crispy style. AND, based on how many times she gets burned before being completely
roasted, we can figure out exactly how much energy is contained within her Philosopher's Stone.
Then from there, divide it by the number of souls in the stone and voila,
we have calculated the amount of energy one human soul contains.
Isn't math great?
So I'm gonna put a brief pause on this scene and hop over to figuring out how many souls are in Lust's stone.
To answer that question, we need to look at the source of the homunculi: Father.
Man who looks suspiciously like the Elric's own father von Hohenheim. The reason for that resemblance as we
learn from the flashback in episode 40,
is that father was originally a homunculus made from Hohenheim's blood back in Xerxes.
Xerxes is a legendary Kingdom whose population died
mysteriously in a single night 400 years before the start of the series, and that
little incident happened because father decided to transmute the entire country's population to make
two Philosopher's stones. One for himself, and one to von Hohenheim to repay him for giving him life.
And jeez, does that ever make me feel self-conscious about my thank-you gifts. I mean, cards? Flowers?
Apparently if I really loved my mom,
I'd get her immortality at the hands of countless screaming tortured souls of a dead civilization.
Immortality - the gift that keeps on giving... Literally.
Well, I might have spoken too soon. How this isn't the right word here
I mean, I was worried that I'd have to make estimates based on historical precedence and census data
and the few images that we had of the nation of Xerxes,
but the anime actually did all the counting for me.
"It took time, but I managed to learn the name of
every last Soul. Five hundred thirty six thousand three hundred twenty-nine.
The people trapped inside of me"
Which is impossible, just by the way?
"Dunbar's Number", proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, is the theoretical cognitive limit
to the number of people with whom a person can maintain a stable relationship.
other anthropologists have pegged this average number to be around 300,
based on different factors. Well, regardless of how many, it is it is a far cry from five hundred and thirty six
thousand people! There are limits to how much information the human mind can hold but I suppose
that's not accounting for a magically enhanced, soul infused minds.
And the show did help me by giving me a hard number to work with, so...
I guess I can let it slide this one time. This time, anime... This time...
Anyway, as father himself declares in the aftermath of the transmutation:
"The voices of all the people in this country who were offered in exchange for your immortality..."
"Well, half of their lives were for me, actually."
Which clearly tells us that exactly
the same number of souls are trapped inside Father as are trapped inside Hohenheim.
Now, we know by watching the anime that father created the seven homunculi by extracting
the seven deadly sins from each of those five hundred thousand plus souls contained within him.
It was all part of a big effort to purge himself of all his negative desires and emotions.
But obviously, he still has a lot of those souls left inside.
I mean, after all, he's using his own souls to fuel the alchemy of every person in the country.
AND, he's shown to be much more powerful than any of his children.
if Father purged himself of all those Souls' vices,
that would obviously leave their virtues.
Going by the same biblical principles, just like there are seven deadly sins,
pride, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, greed, and sloth,
they're contrasted against the seven heavenly virtues: Faith, hope, charity,
fortitude, justice, temperance, and prudence.
Not nearly as fun or as exciting... Now, obviously every person is gonna
have a different amount of each of those traits, and with a large enough sample size, and I'd say
500,000 is certainly a large enough size,
they're likely to all even out at the end.
So, we can assume that Father's stone is divided 14 ways across seven sins and seven virtues.
And with father keeping the virtues, he has 50% of the total souls.
That means each homunculus contains exactly 1/14th of the souls that Father started with.
Clearly this guy was a bit smarter than Voldemort when it came to dividing up his soul into seven vessels.
As such, we can conclude that Lust's Philosopher's stone contains
about one fourteenth of those 536,329 souls, or about
38,309.2 (souls).
Now back to the scene where she dies.
We can count that Mustang lit her on fire nine times before she completely turns to ash
so that means each explosion is burning through
38, 309 divided by 9, or roughly 4256 souls with each blast.
But now what do we get to the energy contained in each of those Souls? Well, the answer lies in how she
regenerates. At first glance, you might assume that the homunculi operate like Cell from
Dragon Ball Z, who, true to his name, could regenerate his entire body from a single cell through replication.
That would make some amount of sense.
The energy in the Philosopher's Stone could be used as fuel for rapid cell growth,
but it's not consistent with other ways that we see the stones used throughout the series.
Time and time again,
we see Philosopher's stones used by alchemists to add mass to objects, and even change their very nature.
Turning things like wood into stone, or flowers into crystals. New matter just can't come outta nowhere.
That would violate the laws of physics, or in Full Metal Alchemist language,
it would violate the law of equivalent exchange.
"To obtain, something of equal value must be lost."
So what must be happening here is that the energy inside of the stone
is being converted directly into physical matter,
in accordance with Einstein's theory of mass energy equivalence.
Now, if you're not familiar with the most famous scientist ever,
Oh and hey, welcome. You must be new to the Theorist family
because I talk about this guy a lot. On your way out make sure you hit that
subscribe button to transmute yourself from a viewer to a subscriber.
That way you get notified of all the other cool anime related theories that I do on the channel.
ANYWAY,
even the loyalists of theorists could probably do with a quick refresher, so aside from his goofy haircut,
the thing that Albert Einstein is best known for is proving that matter and energy are actually the same thing.
Einstein's most frequently quoted formula, e = MC^2, is what allows us to convert from one to the other.
It's not unlike how alchemists change the form of matter.
Going based on the formula, the energy contained in an object is equal to its mass,
or weight in kilograms,
multiplied by the speed of light and meters per second squared.
Now, the speed of light is pretty darn huge,
so this formula gives you some pretty crazy big numbers, and it's no accident.
It takes an insane amount of energy to hold the atoms of an object together and when that energy is released,
well, that is literally what a nuclear bomb is.
Since the Philosopher's Stone is using alchemy to rebuild Lust's body out of pure soul energy,
figuring out how much he expends to regenerate as as simple as plugging half our weight into the formula.
I say half since only part of her body is getting burned with each of Mustangs blasts.
That leaves us to calculate her weight, which, honestly, is pretty easy to piece together.
Lust doesn't have an official weight, but her official height
according to manga charts is 5 feet 7 inches.
An average healthy weight for a woman that size with a medium frame
is 140 pounds or 63 kilograms.
And Lust looks, um...
She looks uhhhhhh...
She looks healthy, to me.
So, we'll go with that for our estimates.
Plugging in 50% of that weight and then solving the equation
gives us an energy equivalent of 2, 786, 141 terajoules.
Now that number probably doesn't mean a whole lot to you, so let me translate.
That's the equivalent of about twelve large Hydrogen bombs going off, and with that sentence,
Kim jong-un suddenly decided to subscribe to the Film Theorists.
Go figure.
To get the energy value of ONE soul,
we just divide that by the number of souls lust expands to regenerate.
4256.6, which gives us 654 terajoules per soul,
which is the equivalent of about a hundred and fifty six kilotons of TNT!
Or about ten times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
To put that in perspective, based on the rules of Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood,
you could use the power contained in one soul to create an explosion big enough to destroy half of Manhattan.
One soul. So in retrospect, I guess I was a little bit off
in my last theory. In addition to all the component elements of a human body they were missing,
the Elric brothers were apparently short a few pounds of uranium in their transmutation circle.
Which, if you think about it would have cost them an arm and a leg anyway.
G-geddit? Cuz-cuz Edward is missing an arm and a leg.
Edward: "WHATS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN!?"
Gee, Ed, it's just an expression. There's no need to get short with ME!
"Damn it. I told you before, don't call me SHOOORRT!"
Ha, ha! It's too easy!
But all that math still doesn't get us to the immortality
that I wanted to get at the beginning of this episode.
The energy of one soul obviously isn't enough for eternal life and with 38,000 Souls,
the homunculi still died pretty easily, all things considered.
If we want to be immortal like
Like Hohenheim and Father, we're gonna need the same amount of energy that they have.
To find the energy of all the souls inside Father. We need to multiply the energy of one soul by
which gives us the whopping number of 351 exajoules.
That is five times as much electricity as the entire world generates in a single year!
Which is a lot of energy, but don't get me wrong, it's still totally attainable
You'd only need about half the world's uranium reserves,
and you'd also have to figure out how alchemy works, too, I guess?
But, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it...
So there you have it loyal theorists,
we have proven definitively the value of a human soul isn't some magical unquantifiable thing,
but it's still way too rich for my non-immortal blood, so guess I'd start building that dragon radar...
But, hey, that's just a theory:
A FILM THEORY.
And-
cut.
(Music)