Game Theory: Sonic is TOO Powerful! (Sonic the Hedgehog)

sonic

, did you know that geico, our sponsor for today's episode, could help you save money on boat insurance? Oh, I think I'm going to throw up, but I don't have a boat. Oh, I guess that makes sense. I know you're not the biggest fan. RV water no, how about like a condo or apartment? I live in a burrow, it's literally a hole in the dirt pit. I would say they could save you money on your car insurance, but I would never need someone as fast as you do now. I'm talking, wait, why do you have a car again and they have an app too?

It only takes 15 minutes to get a quote. That's my kind of speed

game

theory

. Hello Internet, welcome to film

theory

. The show you're waiting for, no, no, sorry, welcome to the

game

. Theory, uh, apologies if my wires got crossed today, in the last two years, I've done four Sonic videos and three of them at our sister location Movie Theory, yeah, three videos from one stinking Sonic movie They really left her dry. It is not like this? It's good to be back here on the gaming side, where it all started. We've covered the topic of the speed of sound a lot over the years and I have to admit that I've been pretty harsh on the topic. old blue blur first we come to the conclusion that he's not actually the super

sonic

hedgehog

he claims to be, then we come to the conclusion that his race would completely destroy his fragile body and then we prove that his chaos emeralds aren't even emeralds, Even I'm starting to have them.

I'm tired of being a naysayer after beating a franchise for so long so you know what new resolution, there's enough sadness and depression in 2020 so today I'm going to stop being a naysayer, I'm going to be pro sonic, I'm going to take a page from the Jim Carrey's playbook and try to come up with a theory where he says yes, yes, man, wow, today I'm going to be Sonic's yes man, a yes, matt, so to speak, what part of the sonic tradition Can I try to try real science? and to show that I am trying to be impartial and abandon any previous prejudices I may have against this character, I will ask a completely impartial source for help.

Hey, computer, what's an easily defensible part of sonic history you could get behind? with real science make a theory about time travel in Sonic CD. You got to be kidding. We're going to talk about that Sonic game, the one about time travel where Sonic can travel back and forth between the future, the past and the present. Do I even have to start with all the paradoxes that would be uh no no no new bad matpat? Let's try to say yes today. I'm sure if we dig into the science we can find some kind of justification for Sonic's ability. traveling through time now for those of you who asked was that it really was part of the Sonic canon, the answer is yes, maybe you haven't experienced it first hand since it only appeared on the Sonic CD, well that and like a cameo in Sonic Mania, which maybe a lot of you did. play but sonic cd is the game where it is one of the main game mechanics.

Sonic starts in the present, but by accelerating past signs, whether labeled past or future, he can travel to the past or future versions of those stages. The first time Sonic travels to the In the future, he finds himself in a ruined world and decadent and the main objective of the game is to change the timeline by collecting enough time stones. It's basically the Avengers endgame plot, except with a blue protagonist looking to collect a bunch of multicolored gems. Oh my god, the Sonic CD is just the endgame for the Avengers, isn't it? So let's start with what is probably the least controversial part of this: the idea that Sonic can somehow use his super speed to time travel into the future, while it might seem like this breaks the fundamental laws of physical.

I mean, how can a few seconds go by to be sonic while the rest of the world ages by several decades? This is actually supported by the scientific concept known as time dilation, something I talked about a long time ago. In episode one of Game Theory, by the way, don't go back there for your own sanity, it's not a pretty place, although I must admit it was a pretty bold move by Matpat from 2011 to try to tackle special relativity in the first episode of his little show about video games anyway, I've gotten a lot better at explaining things since then and to be honest the episodes have gotten a lot longer since episode one so I have more time to explain it so you know what we're up to to try again.

Let's start with a simple example. We, you and your friend Sonic the Hedgehog are jogging along the road, you at a speed of 5 miles per hour or 8 kilometers per hour, Sonic at 50 miles per hour or 80 km/h, meanwhile the cars ? As you pass by, you are moving at 60 miles per hour or 96 kph, so from your perspective those cars are traveling at 55 miles per hour 88 kph their speed minus your speed. From Sonic's much faster perspective, the cars are traveling much slower. only 10 miles per hour 16 kph because it is moving much faster, that is the principle of relativity, the car always travels at the same speed, but in my opinion it seems to go much faster than relative to sound, but you see that light works differently and this is where special relativity comes in. at the speed of light is constant, it doesn't matter what frame of reference you're referring to, whether you're standing there or running five miles per hour, hell, Sonic is running at 95 the speed of light, it doesn't matter.

Light will always appear to move at the same speed, but how can that be certain? If you and Sonic are moving at different speeds then you would perceive the moving light differently the same way you perceive the moving car differently, well you would think that but that's just not how it works in the real world, a quick example, literally the speed of light is about 300 million meters per second, so let's say you stand still and watch the light for a second and you see it travel 300 million meters, but let's say Sonic runs very fast. , very fast, let's say half the speed of light, 150 million meters per second, and he sees that same light.

For him, light still has the same speed, 300 million meters per second, but for that to happen in one second, it has to travel at whatever speed sound goes plus an additional 300 million meters, but light does not. can go at 300 million meters per second for us and 450 million meters per second for sound, a thing can't go at two separate speeds at the same time or it can And you see, that's what makes this relativity so special . The strange thing about the way light moves through spacetime is that the speed of light always remains constant, but the speed is just the distance traveled over the course of time, in this case a distance of 300. million meters for me and 450 million meters for sound, so for the speed of light to stay the same as distances change, it means that the time of a second has to change too, so far we have assumed that one second is always equal to a second, but in this example a second is no longer just a second or more specifically a second for you is not the same as a second for sound, this is how light can travel two different distances in the same amount of time because it is not actually the same amount of time the definition of a second depends on how fast you are going this is all a very long way of describing the phenomenon of time dilation which says that when two objects move through of space at different speeds, they also move through time at different speeds.

Faster speeds, moving objects appear to travel through slower times than their stationary counterparts, all of this seems like the kind of wonky physics that would only work in theory, so the question is whether it holds up in real-world practice. Turns out, yes, if you've ever used a GPS system you've probably connected to a satellite that was traveling around the Earth at about 14,000 kilometers per hour, about twice the speed of the fastest plane on Earth, according to theory. Einstein's relativity. The objects that orbit the Earth at that speed. should appear to run slower by about 38,000 nanoseconds per day and, although you may not know it, this is exactly what happens, in fact it has become a problem for real world engineers, it means that the satellites we rely on to get data can actually get out of sync with the clocks that are here on earth, which can lead to problems like software crashes when engineers don't account for them.

The tldr here is that time travel is a very real thing that you play a small part in each and every time. use a gps satellite to locate the nearest jamb juice, of course that's an example of a very small amount of time dilation, if sonic wants to go so fast that decades pass on earth or on mobius, while for him Just spend a relatively small amount of time, it will. You have to go very, very fast, even if Sonic manages to run so fast that he travels at 99 the speed of light, time will only seem to pass 13.6 percent as fast as Sonic does for the rest of the planet, in short If Sonic wants to travel forward in time 10 years as we see him do in Sonic CD, he would have to run at 99 the speed of light for a year, four months and two weeks, in short, the idea of ​​him running so fast that decades seem to pass.

Flickering like we see on the Sonic CD isn't likely to happen unless you find some way to surpass the speed of light, and as we all know, I've been saying that a lot for the better part of the last decade. I don't think Sonic from the video game is that fast. Go into something I've always been afraid to talk about on this show. The Archie comics you see in the games. The fastest Sonic has ever run is the speed of light and even that is somewhat debatable. The sonic adventure is presented for the first time. players to what will eventually become a regular power-up, the light speed shoes that supposedly give blue blur the ability to travel at light speed now that you have light speed shoes, the light speed dash allows you to run towards the rings at the speed of light in the same way This holds true for the movie Sonic, as I calculated in a previous film theory.

The movie Sonic is capable of near light speed, allowing him to fire emp-style explosions, but there is another major source of the Sonic canon, the Sonic Archie comics, 290 issues spread over 24 years. With panel after panel of absolutely insane physical feats performed by none other than our favorite chili dog-munching champion in the Super Sonic vs Hyperknuckles special, a battle between Sonic and Knuckles destroys an entire dimensional boom that just came out in full in issue #125, runs fast enough to not only escape a black hole, but create enough force to reverse a black hole's spin and, if you thought that sounds ridiculous, the resulting explosion shoots it 849,000 light years away, but maybe my personal favorite of group number 71 attacks robotnik using a time.

Beam and Sonic run faster than time itself to save the day, what does that mean? Well, we can actually figure it out in another of the one-off specials, Sonic Blast Comic Sonic, in that we're told, he's faster than the eye can see. a ball that is made of water and before the physics of displacement can occur, he shapes it into a ball and throws it at a robot bird. That alone would give us the information we need, but the comic goes a step further and tells us that he is able to do all of this at point oh god at point zero zero zero this is like a sight test point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one milliseconds that's twelve zeros there people to be exact he's doing everything in 100 ato seconds for context and adding a second is a quintillionth of a second a ato second is a second What a second is to 31.71 billion years 100 to a second is a third of the amount of time it takes for an electron to transfer between atoms, so this means that we finally found a version of Sonic that is capable of breaking the speed of light, buddy, you can bet that when you run the numbers to 100 you add a second, light travels to point zero zero zero zero zero zero three meters thirty nanometers.

In some context, a sheet of paper is one hundred thousand nanometers thick in that same amount of time. Sonic scoops out water and throws it at an evil robot bird. In other words, the speed at which Sonic travels in the Archie comics absolutely crushes the speed of light, making this A trip to the future through time dilation in this amount of time from Sonic CD is absolutely 100 plausible, but what does it mean to travel faster than the speed of light? After all, our current understanding of physics is based on the idea that the speed of lightcan not.

It can't be topped and yet here's Sonic doing it for fun. Well, that question, of course, has caught the attention of scientists with some of the most interesting results coming from physics researchers at Michigan Technological University for their calculations as to whether this is a person traveling or, in our case , also. cool for school the

hedgehog

passes by at a certain speed, the ratio between the traveler's time and the passage of time back home will actually become a negative value, meaning that as time appears to move forward, time sonic would actually recede into the earth, you heard right, we.

In fact, we have solved the other most difficult part of our Sonic CD time travel puzzle, namely how Sonic manages to travel back in time - in theory, he can go back in time if he travels fast enough . How fast are we talking here about two 2726 times the speed of light? which again in the Archie comics is something he's somehow able to do for the second time in one episode. I confirm again that something seen in a Sonic game is plausible in the same way we see it in said game, except you know. I can't let him get away so easily.

I am a son of Nintendo. Kirby is my friend and Luigi is my favorite plumber. I can't let Sonic get out of an episode unscathed because, as you can imagine, he travels almost 3,000 kilometers. Sometimes the speed of light comes with a certain set of consequences. You might think this is the part where we get into the time paradoxes. What if Sonic goes back in time and kills his parents before his birth or something, but actually has much bigger problems on his hands, see if he leaves Mobius and then, through time dilation, tries to come back sooner After he left initially, we ran into a basic physics problem which is that his body has mass and is made of matter, so where did that matter come from?

If Sonic ran away and then returned five minutes before leaving, that would mean that there are now two Sonics existing at the same time where there was only one before, so the question really is where did the other Sonic come from? You can't just Create matter from nothing, can you? It turns out that no, the returning Sonic, the one who experienced the negative time progression in relation to Mobius, well, it's not actually fully understood because this is strictly theoretical, but the researcher's best conclusion is that this new Sonic. be made of an exotic negative mass and if this exotic negative mass came into contact with the original mass, it would be similar to matter meeting antimatter and the two would annihilate each other.

All of this means that the old sci-fi trope of don't go back in time and touch yourself or you'll explode. Well, it's a lot more true to life than I think most of us imagine, but for this you could propose an easy solution. Sonic could go back in time before he was born. He can't find himself in the past if he didn't exist back then, right? But this is where you are wrong. Every molecule, every atom, every subatomic particle that is part of sound, was once a part of some other being or someone else. object, you already know all about the water cycle, where the water you drink today could have been a dinosaur's drinking water, repeatedly going through the water cycle of evaporation and precipitation for centuries until the day it ended up in your glass, well , think.

That, but at the molecular, atomic, and subatomic level, the carbon atoms in your muscles were probably once part of some other living thing, perhaps they were previously part of the cow that became the steak you had for dinner earlier, that were part of the grass that the cow ate the circle of life, in fact, the further back in time the sound goes, the more dispersed those subatomic particles will be and the greater the chances you will have of randomly coming across a particle that, coincidentally, he will end up as a part of him, the faster he goes, the more particles he encounters and the greater the risk of his total annihilation, so there you have it folks, Sonic is indeed the fastest living being, maybe not in the video games, maybe not in the movies, but certainly in the comics. where its speeds crush that of light time and all known physics except there is a trap every second you spend running in the past is a threat to your own existence and when the positive mass of past sound meets the mass Negative of the time traveler. that's what we like to call a sonic boom, but it's literally like a big boom that blows you out of existence, anyway, that's just a theory, a game theory, thanks for watching and hey, even though traveling in Time can be difficult, save money on your insurance with our sponsor.

Today's episode, Geico is easy and as reliable as the blue blurs defeated Robotnik for almost 30 years. Geico has been saving people money for over 75 years and okay those are the lines you know from the commercials but if I can give a personal experience with geico they have been great to me. I have been with geico for auto and home insurance for almost 10 years and have never had a problem with any of their services. His mobile app is incredibly well designed, fast and easy. to use, making it easy to do things like give proof of insurance to places that need it, like the DMV, no joke, true story here.

I made an appointment a month in advance for the DMV to update some forms. I forgot I needed proof of insurance. printed car insurance because let's be honest, who really prints things on paper these days and I was literally saved by the fact that the geico app puts all of that on your phone right there, just a tap or two away, and then like part of that. Same form update process. I had to update my car insurance policies to what I saw as a really complicated system since we have vehicles in two separate states and they have to be insured, but no, no problem.

I received help over the phone immediately and without much time. waiting and they had agents in both states who took care of the forms, gave me all the information and even saved me money in the process, true to the commercials slogan, I guess it's a statistic, now I don't know and they were super nice. For starters, I still remember the name of the only person, Victoria, we talked about, Oliver, and she swapped stories about her grandchildren while things were being processed anyway. Simply put, here you know the gecko, you know the slogans, but now you know the story of a real customer.

Geico has been a great partner to me personally for the last decade of my adult life and I am now grateful that they are partners in this channel, so if you ever need virtually any type of insurance, consider the geico link down there. in the description see you next week.