Film Theory: The Rat That Beat Thanos! (Marvel Endgame)

(rat noises) Hello Internet! Welcome to Film Theory! The program that doesn't ask you to sit there watching three hours of content, without going to the bathroom. I mean, don't get me wrong, you are more than welcome, in fact, I ENCOURAGE YOU to watch three straight hours of content on this channel. YouTube would love me for it and I would be rewarded with unparalleled riches. But, unlike "Endgame", if you need to rush to the most sought-after throne in the universe, with me you have the advantage of letting my soft voice accompany you on your phone. While you're sitting there, doing whatever you're doing.

So, there was a lot to unpack in Avengers Endgame, and while I have a lot of ideas about future theories, most of them involve time travel, or a deep 21-movie story, or finding out what size clothing the Hulk-Banner combo wears. , because his sweaters go far beyond hoarse. Where do you get those things from? Half of the population disappeared. There aren't enough people around to custom-make your new monstrous figure. So today I wanted to start with something a little more basic, something a little more fundamental, to the whole premise of this movie. The fact that it's RIDICULOUS.

You heard me right, the idea of ​​this movie happening in the first place seems impossible to me. And no, I'm not talking about time travel, I'm not talking about the battles in the Doctor Strange portal, or Tony Stark inventing time travel in less than 5 minutes! No, I'm not talking about his miraculous rescue in the middle of space, or Thor becoming the Santa Claus of existential crisis. I'm talking about THIS moment right here. A rat walking on a keyboard and freeing Ant-Man. When he was sitting in the theater and I saw this scene, I thought, "Are you kidding me?" "You expect me to believe this?" I don't care how much you like the movie, is this how Scott Lang gets out of the Quantum Realm?

I mean, I agree with everything else in this movie. Marvel, I can't get enough of character reunions! A visit to Thanos' retirement home? Beautiful. Poetic deaths of the main character? Distressing! But you're telling me that all of that, everything we see in the entirety of "Endgame" is based on a random rat, stepping on a random button in some parking lot? And I'm not exaggerating in any way, I'm not the one trying to make this sound more important than promoting this episode is. Don't forget, pressing a button with a single rat is the ONLY thing that leads to the return of Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man.

For those of you who forgot, he has been to the Quantum Realm, a type of interdimensional space. time soup for over 5 years before this movie. This rat stumbling into this car is the only reason he was rescued from space-time exile. Which, in turn, is the only reason he introduces the idea of ​​time travel as a possible solution to Snappening. This is the only reason Tony Stark and the rest of the Avengers get involved in the first place, the only reason he and Captain America bury the hatchet, the only reason they manage to travel back in time, recover the stones and save the universe. and all those who were photographed.

It literally starts HERE. And only HERE. You got to be kidding! This entire 22-movie franchise, the epic conclusion to more than a decade of movies, ultimately hinges on one act of rodent randomness that saves half the living universe. So instead of being upset about this, which, honestly, was what I was when I left the theater after "Endgame," I decided to put my

theory

where my mouth was and find out if this was even remotely possible in the real world. What are the chances of that rat stepping on that panel? "And when you stop and think about it, it shouldn't seem so strange" (I say to myself trying to justify my own self-imposed insanity).

But seriously, this entire movie is built around the whole idea of ​​the Avengers having a 1 in 14 million chance of

beat

ing Thanos. This entire franchise is just one huge statistical puzzle. "Endgame" is about that one in 14 million chance of winning when the odds are definitely not in the heroes' favor. But I'm telling you, going into this

theory

, I don't think these probabilities have much to do with time travel, the Infinity Stones, and intergalactic battles, and Tony Stark taking the Infinity Stones. No, I think 99.9% of them are wasted trying to get a single rat to step on a damn button.

But surely, let's find out, shall we? The first question is: Why aren't you subscribed to this channel? We cover ridiculous questions like this all the time. Secondly, however, and more specifically: how do you calculate the probabilities of something like this happening? This is like the worst Google interview question in the world. And to be fair, as we move forward, we have to make a couple of assumptions that will allow us to come to some conclusions and hopefully finish this episode in less than 20 minutes. So let's start with the rats. Obviously there are tons of them in a city like San Francisco, where Scott Lang lives, but we'll need to estimate how many there are in the area around his truck, how much ground they can cover, and also the odds of any of them stepping on them. a particular location over the course of 5 years, because remember, that's how long Scott waits to be rescued before the magic moment happens, and the entire movie plot can begin.

Fortunately for Scott and the rest of the universe, San Francisco is completely overrun by rats. This is not a joke. In 2018, there were news reports that people were having to wait weeks to get an exterminator, because there were so many rats and there weren't enough people to get them all. In fact, San Francisco is the fourth most rat-infested city in the United States! I guess number one is Washington DC: BA-DOOM, CHING! Political humor, ladies and gentlemen! Get in the water, politicians! In New York, a 2014 survey estimated that there are about a quarter as many rats as there are people in New York.

So, applying this ratio to San Francisco with approximately 900,000 residents, we get 225,000 rats, which is a huge number of rats. If you live in a big city, you might not think too much about how many rats share your block or apartment building right now. The maximum distance that a rat is willing to travel from its nest is 50 to 150 meters. So here we'll take an average of 100 meters, larger than the length of an entire football field in all directions. That translates to 31,415.9 m² when you spread it out. That's a lot of ground to cover, when we want the rat to simply step on a button that's about a square inch (or about 6.25 cm²).

San Francisco proper is approximately 46.87 miles² (or 121.4 km²). 225,000 rats, each of them technically capable of covering 31,415.9 m² in their territory, means that they are TECHNICALLY capable of covering over 7 million square meters and, as a result, could cover the entire open space of San Francisco hundreds of times . This is especially true considering that they should be limited primarily to the exterior, sewers, and, yes, storage facilities and garages. The rat's ground zero is likely right in the area where Ant-Man was last seen in "Ant-Man and The Wasp." That last scene, where we see Dr. Pym send Ant-Man to the Quantum Realm, takes place here, with Coit Tower to the right and the Transamerica Building to the south.

This gives us a nearly 100% chance that Scott Lang's car will actually fall into many rat territory. Which, I already thought was a stretch when I started this theory, but I was wrong. There are a lot more rats in San Francisco than I thought. But it's okay! Saying that Scott's car falls into the territory of a few rats does not guarantee that he will ever step on a very small button. However, realistically, we are not just dealing with a rat. You see, unlike Youtubers, rats are not loners. They enjoy things like socializing and sharing. They live in groups.

In fact, rat colonies have a population of up to 100 rats. So if this truck is in range of some rats, it will actually be in range of A LOT of rats. But remember that at the end of "Infinity War", half of all living things in the universe disappeared. That means that at the beginning of five years, we are dealing with fifty rats in the Scott Lang area. So how much ground do these 50 rats cover? Well, it really depends on how fast they go. Once we know that, we can know how many places they might randomly step on over the course of a typical rat day, and then statistically how long it would take them to step on this button.

We can estimate an average walking speed of 3.5 cm/s for a rat. Rats can actually move much faster than that, because their gait (or walking/running speed) can range from 3.5 to 8.5 cm/s, depending on how exciting that Twinkie looks. 4 years on the other side of the dumpster. , but we are interested in what your average speed would be throughout the day. Also, knowing that a rat's stance (or the distance between its legs) is about half an inch wide, let's take the walking speed, the linear distance traveled per unit of time, to the area the rat physically covers during that time. .

Think of the rat as a moving rectangle, trying to fill all the spaces in this giant circle, which is its territory. Well, knowing your walking speed and average foot placement, we can calculate how much area you cover per unit of time, and that translates to 4.44 cm² per second. So the question now is: how much time does a rat actually spend wandering around looking for food, instead of sleeping or doing things in the nest, like learning interesting rat tricks or, I don't know, giving birth to the next generation? ? Well, rats tend to be nocturnal, meaning they usually take the night shift and search for food for about 8 hours a day, from 9:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. m., without free weekends.

So, calculating how long they search and the area they cover per second, on any given rat day, one rat would cover 12.8 m². That's a small fraction of its total 31,415.9 m² territory, and the rat has a small chance of finding Scott's button on any given day. To be exact, that rat would have a probability of 0.0407%. To be clear, that is not 4%, but 0.04%. Let me pull out my Doctor Strange "looking into the future" effects, that is, 1 in 2454. If we give this rat the maximum benefit of the doubt we can, and say that he never goes to the same place twice in his life, which is not entirely realistic, but hey, just for the purposes of a thought experiment, It would take 2454 days to completely cover the entire search area.

That's 6 years, 8 months and 21 days of constant searching for rats, without ever going through the same area twice. Now, I feel good about this assumption because it's like a great average. Realistically, if the van was near the rat's nest, well, this button would have a huge chance of being pressed in the first place. On the other hand, if you're on the edge of a rat's territory, the odds become incredibly low. So by extending the area that the rat walks through, we know that we are not accurately representing actual traffic patterns, but rather averaging things out, based on the fact that we have no idea where the rat actually starts.

So all you "but really" guys, take it easy. I try to take it into account as much as possible. And no, I'm not taking into account that the truck is raised, and he has to get up there and all that, yes, I understand, we are talking about pure surface. So if the rat searches the entire area of ​​its territory, and the last part turns out to be the button it walks on that frees Scott, it would take almost 7 years. It's a lot, but it's nowhere near what I was really expecting. I expected this to happen with the probability of "never." For the rat to find Scott's button in 5 years, as the movie shows, it would have to press that button within the first 1825 days.

According to our calculations, there is actually an incredible 54.7% chance that you can do that. I can't believe what I'm saying, but it's better than flipping a coin, having a single rat step on a button that frees a man from the Quantum Realm! But that is not all! If we continue to keep things in mind, we can do much better. Remember, Scott doesn't just have one rat, he has 50 that cover the same territory because they share the same nest. So if we rerun our calculations, based on the idea that 50 rats are each searching independently, our 5-year search actually becomes much more optimistic.

If the odds of a single rat randomly releasing Scott are just over 50%, the odds of 1 in 50 rats wandering and stumbling their way to releasing Scott are a staggering 99.9999 7%. I guess you could say THE RAT IS ENEVITABLE. even if we are less optimistic about the future of the rat population and decide to have Thanos adjust the number used in our previous estimate and do the calculations based on a smaller number of rats, such as 10 rats, traveling toIts slower speeds, and it only gets to this place once in its life, the chances of being found in 5 years are STILL 99.94%. and that's when we repeatedly take low estimates at every step of this process.

Doctor Strange might have seen 14,000,605 futures and only one path to victory, but of those 14,000,605 futures, 14,000,601 of those futures involve Scott being freed by a rat, and only 4 of them involve Scott trapped forever. in the Quantum Realm, or simply released by a hippie looking for a new van instead of a rat. I mean, we're talking about San Francisco. So at the end of the day, the odds might not have been on the Avengers' side, but they certainly were on Ant-Man's side! But hey! That's just a theory- A

film

theory! Aaaaand...looking at the Avengers lineup, do you know what's missing?

I mean, we have Arrow Man, Thunder God, Tiny Man, Large Man, Living Tree and Mr. America 2.0, it seems like you have most of your bases covered, but oh no, my friends, you yourself have a key weakness with the equipment as it is currently configured. You're missing a hacker! I mean, we just lost our technological genius, and that sensitive laser computer guy died shortly before that, because this is what, my friends, without proper online protection, all the super strength in the world won't help, when your identity is stolen and your bank account is left empty. Fortunately, you don't need to be on Earth 616 to find a suitable hero, he already exists here, in this universe, through our sponsor for today's episode: NordVPN.

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