Game Theory - Sonic is TOO Powerful! (Sonic the Hedgehog)

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he explains how Sonic actually BROKE reality! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick and Justin Kuiper Editors: Tyler Mascola, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Hello internet, welcome to game theory. We've tackled the subject of Sonic Speed a lot over the years, and I have to admit, I've been pretty hard on the old blue blur. First we concluded that he isn't actually the supersonic hedgehog that he claims to be. Then we concluded that his running would completely destroy his fragile body. Then we proved that his chaos emeralds aren't even emeralds. Even I start to get tired of being a naysayer after beating up on a franchise for so long. So you know what? New resolution.

I'm gonna be pro-sonic. I'm gonna take a page from Jim Carrey's playbook. and try to come up with a theory where I say yes. A yes man. Wow. Today I'm gonna be Sonic's Yes Man, a yes-math, if you will. So what part of the Sonic lore can I try to prove with actual science? And to show that I'm trying to stay impartial and abandon any previous biases I might have against this character,

I'm gonna ask a completely unbiased source for assistance here. Hey, computer, what's an easily defensible part of the Sonic lore that I can back up with actual science? Do a theory about the time travel in Sonic CD. What? You've got to be kidding me. We're going to talk about that Sonic game? The one with time travel. Where Sonic can travel back and forth between the future, the past, and the present. Do I even have to start with all the paradoxes that that would...

No, no, no, new mat pat, bad. We're going to try to say yes today. I am sure that if we just dig into the science, we can find some sort of justification for Sonic's ability to travel through time. Now, for those of you asking, was that really part of Sonic Canon? The answer is yes. Might not have experienced it firsthand since it only appeared in Sonic CD. Well, that and as a cameo in Sonic Mania, which maybe a lot of you did play.

But Sonic CD's the game where it's one of the main gameplay mechanics. Sonic starts off in the present, but by speeding past signs, either labeled past or future, he can travel to the past or future versions of those stages. The first time Sonic travels to the future, he finds himself in a ruined and decayed world. And the main goal of the game is to change the timeline by collecting enough time stones. It's basically the plot of Avengers Endgame, except with a blue protagonist, looking to collect a bunch of multicolored gems. Oh my gosh, Sonic CD is just Avengers Endgame, isn't it?

So let's start with what's probably the least controversial part of this, right? The idea that Sonic can somehow use his super speed to travel forward through time into the future. While it might seem like this breaks the fundamental laws of physics, I mean, how can mere seconds seem to pass for Sonic while the rest of the world ages forward by seven decades, this is actually supported by the scientific concept known as time dilation, something that I talked about way, way, way back in episode one of game theory. By the way, do not go back there for your own sanity. It is not a pretty place. Though I gotta admit it was a pretty ballsy move of 2011 Matt Pat to try and tackle special relativity for the very first episode of his little show about video games. Anyway, I've gotten a lot better at explaining things since then, and to be honest, episodes have gotten a lot longer since episode one, so I've got more time to explain it, so you know what? Let's take another crack at it. Let's start with an easy example, shall we?

You and your buddy Sonic the Hedgehog are jogging along the side of the road. You at a speed of 5 miles an hour, or 8 kilometers per hour, Sonic at 50 miles per hour, or 80kph. Meanwhile, the car is driving past you are moving at 60 miles an hour, or 96kph. So, from your perspective, those cars are. traveling 55 miles an hour, 88kpH. Their speed minus your speed. From Sonic's much faster perspective, the cars are traveling a lot slower. Only 10 miles per hour, 16kpH, because he's moving so much faster. That is the principle of relativity. The car is always traveling the same speed, but relative to me, it seems to be going much faster than it is relative to Sonic. But you see, light works differently. And here's where special relativity comes in. The speed of light is constant, no matter what

frame of reference you're referring to. Whether you're standing there or you're running at 5 miles per hour, heck, Sonic's over there running at 95% the speed of light. It doesn't matter. Light will always seem to be moving at the same speed. But how can that be? Surely if you and Sonic are moving at different speeds, then you'd perceive moving light differently. The same way you perceive that moving car differently, right? Well, you would think that, but that's just not how it works in the real world. A quick example, literally. The speed of light is reference to the 300 million meters per second, right? So let's say that you're staying still and you observe light for one second You see it travel 300 million meters, but let's say Sonic is running really really fast say half the speed of light

150 million meters per second and he sees that same light well to him the light is still the same speed 300 million meters per second but for that to happen in a second it has to travel whatever speed Sonic is going plus an additional 300 million meters but light can't be going 300 million meters per second for us and 450 million meters per second for Sonic. A thing can't go two separate speeds at the same time, or can it? And you see, that is what makes this relativity so special. The weird thing about the way light moves through space time is this. Light's speed is always remaining constant. But speed is just distance traveled over a course of time.

In this case, a distance of 300 million meters to me and 450 million meters to Sonic. So for the speed of light to stay equal while the distances are changing, it means the time of one second has to change as well. So far, we've assumed that one second always equals one second, but in this example, one second is no longer just one second. Or, more specifically, one second for you, isn't the same as one second for Sonic. That is how light can travel two different distances in the same amount of time,

because it's not actually the same amount of time. The definition of one second depends on how you're going. All of this is a very long-winded way of describing the phenomenon of time dilation, which says when two objects move through space at different speeds, they also move through time at different speeds. Faster moving objects seem to travel through time slower than their stationary counterparts. All of this seems like the kind of wonky physics thing that would only work in theory. So the question is, does it hold up in real-world practice? It turns out, yeah. If you've ever used a GPS system, you've probably connected to a satellite that was traveling around the Earth,

somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 kilometers an hour. It's about twice the speed of Earth's fastest aircraft. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, objects orbiting Earth at that speed should appear to run slower by about 38,000 nanoseconds per day. And wouldn't you know it, but this is exactly what happens. In fact, it's become a bit of a problem for real-world engineers. It means that satellites that we rely on for data

can actually become desynced with clocks that are back here on Earth, which can lead to things like software glitches glitches when engineers don't account for them. The DLDR here is that time travel is a very real thing that you play a small part in each and every time you use a GPS satellite to locate the nearest jamba juice. Of course, that's an example of a very tiny amount of time dilation. If Sonic wants to go so fast that decades pass on Earth, or Mobius, while only a relatively small amount of time passes for him, he's gonna have to go really, really fast.

Even if Sonic manages to run so fast that he's traveling at 99% the speed of light, time will only seem to pass 13.6% the speed for Sonic that it does for the rest of the planet. In short, if Sonic wants to travel forward in time by 10 years like we see him do in Sonic CD, he'd have to run at 99% the speed of light for one year, four months, and two weeks. In short, the idea of him running so fast that decades seem to pass in the blink of an eye like we see in Sonic CD isn't likely to happen unless he finds some way to surpass the speed of light. And as we all know, since I've been saying it a lot for the better part of the past decade, I don't think video game Sonic is that fast. Enter something that I've always feared talking about on this show, the Archie Comics. You see, in the games, the fastest Sonic ever runs is Lightspeed. And even that's kind of debatable. Sonic Adventure first introduces players to what will eventually become a regular power-up,

the Light Shoes, which supposedly give the Blue Blur the ability to travel at Lightspeed. Now you've got LightSpeed shoes. The Lightspeed Dash let you raise you. Face toward rings at light speed. The same holds true for Movie Sonic. As I calculated in a previous film theory, movie Sonic is able to hit near light speed, allowing him to fire off EMP-style blasts.

But there's one other major source of Sonic Canon, the Sonic Archie Comics. 290 issues spread across 24 years filled with panel after panel of absolutely insane physical feats performed by none other than our favorite Chili Dog Chomp Inchance In the special Super Sonic versus HyperNuckles, a battle between Sonic and Knuckles destroys an entire dimension. Boom, just gone outright. In Issue 125, he runs fast enough to not only escape a black hole, but creates enough force to reverse the spin of a black hole.

And if you thought that sounds ridiculous, the ensuing explosion shoots him 849,000 light years away. But perhaps my personal favorite of the bunch, issue number 71, Robotnik, attacks using a time beam and Sonic runs faster than time itself to save the day. What does that even mean? Well, we can actually calculate it. In another of the one-off specials, the Sonic Blast comic, Sonic, in what we're told, is faster than the eye can see, forms a ball that's made out of water, and, quote, before the physics of displacement can happen, forms it into a ball, and throws it at a robot bird. Now, that alone would give us the information that we need, but the comic takes it one step

Further, telling us that he's able to do all of this in point, oh god, in point zero zero zero, oh, this is like an eye test. Point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one milliseconds. That is 12 zeros there, people. To be exact, he's doing all of that in 100 ato seconds. For context, an att a second is one quintillionth of a second. An attosecond is to a second, what a second is to 31.71 billion years. 100 a second is a third of the amount of time it takes for an electron to transfer between atoms. So does this mean that we finally found a version of Sonic that's able to break light speed?

Oh, buddy! You betcha! When you run the numbers, in 100 a second at a seconds, light is traveling point 0-0-0-0-0-0-3 meters, 30 nanometers. To give me some context, a sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick. In that same amount of time, Sonic scoops water and throws it at an evil robot bird. In other words, the speeds that Sonic is traveling in the Archie Comics absolutely crushes light speed, which makes this trip to the future via time dilation in this amount of time from Sonic CD absolutely 100% plausible.

But what does it mean to travel faster than the speed of light? After all, our existing understanding of physics is built on the idea that the speed of light can't be surpassed and yet here's Sonic doing it for the funzies. Well, that question of course has drawn the attention of scientists with some of the most interesting results coming from physics researchers at Michigan Technological University. By their calculations if a traveling person or in our case too cool for school hedgehog passes a certain speed the ratio of the travelers time to the passage of time back home will actually become a negative value.

Meaning that as time seems to move forward for Sonic, time would actually move backward on Earth. You heard that right. We've actually solved the other harder part of our Sonic CD time travel puzzle. Namely, how Sonic manages to travel backwards in time. Theoretically speaking, he can go back in time if he travels fast enough.

How fast are we talking here? About 2,726 times the speed of light, which again, in the Archie comics, is something that he is somehow capable of doing. So for the second time in one episode, I confirm again that something seen in a Sonic game is plausible the exact way that we see it play

out in said game. Except, you know, I can't let him get off that easily. I'm a child of Nintendo. Kirby is my homeboy and Luigi is my plumber of choice. I can't just let Sonic get away from an episode unscathed. Because, as you can imagine, traveling nearly 3,000 times

the speed of light comes with a certain set of consequences. You might think that this is the part where we get into time paradoxes. What happens if Sonic goes back in time and kills his parents before his birth, something like that, but he's actually got much bigger problems on his hands. See, if he leaves Mobius and then through time dilation tries to return before he initially left, we run into a basic physics problem, which is that his body has mass and is made of matter. So where did that matter come from? Imagine if Sonic ran away and then returned five minutes before he left. That would mean that there are just now two Sonics existing at the same time where there was only one before.

So the question really is where did the other Sonic come from? You can't just Create matter out of nothing, can you? Well, as it turns out, no. The returning Sonic, the one that experienced the negative time progression relative to Mobius, is, well, it's not really understood fully because this is strictly theoretical, but the researcher's best conclusion is that this new Sonic would be made of exotic negative mass. And if this exotic negative mass came into contact with the original mass, it would be similar to matter meeting antimatter, and the two would annihilate each other. All this means is that the old sci-fi trope of don't go back in

time and touch yourself or else you'll explode is, well, it's a lot more true to life than I think most of us imagine. But to this, you might propose an easy solution. Sonic could just go back in time before he was born. He can't meet himself in the past if he didn't exist back then, can he? But here's where you're wrong. Every molecule, every atom, every subatomic particle that is a part of Sonic, was once a part of some other being or some other object. You know the whole thing about the water cycle, where the water that you drink today might have one time been a dinosaur's drinking water, repeatedly being cycled through the water cycle of evaporation and precipitation for centuries until the day it wound up in your glass.

Well, think that, but on a molecular, atomic, and subatomic level, the carbon atoms in your muscles were probably once a part of some other living thing. Maybe they were previously part of the cow that turned into your steak that you ate for dinner. Before that, they were part of the grass that the cow ate. The circle of life! In fact, the further back in time, Sonic goes, the more scattered those subatomic particles are going to be, and the greater chance that he has of randomly running into a particle that just so happens to end up as a part of him. The faster he goes, the more particles he encounters, and the greater the risk of his total annihilation.

So there you have it, friends. Sonic is indeed the fastest thing alive. Maybe not in the video games, maybe not in the movies, but certainly in the comics where his speeds crush that of light, time, and all-known physics. Except there's one catch. Every second that he spends running around in the past is a threat to his very existence. And when the positive mass of past Sonic meets the negative mass of time traveler Sonic, well, that is what we like to call a Sonic boom.

But like literally a big boom blowing him out of existence. Anyway, that is just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.