Game Theory - Does Chell DIE In Portal 2?

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the iconic ending of Portal 2, and the effect it would have on Chell. Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Forrest Lee, Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Pedro Freitas, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Here come the test results. You are a horrible person. That's what it says. A horrible person. We weren't even testing for them. Are you still there? I wish I could take it all back. And not just because I'm stranded in space.

Oh, internet, welcome to game theory. Before we get any further, spoiler warning, we're going to be talking about the ending of Portal 2. If that matters to you, then why haven't you played the game in the last nine years? I mean, its base price is $10, but more often than not, it's even on a discount. Heck, I've paid more than that for crappy indie horror games. Looking at you, hello neighbor. Anyway, if you care about Portal 2 spoilers and somehow haven't already played it,

or heck, if it's been a while since you last played it, go, spend the afternoon beating it, then come back and watch this video. Alright, everyone back? Cool. As you all know, since you all took my advice and just played through the game, obviously Portal 2 has you playing the role of Test Subject 1498, aka Chell. Or Chell, I'm gonna call her Chell. There's an unused voice line of Glados actually saying her name, and that's the way she pronounces it.

As far as how you pronounce Glados, Gladys, apparently is a viable option. It's at least in the Wikipedia page. These sorts of things make me so tired. Anyway, you play as Chell who wakes up in a stasis chamber in the Aperture Science Research Facility. You then spend the rest of the game trying to escape with the help of your... Handy-dandy! Portal gun! This time there are various tweaks to the formula,

like the inclusion of gels that boost your speed or bounce you around. But overall, it's the same basic premise as the first game. Sol, physics-based puzzles to establish. escape. But in order to make it back to the surface, you first have to team up with your former nemesis Galados to defeat the corrupted AI named Wheatley. Now, that alone would be cool. Enemies being forced to work together is always a solid plotline for a story. But what's even more incredible is the way that you defeat Wheatley in that final boss battle. When everything seems lost, Chell looks up through a hole in the crumbling ceiling and out of desperation,

shoots a portal at the moon. Miraculously, it works. And I do mean miraculously, considering the distance that the portal would have to travel, just an inch or two off, and you're missing that moon by miles. Anyway, the shot lands, a portal opens up on the moon, exposing them all to the vacuum of space. We're in space! Wheatly, several AI cores and Shell get sucked through the hole until Glados reaches out and saves the day. She, begrudgingly delivers us to the surface and demands that we never return, which, I gotta admit, is kind of a fair request, considering we've now completely destroyed two of her testing facilities, and of course, there's a catchy song to round it all out.

Now, that moment where you look up into the sky and see the moon and realize that you can create a portal there is one of the coolest reveals in video game history. No joke, I remember that scene. I was like, wait, you want me to shoot it on the moon? And the game actually does an incredible job of setting this moment up. Earlier in the game, we learned via various lordums that moon dust is the thing that allows walls to be portable in the first place. No, portable would mean that I could carry the walls. Portolable? Sure, we're just going to go with that one. told me we literally could not afford to buy $7 worth of moon rocks, much less $70 million.

Bought them anyway, ground them up, mixed them into a gel. And guess what? Turns out they're a great portal conductor. But that final scene does lead to some interesting questions from a science perspective, which, let's be honest, is a valid perspective to take in a video game where all you do is physics puzzles in various scientific testing chambers. For instance, when you Wheatley and the other AI cores are getting sucked into the vacuum of space, should you really be able to hear their voices, or anything, for that matter? Mean, you're in space. Let go! Let go, I'm stuc-

And more importantly, how did Chell manage to survive her 28-second visit to the moon before Glados rescued her? Shouldn't her lungs have collapsed in the vacuum of space, or shouldn't they have, like, burst, like a balloon? I'm really not sure what should have happened in the scene, and I'm really curious to find out. I recognize that this feels like one of those moments where you're just supposed to suspend your disbelief and not think too hard about the science.

Well, pshaw to that, I say, shut off your brains and stop worrying about the science. If game theory as a show has a motto, it's whatever the opposite of that is. So, uh, turn your brain on and do worry about the science. Because when you actually look at what's going on in the scene, well, this iconic gaming moment actually holds up better than you would think. With one big difference that completely changes the ending. So today, I'm gonna show you the true ending of Portal 2,

and I guarantee it's not what you're thinking. Let's start by dispelling a common myth about what happens when you're exposed to the vacuum of space. It's not a case of instant death. Experiments conducted on animals, and humans, no joke, have shown that people can survive exposure to space's vacuum conditions. What do you think it must have been like for the human test subjects involved in those experiments? Oh, we're pretty sure you'll survive the vacuum of space, but we just have to test. It's the type of experiment that would make Glados proud. Anyway, not only can humans survive, but we can survive for a few minutes.

Former NASA astronaut Jay Bucky, who now works as a professor at Dartmouth Medical School, wrote about this subject in a book titled Space Physiology, which has everything you need to know about surviving in space, but we're too afraid to ask. Now, surviving in vacuum conditions isn't going to be pleasant. Under low-pressure conditions, any air that's in your lungs will expand outward, causing your lungs to inflate like balloons, and I'm not talking about like fun birthday party balloons. These balloons are going to be causing you severe internal tissue damage.

So, as counterintuitive as this might seem, If you're gonna spend a few seconds in the vacuum of space, don't take a deep breath. You want your lungs as empty as possible to prevent any gas expansion. It's weird, right? It's actually the reverse of going under water. But that's not the only stress you're gonna be under. As you may have heard, the human body is around 60% water, and that water content matters, because when exposed to vacuum conditions, lower pressure means lower boiling point.

You might remember from science class that the boiling point of water is 100 degrees Celsius, right? Well, as air pressure goes down, the temperature needs to be, needed to boil water also goes down. At an elevation of 8,000 feet or 2400 meters, roughly the size of a small to medium mountain, the air pressure is low enough that water now boils at a temperature of 92 degrees Celsius. So 8 degrees less than it is at sea level. What happens in the vacuum of space where air pressure drops to zero? Well, the boiling point of water drops so low that the liquids in your body can start to vaporize. In your soft tissues, this means bloating. Fortunately, for at least the first few minutes your skin is strong

enough to keep you from completely bursting apart, but well, let's just say when we're talking about how long you can last without bursting apart, you can assume that it's not going to be a comfortable couple of minutes. By the way, when people ask me why I never want to go into space, this is the reason why. Space is like just terrifying as is, and the methods of dying in space are just the worst. Your lungs are blowing up like balloons. The water content in your body is making you swell to the point of bursting. Oh yeah, and that boiling also applies to your blood. Forming inside your individual veins and arteries would block the flow of blood around your body Effectively shutting off your circulation in one minute after that it takes about 15 seconds for the lack of blood flow to the brain to result in unconsciousness

Which at this point let's be honest is a mercy and while it would take several minutes after that for you to die Well once you're unconscious you're basically at the mercy of whatever other person or AI might be able to rescue you Thanks for that one Glados now back to portal 2 we see that Chell spends exactly 28 seconds in the vacuum of space Honestly, she's probably safe. In one 1965 study, dogs were exposed to near vacuum conditions for 90 seconds and survived. After being returned to natural pressure conditions, it only took about 10 to 15 minutes for the dogs to be steady enough on their feet to start walking around again. Chimpanzees can even do better. Studies conducted by NASA in 1965 and 1967 found that most chimpanzee test subjects could survive up to three and a half minutes in vacuum conditions. Follow-up tests conducted months later even showed

that the chimps suffered zero lasting brain damage or loss of cognitive function. All of this is to say that Chell surviving for half a minute in the vacuum of space, like we see at the end of Portal 2, isn't just possible, it's highly likely. But wait, this is game theory. What have I ever concluded that a character could survive some horrific thing that happens to him in a video game? Feels, feel kind of dirty. And yet, from a scientific perspective, it's true. The lack of air in space isn't the thing that's gonna kill her.

It's the air back on Earth that's gonna do the job. You see, while Chell's literally hanging out on the surface of the moon, the portal is open. And that means that everything in the aperture science testing chamber is getting blown out into space. That includes Wheatley, the other AI cores, various lab equipment, as well as the air in the room itself. Watch the scene again. In that 28 seconds, she isn't just drifting calmly. She is getting blown out by the constant rush of air that's coming from the portal. Watching the scene, have you ever thought about that? She's on the moon's surface. Shouldn't the gravity of the moon be pulling her down?

No. And the air? coming out of the portal on Earth is why. In space, there's no air. On Earth, there's lots of air. And that creates a massive pressure difference. And when there's a pressure difference, nature rushes to balance it. Meaning that all the air on Earth is flooding out into space. Now, this is both good news and bad news for Chell. Good news, she can still breathe. It means a lot of air is rushing past her face. Great. It also means that, yes, she would be able to hear Wheatley talking to her. Which, I guess, is either good news or bad news. depending on how much you wish this guy would shut up by this point. Let go, I'm still connecting! But the really bad news is, well, high-speed winds can be hazardous to humans, even more hazardous than the vacuum of space. In 1946, NACA, no, that's not a typo back in 1946, more than a decade before the first satellite was ever launched into orbit,

the pre-space precursor to NASA, was NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Anyway, in 1946, NACA conducted a test to see how high-speed winds would affect a human passenger. Producing this highly amusing video where we see what happened to a human face when exposed to wind speeds of 457 miles an hour or 209 meters per second. It just ends with the end on screen. What? This is a scientific film, it isn't like some cinematic masterpiece. By the way, if you're wondering, they weren't torturing this poor guy for the heck of it.

Fighter pilots need to be able to eject from their planes when traveling at high speeds, and it's useful to know just how fast their plane can be moving while still allowing them to survive being ejected. So how does that compare to the speed of the air? flowing out of the portal in Portal 2. Luckily, we have everything that we need to calculate it. Based on the pressure of Earth's atmosphere and the pressure on the surface of the moon, which is almost but not quite a perfect vacuum, we can calculate that the air would be traveling at a speed of 407 meters per second,

910 miles an hour. That is literally double the 457 mile per hour winds that we saw in the NACA video. So, could Chell survive that? A wind speed of 910 miles an hour is equal to miles an hour, 1.2. That is 1.2 times the speed of sound. For reference, modern fighter jets flat a max speed of around Mach 2.8. And in the real world, aircraft safety specification state that pilots can safely eject at a rate of 870 miles per hour, or 389 meters a second. And while 910 miles per hour is a little bit above that officially approved safe zone, there are a few cases of pilots ejecting at velocities higher than that and still surviving. with the record being incredibly over Mach 3. Admittedly, that was done using specialized protective gear, being exposed to wind speeds of over Mach 2.6 or 1,980 miles an hour,

is when you have to start worrying about things like, you know, the wind being strong enough to actually tear the skin off your face. But the long and short of it is that at the wind speed she's experiencing, Chell actually has a decent shot of staying fine. Well, she does have to live out the rest of her life back on Earth, where things are actually kind of far from being fine these days, But still, she won't be dying out in space anytime soon, which is honestly not too far different from what they depicted in the game. Go figure that a game all about solving science puzzles actually adheres to real-world science in one of its most extreme and unbelievable cutscenes.

But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.