Assassin's Creed: The Fall

Transcription

Jumps from a building. Lands in a haystack. Gets up fine. Does it all again. Ezio's free...Free fallin'. But can he survive? Hello Internet. Welcome to Game Theory. Tom Petty I ain't. A few months ago, I did an episode on Assassin's Creed, looking at whether memories can be passed through genes. It was a good one. It even taught me a couple of things, like the fact that one gigabyte doesn't actually equal 1000 megabytes. Who knew that THAT would be something I would have to look up?! Well a lot of you did, actually. But since then, a bunch of loyal theorists have been asking in the comments for a Leap of Faith episode, so here we are. Topic of the day: Could the Ass Creed clan actually survive their famous leaps of faith? No. But hey, that's just a theory. A Game Theory. Thanks for watching! Seriously, though, your odds of walking casually away from an Assassin's Creed fall are slim. Far from impossible, but slimmer than a...a...SlimKirby? I don't know. I can't always think of clever similes, okay? Medical journals generally say that a fall from any height greater than 100 feet or 30.5 meters is in the red zone, unsurvivable, and in Assassin's Creed, some of your biggest jumps triple that number. But let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start, by taking it TO THE EXTREME: Falling out of a plane, six miles, 31,000 feet, or 9,656 meters up in the air. According to the free fall database, since the 1940s, an astonishing 44 people have survived falls from planes at these tremendous altitudes. You heard right: 44 people survived falling out of a plane! Of those, 31 were classified as wreckage riders, people who fell that distance attached to or surrounded by a piece of the plane. The other 13 were pure free fallers--nothing to protect them. The thing is, although it's impressive that these people survived falls from tens of thousands of feet, any fall over 1500 feet or 457 meters is going to be about the same because that's the point you generally reach terminal velocity. To explain, gravity is accelerating you towards the earth, right? But as you keep falling faster and faster, the air rushing past you pushes you back more and more, creating drag. Terminal velocity is the point where the two forces equal and you no longer accelerate downward. After falling 1500 feet, this speed maxes out at around 120 miles per hour or 54 m/s. So, if you're going to fall, why not add 10,000 extra feet. Might as well enjoy the view on your way down... Now, using information from past fallers, we can critique the Assassin's technique: And quite honestly, they're doing a lot right. They spread their bodies like a skydiver in the air which increases their overall drag and slows their descent. When they land, they they aim for a cushy substance. Ultimately, you want to land on something with give, with flex. A wooden cart filled with hay is far better than earth, concrete, and water. You heard right, water. Surprisingly, the surface tension between water molecules makes the impact just as hard and inflexible as concrete. Except when you hit concrete, your newly-crippled body ISN'T forced to swim to safety. The one area for improvement is that they're landing flat on their back. In the good ol' days of 1940, this position was thought to be the best way to handle a fall, spread out the force of the impact across a larger surface area rather than placing lots of force in one part of the body. However, more recent studies say falling like a skydiver's landing position, with legs and hips flexed, is the optimal way to handle a fall like this. In short, the odds of survival are low, BUT the Assassins are doing everything they can to put the odds in their favor. All right Felix Baumgartner, knowing that, you still want to recreate Assassin's Creed? Fine. Let's take the "High Dive" achievement from Ass Cred 2. To earn it, you must leap from Florence's Campanile di Giotto...man this channel is so bad at foreign names. Campanile di Giotto! Look 'a me, it's 'a Mario. It'sa me Mario! Or as the Americans pronounce it, Camp-an-isle D-G-Otto, a 84.7 meter or 278 foot tower built around 1340. At this height, it's well above the 100 foot Red Dead Redemption zone. By my calculations, the fall takes around 3.7 seconds to complete, and with the acceleration due to gravity being 9.8 meters per second per second, we can just plug these numbers into this equation to make sure everything checks out. Distance = ½ acceleration due to gravity times time of the fall squared. Aaaand we get...something, that's not right. The equation should balance. Of course, we're not factoring in wind resistance, but that would make Ezio fall even slower, thus making this side of the equation even less! But we KNOW that both the time of the fall and height of the building must be correct. The building is clearly identified in the game and the time we just measured which means...gravity in the Assassin's Creed world is wrong! So, recalculating to solve for gravity gives us 12.4 m/s2. That's over 125% of Earth's gravity! So, say you're 200 pounds. Conglaturations, you just put on an extra 50 without even getting to enjoy that extra Cheese Doodle. In fact, 12.4 m/s2 is greater than the gravity for every other planet in our solar system...except for Jupiter! For Jupiter levels of gravity, we need to rewind to the first Assassin's Creed and the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, one of the game's signature locations. Here, we're jumping off its tallest minaret. The game mislabels it as the Minaret of the Bride, when in actuality it's the Minaret of Jesus, probably in an attempt to avoid religious names—but no need to worry about being PC here. Not that type of PC. There ya go! The minaret stands at 77 meters tall and you hit the hay in 2.8 seconds which means that gravity here is nearly 20 meters per square second! That's easily over 2 Gs and approaching Jupiter levels of gravity! To put that in perspective, if you weighed 200 pounds in the real world, in the Assassin's Creed 1 universe, you'd be hefting around a good 400! And remember, this is assuming ye olde Italy exists in ye olde vacuum! Factoring in drag would mean that whatever planet Assassin's Creed takes place on would have even more gravity! If Facebook were to classify the relationship between Assassin's Creed and this fundamental force, the status would be "It's complicated." Man, that has got to be the cheesiest joke I've used in a long time. What's this do to our chances of survival? Well, if you weren't facing certain death before, you certainly are now because higher G forces means more acceleration in a shorter time span. To calculate the velocity the instant before we hit the ground, we simply take the acceleration due to gravity and multiply by the time we've been falling. Under normal G forces, you'd be hitting the hay at 36 m/s or a leisurely 80 miles an hour. With the game's skewed gravity, however, you'd be hitting the ground at nearly 46 meters per second or 103 miles per hour! Jumping in Damascus would be even worse for your health as the higher gravity results in a 56 meter per second, 125 mile per hour faceplant! That's terminal velocity right there—the same as if you were dropping from over 1500 feet! And you only had to fall one-sixth of the distance. Of course drag would slow you down, but as I said earlier, it would also mean these gravity numbers would be even higher, so all in all, not a bad estimate. But all of this is assuming we even have buildings to jump off of! Remember, we're talking about a double gravity world here! What else would life be like? Would life even be able to exist? This is a scenario known as hypergravity, and if Assassin's Creed truly depicted the real world with twice the normal g forces, none of these buildings would actually be standing. Structurally, they couldn't handle the heightened pressure and would collapse under their own weight. And humans? We would survive, but it would take quite a bit of adaptation. Humans exposed to hypergravity for extended periods show increased bone mass as the skeleton adapts to support the spike in weight. And with twice the gravity, EVERYTHING gets twice as heavy, which means heavier blood. Who thinks of their blood having weight, right? The heart certainly does as heavier blood means more work, making it especially difficult to pump upwards to the brain. In fact, some theorists propose that the dinosaurs went extinct when the Earth's gravity increased, making life unsustainable for supersized animals. The irony here is that, of all the people, the Assassin's would be most affected. You see, the exertion of climbing tall buildings coupled with the high altitudes of their viewpoints would result in them being much more prone to light-headedness as their hearts struggled to get blood to the brain. Chances are, if tall builds were still standing, they would pass out long before reaching the top of any structure, ultimately plummeting to their doom. Leap of faith? Ha! They wish they had the chance. More like tumble of...fatigue. I...I don't know. I can't come up with any good punchlines this week. Not that my punchlines are ever any good. So, in the end, what have we learned today? Don't jump off of buildings. You will die. But hey, that's just a theory. A Game Theory. Thanks for watching! Welcome back to the Super Amazing End Card Tournament, where last week the Crono crazy crowd crushed the Final Fantasy fans. In honor of Assassin's Creed, a very international game, today we're having a battle of the countries. A lot of people from all over the world watch this show. I see all the statistics in my analytics. I want you to go into the comments and type something, anything in your native language. The country that comes the closest to getting one comment for every one view on this video from your country gets international bragging rights FOR LIFE...or until I decide to do this again. You're all loyal theorists, but what country has the most loyal of loyal theorists? Let's find out. While you're thinking about what to write in the comments, I'm just going to stay here and encourage you to subscribe...soooo you should do that. Subscribe. There's a lot of good stuff comin' up. Like really, I'm excited for the next couple months. And hey, click right here to start listening to my other Assassin's Creed video. It's one of those under-appreciated gems on this channel. Anyway, if you commented, subscribed, and watched the other Assassin's Creed video, you are now permitted to leave. Okay? Thanks! I love you bye!