Game Theory: Mario's Secret Fire Power is... Rocket Fuel!

wow, this is cool, it's actually really hot, watch out goombas, here comes matio, now that I think about it, this is probably a lot more humane than stomping on their heads. I've always felt bad about crushing another living creature with my own. body weight yahoo here we go I'm in agony unbearable agony this has to be the worst way to die why would you do this? Why couldn't I die like my brother Tony? he was crushed in a single instant his life ended without suffering my mom hello internet welcome to

game

theory

the program that is like a super mushroom for your brain that makes it grow up to twice the size, which also means that it would be as big that barely fits in your skull oh god, what have I done?

Anyway, there are so many tiny skulls with big brains theorists out there super

mario

3d world just arrived on nintendo switch. I have to say this is great news because it's really one of the best wii u titles, which when I think about it, isn't that high. high praise as I originally thought, considering the top 10 list for that system includes a two-generation remake of a cross-platform indie

game

, a less good port of a switch game, and the original tech demo that came packaged without much competition over there. Regardless, it's a great Mario game and it would be a shame if it were still stuck on a system that no one bothered to own.

It's also great news because it gives me an excuse to talk about the popular plumber and one of the most iconic

power

-ups in gaming. the

fire

flower, this has been around since the original super

mario

brothers and has appeared in basically every mario game since even super mario odyssey which replaced traditional mario

power

-ups with hat powers, it still managed to make a cameo for

fire

. peach blossom appearing wearing a traditional kimono in Bowser's Japanese-inspired fortress decorated with, you guessed it, the fire flower anyway, we all know how this works, it needs no introduction, considering it's the most iconic power of all. time.

I feel like it's not even like that. Overstating it, Mario and Fireflower, I mean, name a more iconic duo, but you can prove it in the comments below. With a single touch, Mario's suit turns red and white while giving him the all-important ability to throw fireballs, it's that simple. like glass or I literally just said we all know how this works, but have we stopped to wonder what exactly is going on here? What exactly are Mario's fireballs? I mean, they can't just be pure flames after all the flames just burn. gas and as such we would expect hot gas to rise but what mario uses is affected by gravity these things are dragged down and not just down but they also bounce off the ground its a detail we all give taken for granted because I've seen it for decades, but any explanation of what he's actually using here has to take into account that bounce and then you have the fact that, even though they are supposedly fireballs, Mario still seems perfectly capable of use them underwater, so this has to be like this. some kind of special flame In short, we have three things to answer if we want to approach this properly: one that can catch fire two that bounce off the ground and three that also burn underwater What exactly are Mario's fireballs?

It's a simple question with a not-so-simple answer, and that makes it the perfect topic for game

theory

. This isn't the first time I've tried to tackle the topic of Mario's fireballs in 2017. I did a collaboration with Grant Thompson, the king of chance, to figure out how fireballs work. He could burn me underwater. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to spend that time with him because two years ago he passed away tragically too soon. Rest in peace, friend. Now they remember you on the beach that day. What Grant wanted to prove was. thermite a flammable metallic powder used in welding hazard scale from one to ten what would you list this as?

I'm going to put this up there in a solid can. Wow, that's some quality science on YouTube. We packed tennis balls full of thermite and I threw them under the water to see if they continued to burn. I love the smell of termites in the afternoon. Matpat is a natural maker of thermite grenades. Let's not spread the word about it too much, and the conclusion was that yes, the termite did it. I manage to continue burning while submerged in water giving us fireballs underwater. Look, if I were a koopa, I would be very afraid of being a human and I am very afraid of that.

Very good job, Mario, however, although he demonstrated the underwater fire point, I was not convinced that he had solved what Mario's fireballs actually were, I mean one, I don't think Mario is carrying fireballs. extra sneakers in their pockets just to load them with flammable dust, but most importantly, the thermite reaction leaves behind molten remains. iron and I just don't see much metal slag lying around the mushroom kingdom after I finish laying waste to it with my fireballs of death, which means today I want to look for an alternative solution to start with, we need to establish one.

Mario's fireballs aren't just pure fire, in fact, they can't technically be pure fire because well, fire isn't actually a thing. Fire is a chemical reaction that produces, among other things, a flame, which is the hot gas you probably imagine in your mind. When you hear the word fire now, why bother making the distinction between fire and flame? Well, we know that a pure flame wouldn't look like what we see. Mario throwing pure hot gas wouldn't bounce off the ground like a rubber ball, obviously Mario. is launching some kind of chemical cocktail that is capable of keeping a combustion reaction going, it's more of a flaming projectile, so Mario's fireball wouldn't be so much a fireball as it would be a flaming ball, of course , that still leaves us with the obvious.

Ask a ball what it takes to create a flaming, bouncing underwater projectile. Well, it all comes down to having the necessary ingredients to sustain a fire. If you've ever paid attention during Smokey the Bears' safety lessons or watched our episode about fire. Pokémon from four years ago, you may remember the concept of the fire triangle, which is a simple model of the three basic ingredients you need to maintain a fire. A fire needs one heat, two

fuel

s and three, an oxidizing agent. Technically, the fire triangle evolved recently. in a triforce of fire, but for today the triangle will suffice anyway without any of these three ingredients the chemical reaction simply cannot continue, for example, 99 of the time the oxidizing agent is just oxygen, the air we live in a planet with a lot of oxygen floating around all the time in case you haven't noticed and fire really appreciates that fact, but if you want to extinguish a fire you can smother it with a blanket that covers the fire, it deprives it of oxygen, so the triangle is broken and the fire cannot survive this is also how most fire extinguishers work: they spray carbon dioxide surrounding the fire effectively suffocating it or you know you can always rely on your good friend h2o just drop the burning object in a bucket of water and Bam, there's no oxygen, which means no combustion reaction, which means no more flames, except clearly that Mario's fireballs work underwater, which It leaves us with the big question of how a popular Japanese tuber put water on the fire, why what?

Well like I said 99 of the time oxygen is the oxidizing agent for a fire which leaves the one percent of the time where it isn't and mario fireballs apparently fall into that one percent , a rare extreme case, a situation where you use an oxidizing agent other than o2 to create the fire, now You don't have to be a

rocket

scientist to figure this out, but it would help because this is one of the big problems they have with real space scientists have to deal with. Think about it, in space there is no error, which means that in space there is no oxygen. floating to be part of your combustion reaction so how do you get a combustion reaction in the vacuum of space?

Well, one answer is to bring your own oxygen in liquid form, that's what the

rocket

dyne rs-25 aerojet engine that was used on NASA's space shuttle used, although that probably won't work as well for Mario's purposes, considering that liquid oxygen must be stored at very, very, very, very very low temperatures, we're talking minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit or negative. In fact, the RS-25 is classified as a cryogenic rocket engine because its propellants are stored at such low temperatures. Now I know Mario can handle coal. He tends to run through frozen landscapes with only his overalls but carrying sub-. zero cryogenic ice balls in your pants only to light them later doesn't make much sense, but really any source of oxygen will do, for example the reason thermite dust was able to burn underwater in that random experiment was that It is made of aluminum powder and iron oxide, the aluminum metal acts as

fuel

and the iron oxide, as can be deduced from the word oxide, provides oxygen just like oxyclean works with the air you breathe, activated by water that you and I drink. how you have some oxygen floating near the edges of its chemical structure, well, that's why it's your oxidizing agent.

Fire is basically a super-fast version of a type of reaction that exists everywhere in our world, something called a reduction oxidation reaction. or redox reaction for short oxidation is the loss of electrons and reduction, rather confusingly, is the gain of electrons. It's called reduction because you're gaining electrons that are negatively charged, so you're losing charge, so reduction anyway, is just a fancy way of saying electron. It exchanges and if you look at what the oxygen actually does here, its function is to accept electrons from the fuel, so in our quest to find out what's going on with Mario's fireballs, all we need is something that has a chemical composition Similar to what we saw in The Termites, Iron Oxide, examples of oxidizing agents that have been used in rockets include nitrogen tetroxide, which was used by the Apollo 11 lunar module, and ammonium perchlorate, which is frequently used in rocket boosters.

See all those juicy o's waiting around the edges of the chemical structure. waiting to accept electrons and you see, it's the second one, ammonium perchlorate, that I want to focus on because, unlike oxygen o2, which is a gas at room temperature, ammonium perchlorate is a solid and that's good because it remembers the three things we need to do Mario. When fireballs happen, it has to be able to bounce, which means it has to be affected by gravity and you know, solids tend to bounce better than gases. Being solid also means that we can mix it with the fuel source and we can create a chemical cocktail that provides both the fuel source and the oxidizing agent that we need to make combustion happen, all in one small package, as we are seeing happen.

With Mario's fireballs as a fuel source, most rockets just use powdered aluminum, the same type of material I talked about. We talked to the termite, so we're going to continue with that, but there's still one piece missing. We need a way for everything to stick together and this is where Mario's fireballs really surprise us. It all comes down to rubber, yes, silicone rubber, no. Jokingly, here on YouTube you can find DIYers making their own rocket fuel videos where they put together aluminum powder and ammonium perchlorate, which again remember is the same thing NASA is using in their rocket boosters real ones and they're combining these things with silicone rubber tubes that you can find at Home Depot as inflatable rubber and by the way, the idea of ​​using rubber or something similar as a binding agent for rocket fuel isn't just something that YouTubers are into. doing in 2013, the private space company Virgin Galactic announced. that the latest tests of its suborbital space vehicle were being conducted with fuel that used a key ingredient for synthetic rubber.

Virgin Galactic's own press releases describe the fuel as if it were rubber. So what exactly are Mario's fireballs? They are literally an advanced form. of rocket fuel, gummy rocket fuel, aluminum powder plus ammonium perchlorate plus a little silicone rubber to hold it all together, that is, in my opinion, the only way to explain how they can burn continuously even when underwater or in a vacuum. Like Super Mario Galaxy's conditions, it's also an explanation for why they bounce like a rubber ball when you throw them. It also explains why enemies die on contact, considering that solid rocket boostersThey can reach temperatures of more than 5000 degrees Fahrenheit, that is, 2760 degrees Celsius.

Sorry Goomba, that's going to leave a mark that leaves the only thing unexplained in this theory is why everything comes from a flower, but hey, that's just a theory, a game theory, thanks for watching, you know what Isn't it rocket science? Saving money with the sponsor for today's episode. Honey Theorists These days, I like to get cozy on the couch while I do most of my shopping online and while I'm looking for matching pajamas for myself and the family's next movie night, honey is there to enhance my experience. shopping, honey is the definitive one. free browser extension that you can get on your computer in just two clicks as you browse one of Honey's 30,000 supported sites in search of the perfect Mario jumpsuit to wear in your next rerun of the '90s classic.

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