Powerwashing will kill all of us! It may look like a harmless strangely satisfying activity, but our little water gun holds the key to our entire planet's destruction. Hello internet! Welcome to Game Theory the show that is never satisfied with playing games normally. Everyone has really big ups. Everyone's jumping and coming down very slowly. The sun is big. I don't know. I feel like I have a lot of reasons to be kind of scared. And you should be scared Ash. This is Powerwash Simulator 2 after all. And if the first game taught us anything, it's that nothing is as it sees. Sorry, I've got a little carried away there. You see, this game and me go way back. We covered the original Powerwash Simulator back when it was in early access. It was actually my sixth ever game theory. And the second video I was asked to give notes on while auditioning for the role of Creative Director. I could never ever imagine I'd end up here, but I remember getting that email from Matt asking me to see if there was anything we could find in this game with seemingly very little lore. It taught me a really valuable lesson in theorising. And since then, I've made countless theories about games with seemingly no story and finding the intrigue hidden beneath the surface. So, it feels fitting that I find myself back here again. Talking about one of the games that kicked off my career here at Game Theory. In our initial theory, we used geographic landmarks like volcanoes forests. And even the British spelling of words, a pinpoint our location to the state of Oregon. We predicted that the volcano was likely going to cause the destruction of the town, based on its appearance, and we determined that we, the player, were in fact the villain. Washing away all of this ash illegally, which would destroy the city. You know, if the volcano doesn't get there first. And while some of those details were proven at least somewhat correct when the full game was released, for this game, the developers really did their homework. Not only are there even more interesting storylines piling up on our towns, WhatsApp group, but there's also a bunch of real science that's gone into explaining some of the weird happenings around this strange town of Mockingham. Although, don't think that means I'm not keeping a close eye on our player character. He may have evaded the law once before, but this time, their actions could cause the ruin of not just the city, but the world. First, let's get caught up on where the first game left off, as there was a lot that changed between our theory and the full release of the game. We're just a normal guy trying our best to get our power washer business off the ground. Our friend Harper is doing their best to find his jobs with the various townsfolk, and in doing so, we get wrapped up in a city-wide conspiracy. Throughout the early parts of the game, we learn about how the Mayors cat has gone missing. Some even believe the cat to be completely made up as a cover-up for the Mayors' secret new pipeline. This pipeline we later learned was being used to divert water from the river to the even more secret mining operation happening within Mount Rushless, the volcano that's been weirdly unstable the entire gate. Turns out the mayor and his wealthy friend Blake Thrass found a special crystal or deep within Mount Rushless and decided to do the only logical thing, minus out, leading to Mount Rushless being unstable in the first place. But don't worry, all is well because this is where Cerulean comes in, a time traveler who is determined to stop the world from falling into chaos. Yes, I'm completely serious. Once we clean their ship, they go back in time to try and fix the issue in the past. Mount Rushless seismic activity then unerves a palace in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that contains statues and murals of us. Being worshipped as a god. Cerulean tells us that this is the work of the pacifists, the Pacific Ocean counterpart to the Atlanteans. Oh, I see what you did there. See all of the statues that we've been cleaning that looked Greek in nature and began firing beams at the volcano? That was their doing. Thanks to Cerulean, they fitted their temple with one final neutralizing beam to stabilize Mount Rushless and save the world. All we have to do is you guessed it, power wash it. We do so and the world is saved. Plus, we then find the mayor's missing cat in the back of our truck now, with kittens. Truly a happy ending for everyone. I told you this game was nuts, and all of it only revealed if you actually stop and read all the text messages that you get in the middle of your jobs, by the way. But that leads us to the plot of the sequel. Pretty much picking up where we left off, we're still power washing across the town, but I immediately noticed one small detail that made me panic. The first job we have is to clean the rental van that we use to move to our new office. As you clean it, you reveal a license plate, and to some of you, it might seem familiar. The mountain behind the text, it's exactly what you'd see on a Washington state license plate. So we theorized this game took place in Oregon. Dang it! So close yet so far. Oh, that's what I thought, until I checked the license plate on our own van. Our van has a different plate. One that has pine trees on it, which is very similar to the license plates from Oregon. Okay, so which is it? Well, our license plate says Mockingham. The town we were originally from in the first game, though one we predicted was Oregon. While this new Washington style license plate says Caldera County, which our map tells us is the whole area we're exploring in this new game. Weirdly, this seems to include Mockingham, but the license plates wouldn't be different if that was the case. So there's a chart that Mockingham is a state over separated by the river, and Caldera County is just referring to the land on the other side of the river. Whew, crisis averted. But anyway, that small potatoes compared to the rest of what the story has to offer. We see the return of the mayor and his shady friends threatening to sue us for stealing his cat. Now, look, he may have abandoned the cat, but as we learn from Harper, we didn't exactly file a transfer of guardianship. So while I don't like the mayor and the cats are very cute, he may actually have a point. Geez, first not disposing of Ash correctly. Now this, I knew there was something shady about us, but the mayor isn't exactly innocent either. All of this is once again an attempt to cover up his shady antics. Anyway, it turns out their plan is actually just the same as it was the last time. Dig up the crystals from Insight Mount Rushless to sell for profit. Not super imaginative, but if at first you don't succeed, I guess. They even go so far as to steal the stone from the head of the statue that was helping keep Mount Rushless subdued. Like, come on guys, I know that you're just greedy little dudes, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize you shouldn't take the thing that's stopping the volcano away. This naturally has some negative consequences. Just not the ones we expected. Instead of the volcano now suddenly erupting, the moon begins to spin, quote, like a topway faster than it usually does. You can actually see it spinning in the ski lift level, and so I figured I would time this thing just to see how bad it would actually be in the real world. You know, providing you fall for all the scientific propaganda and believe that our moon is real in the first place. In Power Wash, it only took 25.1 seconds for the moon to do a full rotation. That's roughly 430,000 meters per second. Please bear in mind that the moon typically does a full rotation on its axis in 27.3 days, roughly 4.7 meters per second. That is 90,000 times faster than it should be, and you can bet that's not going to end well. Once the moon starts spinning at anything over 1700 meters per second, there would be a bunch of seismic activity as the moon slowly gets torn apart. The game is actually pretty accurate with this. As we get a text claiming that the moon is ringing like a bell. That might seem like an odd thing to say, like why would the moon be ringing, but this is a real thing that happened in 1969 when the Apollo 12 spacecraft crashed into the moon. The collision caused a bunch of moon quakes that lasted up to 10 minutes. And thanks to the low frequencies picked up by the seismometers, it sounded like the moon was ringing like a bell. This is actually where the hollow moon conspiracy comes from. The more you know. But if this seismic activity carried on, eventually the moon would break apart and become a dangerous ring of debris like we see on planets like Saturn. Without the moon, the tides would change drastically, flooding some parts of the planets while causing others to gain more shoreline. The debris would likely be falling to Earth consistently, causing massive damage over time, and the ring would cast a shadow over the equator, meaning less sunlight, which would totally ruin the agricultural landscape and wildlife habitat. However, there's one more interesting effect this would cause on Earth. You see, the moon acts as a sort of break for the Earth's rotation. Their gravities are locked to one another, which means that even if one speeds up or slows down, the other one's gravity just goes, oh no you don't, and helps to get it back to the right speed. They balance each other out. But if the moon was spinning insanely fast or stopped existing altogether, the Earth would lose that break. Over time, that would cause the Earth to pick up speed. Some studies even estimate that a day could go from 24 hours to just six. This would obviously have massive implications for the environment and our quality of life, but the big thing it would change is gravity. You see, the Earth spinning creates a central fugal force. This is an outward force that works counter to Earth's gravity. Basically, because the Earth is spinning at this rate and Earth's mass is what it is, that keeps our gravity locked at 9.81 meters per second squared. So with this moon's new speed, what would the gravity be like? Well, for that, you first need to figure out the new angular velocity, which you can get by using 2 pi over t, with t being the time, 6 hours or 21,600 seconds. This makes our new angular velocity 2.91 times 10 to the power of minus 4 radians per second. Next, we need the radius of Earth, 6,378,100 meters. And we then multiply that by our new angular velocity squared, giving us an effect on apparent gravity of 0.541 meters per second squared. Now, we just have to take the current effect of gravity, 9.81 meters per second squared, and subtract the effect on apparent gravity, which means our new gravity at the equator would be, drum roll please, 9.27 meters per second squared. That's only a 5% decrease in gravity, turning a 20-inch jump into a 21-inch jump. Now, if you've played these games before, it seems like the devs actually did their homework on this too. One of the things people like to joke about is how high these characters can jump. I'm worrying about a lot of things. Everyone has really big ups. Everyone's jumping and coming down very slowly. The idea that this could be based in actual science thanks to the law of the moon is crazy. However, as I'm sure you can see, it seems to be a lot more than a mere 5% increase. So, because I'm just that much of a nerd, I got host of film theory lead to jump into a game with me so I could measure his jump height and the speed at which he fell so I could compare the two. To do that, we need a measuring stick. And these park benches are perfect for this. While park benches can vary a small amount, in the US the average park bench is about 31 inches tall. So, by lining Lee up to the bench and using pixel measurements, we can determine that our character is around 5 foot 6. Hey, we love a short king in this house. Unless it's not. Anyway, with that in mind, we can now calculate two things. The height they reach with a single jump and the amount of time they spend airborne. Using this clipably against a disgustingly dirty building, sorry about that, I promise we cleaned it afterwards. So with that, I was able to determine that our characters jump height is around 114 centimeters or 45 inches. And then he had 1.367 seconds of air time. So, by using the equation, gravity equals 8 times the height to divide it by the time spent airborne, we find that our world's actual gravity is second drum roll, please. 4.9 meters per second squared. 50% of our real earth gravity. At that rate, the atmosphere would expand around earth, causing the air pressure to decrease, meaning there's actually a lot less oxygen at ground level. So we'd all essentially end up with altitude sickness. So that's not great, but clearly something isn't quite adding up here. Either the moon is spinning faster than they're showing us, or we shouldn't be able to jump this high. But, credit where credit's due. Gravity would technically be affected by the moon spinning faster. So there's at least some logic to what we're seeing here, even if it's not totally accurate. And, you know, the game's fun, so I'm willing to give it a pass here. Unlike in reality, though, where the earth and the moon are tied together due to gravity, in power simulator, we get a slightly different explanation. During the solar system exhibit level, we're told about the protoplanet, FIA, and how it collided with earth to create the moon, which, surprise, surprise is another real scientific theory. I've really got a hand at these devs. But, according to the game, the moon wasn't the only thing that was created. This collision also created the crystals that we find inside Mount Rushless, which they call pacifist, tying it back to the ancient pacifists from the last game. Because the moon and these crystals are essentially made up of the same material, they have an inherent bond. And that is why the two are linked. So, when the pacifist is removed from Mount Rushless, it destabilises that link and causes the moon to go haywire. But, it's fine. Because thanks to our cleaning jobs in Mayer, it's outed for stealing the statue stone. Our friends return it, turn it upside down, as per the instructions of our time traveling friend, Cerulean, which points us back towards Mount Rushless. We follow it inside and find a special system designed to aim the beam at the moon. But, it's all covered in dirt. Meaning, there's only one man for the job. Armed with nothing but our trusty water gun, we clean the structure which allows the beam to travel through it, hit the moon, and slow the moon's rotation back to normal speed. All before any negative consequences can take effect. Yippee! So, that's it, right? We saved the earth. We were wrong in our first theory. We're definitely not the villain. We're the hero. And you think so? If it weren't for one small detail, that actually makes our supposed act of heroism completely pointless. While I was calculating the moon's rotational speed, there was something else that stood out to me. Moon big! Like real big! Just take a look at it next to this totally real picture of our moon. The size difference is drastic. To be that big, the moon would have to be way closer to earth. In fact, if we go back to the ski level and use those same park benches I use to measure the gravity, I think we can figure out exactly how close it is. This is where the math is going to get a little complicated, but I'll try my best to explain it. To figure out the distance we need three things. The moon's angular size, the bench's angular size, and the pixel ratio of how big the moon looks versus the bench. Let's start with that last one. At this angle where both the moon and bench are in frame, the bench measures in at 153. Get away! So embarrassing! They're growing up. Won't be long before the thought of a family holiday is just. But with Hilton's staycations all over the UK, we don't need to go far to feel close. And with connecting rooms confirmed when we book, we'll have plenty of space to make the most of every moment. Everyone in the photo! When time away means time together, it matters where you stay. But now at Hilton.com, Hilton for this day. The pixels, while the moon is 180 pixels, so we just divide the moon by the bench, making our pixel ratio 1.18. Now we need the bench's angular size, which is another simple equation of just dividing the bench height by our distance from the bench. We know the bench's height is 31 inches, and on average, a wooden slats used on benches like this are around 5.8 inches, and these benches use 14 slats, making their total width 81.2 inches. I also then measured the distance between the tables and ended up with a total distance from our initial bench as 305 inches, making the bench's angular size 0.102 radians. Then for the moon's angular size, we just multiply those two answers together, giving us 0.120 radians, which leaves us with our final calculation. The moon's diameter of 3,474,000 meters, divided by the moon's angular size of 0.12 radians, giving us a total distance from the Earth of the drum roll, please! 28,950 kilometers. That might sound like a lot, but if I got on a plane in Raleigh, North Carolina and traveled directly east for that distance, I'd only end up in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, almost lapping myself, but oh, that far in the grand scheme of, you know, space! Because the moon is typically 13 times that distance at 384,000 kilometers. The moon being at this distance would actually make our days longer over time, cause huge tidal shifts, flooding massive chunks of the globe, and what it's technically outside of the roach limit of 20,000 kilometers, so it wouldn't immediately break apart like we talked about with the rotational issue. Over time, the amount of gravitational stress on the moon would slowly cause it to deform, crack, and shed part of itself off, slowly creating rings around the Earth, until eventually it would become so weak it would totally collapse, causing all of the same issues we talked about earlier. But there's more, because in the meantime, we'd have to deal with the tidal forces causing huge strain on the Earth. We would see frequent mega-earth quakes, and intense volcanic eruptions all over the planet, and not just on the plate boundaries either. Literally anywhere on the globe, you could see lava exploding out of the ground. Mount Rushless would be the least of our worries, so sure. We technically save the planet from immediate devastation, but in the end, the outcome is essentially the same. We're just passing the problem off to our great-great-grandchildren instead, and you guys keep wanting me to believe this thing is real. Seems like nothing but problems to me, but hey, that's just a theory. A GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching!
