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

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he SOLVES Mario's fireballs, and what they really are once and for all! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Pedro Freitas, Tyler Mascola and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

This is so cool. Actually it's totally hot. Watch out Gumbas, here comes Matteo! Actually, come to think of it, this is probably a lot more humane than stomping on their heads too. I've always felt bad about crushing another living creature to death with my own body weight. Yahu! Here we go! I'm in agony! Excruciating agony! This has to be the worst way to die!

Why? Why would you do this? Why? Why? Why couldn't I die like my brother? brother Tony he was crested a single instant his life ended with no suffering mama me oh internet welcome to game theory the show that's like a super mushroom for your brain making it grow to twice the size which also means that it be so big that it barely fit into your skull anymore oh god what have i done so many big-brained tiny skull theorists out there anyway super mario 3d world just made its way to the nintendo switch i gotta say it's great news because it's truly one of the We use best titles, which, come to think of it ain't as high of praise as I originally thought,

considering the top 10 list for that system includes a remake from two generations before, a cross-platform indie game, a less good version of a Switch game, and the original tech demo that it came packaged with. Not a lot of competition there. Anyway, it's a great Mario game, and it would be a shame for it to remain trapped on a system that nobody bothered to own. It's also great news because it gives me an excuse to talk about the popular plumber and one of gaming's most iconic power-ups, the Fireflower. This one's been around since the original Super Mario Bros.

It has made an appearance in basically every Mario game since. Even Super Mario Odyssey, which replaced the traditional Mario power-ups with hat powers, still managed to squeeze in a cameo appearance for the Fireflower, with Peach showing up wearing a traditional kimono in Bowser's Japanese-inspired fortress, decorated with, you guessed it, the Fireflower. Anyway, we all know how this works, right? Needs no introduction, considering it is the most iconic power-up of all time. I feel like that's not even overstated.

it. Mario and Fireflower. I mean, name a more iconic duo. You can't, but you can try down in the comments below. With one touch, it turns Mario's outfit red and white while granting him the all-important ability to throw fireballs. Simple as that, clear as crystal. Or is it? I literally just said we all know how this works, but do we? Have we stopped to question what exactly is going on here? What are Mario's fireballs exactly? I mean, they can't just be pure flame. After all, flames are just burning gas. And as such, we'd expect hot gas to rise, but what Mario is using is affected by gravity. These things are being pulled downward and not just being pulled downward, but also bouncing off the ground. It's a detail that we all take for granted because we've seen it going on for decades, but any explanation for what he's actually using here has to account for that bouncing. And then you got the fact that despite supposedly being balls of fire, Mario still seems

perfectly capable of using them underwater. So this has to be some sort of special flame. In short, we have three things to answer if we want to address this properly. One, what can get set on fire, two, bounce off the ground, and three, 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. Now, this isn't the first time that I've tried to tackle the topic of Mario's Fireballs. Back in 2017, I did a collab with Grant Thompson, the King of Random to solve how Fireballs could burn underwater. I count myself extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to spend that time with him because two years ago He tragically passed away much much too soon rest in peace buddy you are remembered now on the beach that day what grant wanted to test was thermite a flammable metal powder that's used in welding

Scale of danger from 1 to 10. What would you list this as I'm gonna put this up there a solid 10 Wow that is some quality YouTube science thing going on we packed tennis balls full of thermite and dropped them underwater to see if they'd continue to burn I love the smell of thermite in the afternoon. Matt Pat is a natural thermite grenade maker. Let's not spread the word about that one too widely, shall we? And the conclusion was that, yeah, thermite did manage to continue burning while submerged in water, giving us underwater fireballs. See, if I was a kupa, I would totally be afraid of that. I'm a human and I'm totally afraid of that, so good job Mario. However, while it did prove the point of underwater fire, I wasn't convinced that we had solved what Mario's fireballs actually were. I mean, one, I don't think Mario's carrying around extra tennis balls in his overall pockets just to load up with flammable powder, but more importantly, the thermite reaction leaves behind molten iron, and I just don't see a lot of

slag metal laying around the mushroom kingdom after I'm done rampaging through it with my fireballs a death, which means today I want to look for an alternate solution. To start with, we need to establish one thing. Mario's fireballs aren't just pure fire. In fact, technically they can't 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 that you probably mentally picture when you hear the word fire. Now why bother to make the distinction between fire and flame? Well, we know that a pure flame wouldn't look like what we see Mario tossing.

Pure hot gas wouldn't bounce along the ground like a rubber ball. Obviously, Mario is throwing some kind of chemical cocktail that's able to sustain an ongoing combustion reaction. It's more of a flaming projectile. Thus, Mario's fireball wouldn't be a ball of fire so much as it is a ball on fire. Of course, that still leaves us with the obvious question, a ball of what? What does it take to create a flaming, bouncing underwater projectile? Well, it all comes down to having the ingredients needed to sustain a fire. If you've ever paid attention during Smokey the Bear's safety lessons,

you might remember the concept of the fire triangle, which is a simple model of the three basic ingredients that you need to sustain a fire. A fire needs one, heat, two, fuel, and three, an oxidizing agent. Technically, the fire triangle recently poke evolved into a fire tri-force, but for today, the triangle is gonna be enough. Anyway, without any of these three ingredients, the chemical reaction just can't continue. For instance, 99% of the time the oxidizing agent is just oxygen. Air. We happen to live on a planet with a lot of oxygen just 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. Covering the fire deprives it of oxygen. Thus, the triangle is broken and fire can't survive. This is also how most fire extinguishers work. They spray carbon dioxide, which surrounds the fire, effectively smothering it. Or, you know, you could always rely on your good old pal H2O, just drop the flaming object into a bucket of water and bam. No oxygen, which means no combustion reaction, which means no more flames.

Except clearly Mario's fireballs do work underwater, which leaves us with the big question of how. Or as one popular Japanese V-tuber put it, Water in the fire, why? Well, like I said, 99% of the time, oxygen, is the oxidizing agent for a fire, which leaves 1% of the time when it's not, and Mario's fireballs apparently fall into that 1%, a rare edge case, a situation where you use an oxidizing agent

other than 02 to create your fire. Now, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this stuff out, but it would help, because this is one of the big problems that actual rocket scientists have to deal with. Think about it. In space, there's no air. That means that in space, there's no oxygen floating around to be a part of your combustion reaction.

So how do you get a combustion reaction in the vacuum of space? Well, one answer is to bring along your own oxygen in liquid form. That's what was used by the Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engine that was used on the NASA Space Shuttle. Though, that probably isn't going to work as well for Mario's purposes, considering that liquid oxygen needs to be stored at very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very low temperatures. We're talking in the minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit or negative 240 Celsius range. In fact, the RS-25 is actually classified as a cryogenic rocket engine because its propellants are stored at such low temperatures. Now, I know Mario can handle the cold. He does tend to run through icy landscapes in just his overalls,

but carrying sub-zero cryogenic iceballs in his pants only to ignite them later doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But really, any source of oxygen will do. For instance, the reason thermite powder was able to burn underwater in that king of random experiment was that it's made of aluminum powder and iron oxide. The aluminum metal acts as the fuel and the iron oxide, as you might be able to tell from the word oxide, provides oxygen. Just like oxyclean is powered by the air you breathe, activated by the water to you and I drink. See how you have some oxygen o's floating around near the edges of its chemical structure? Well, that right there is why it's your oxidizing agent.

Fire is basically just 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, confusingly enough, is the gaining of electrons. It's called reduction because you're gaining electrons which are negatively charged. So you're losing charge, thus reduction. Anyway, it's just a fancy way of saying electron swap. And if you look at what oxygen is actually doing here,

its role is to accept electrons from the fuel. So in our quest to figure out what's going on with Mario's fireballs, all we need is something that has a similar kind of chemical composition to what we saw in the thermites iron oxide. Examples of oxidizing agents that have been used in rockets include nitrogen tetroxide, which was used by the Apollo 11 lunar module, an ammonium per chlorate, which is frequently used in rocket boosters. See all those nice juicy O's waiting around the edges of the chemical structure waiting to accept electrons? And you see, it's that second one, the ammonium per chlorate that I want to focus on, because unlike O2 oxygen, which is a gas at room temperature,

ammonium per chlorate is a solid. And that's good because remember the three things that we need to make Mario's fireballs happen. It needs to be able to bounce, which means that it needs to be affected by gravity, and, you know, solids tend to bounce better than gases. Being a solid also means that we can mix it with the fuel source. 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 neat little package, just like we're seeing happen with Mario's fireballs. For the fuel source, most rockets just use powdered aluminum. The same kind of stuff that I talked about with the thermite, so we're going to go with that. But there's still one missing piece here. We need a way for all of it to stick together. And it's here that Mario's fireballs really deliver the surprise. It all comes down to rubber. Yeah, silicon rubber. No joke, here on YouTube, you can find people doing DIY, make your own rocket fuel videos,

where they bind aluminum powder and ammonium per chlorine. Which again, remember, is the same stuff that NASA is using in their actual rocket boosters. And they're combining these things with tubes of silicone rubber that you can find at Home Depot. rubber, as in bouncy 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 doing. In 2013, private space company Virgin Galactic announced that the latest tests of their suborbital space vehicle were being done with fuel that used a key ingredient for synthetic rubber. Virgin Galactic's own press releases described the fuel as quote, rubber-like. So what are Mario's fireballs exactly? Well, they're quite literally an advanced form of rocket fuel, rubbery bouncy rocket fuel, aluminum powder plus ammonium per chlorate plus a little bit of silicone rubber to bind it all together. That is, in my estimation, the only way to explain how they're able to burn continuously, even when underwater or in the vacuum-like conditions of Super Mario Galaxy.

It's also an explanation for why they bounce like a rubber ball when he throws them. It also also explains why enemies die on contact, considering that solid rocket boosters can reach temperatures of more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's 2,760 degrees Celsius. Sorry, Goomba, that's gonna leave a mark. Which leaves the only thing unexplained in this theory is why it all comes from a flower. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching!