Food Theory: Can You Kill Someone With A POTATO? (Dream SMP)

You’re racing against the clock someone is after you you need to defend yourself you scan the kitchen for anything that you can use to protect yourself a knife cliche frying pan what are you a disney princess then you see it yeah now you’re talking Hello internet welcome to food theory the show that’s more spud than stud and welcome to minecraft weekend well we’re over here talking about the deadly science of minecraft potatoes over on game theory we’re delving into all of the wild wild editions in minecraft’s latest update and talking all about the

Warden the skulk and the lore of the newly added music disc number five so be sure to check out that video after you’re done with this one but before you hop over there you’re probably wondering why i’m also talking about minecraft and specifically potatoes over here on food

Theory well for that i actually have to blame you you see i’m always on the lookout for your episode suggestions over on twitter at matpat gt if you’re interested in submitting something and recently one request in particular caught my attention at x shadowcasterx reached out to me with this tweet quote

I need to know if you could kill someone with a raw potato like what is the science of tommy and its death on the dream smp can someone actually die from blunt force trauma with a potato now at this point you’re either reliving that moment because it lives rent-free in

Your head or you’re wondering how i just accidentally misspelled dream simp and who the heck tommy knit is so let’s just get all on the same page because whether or not you watch minecraft youtuber soap operas this is gonna be a nutritious theory that you’re not gonna wanna miss

The dream smp is a minecraft survival multiplayer server a special section of the internet just for playing survival games in minecraft that’s been turned into a playground a performance stage for a group of friends to act out a story using structured improv think of this thing as a soap opera being

Performed live using minecraft characters and twitch streamers as the actors it is without exaggeration one of the biggest things to have happened in the gaming scene from the past two years and in that amount of time the story has produced dozens of iconic moments but

Few of them have had the level of drama and pure shock as tommy in its final death you know why i won’t because i’m leaving this prison stop it stop it i’m on two hearts he’s dead i’ve seen his grave his grave is real his corpse is that why don’t you

Go see him no stop it that my friends is the stunned silence of a man who’s just been clubbed to death by a raw potato not just any man either tommy was in many ways the main protagonist of the dream smp and a few swings of a potato the story suddenly

Lost its main character and what more glorious way to bid a due to this mortal coil than at the hands of a potato wielding madman and there he sat in the cold blackness of death from henceforth one stream later he’d be brought back to life thereby negating the three strikes

Your dead rule on the server and solidifying dream’s abilities as a god-capable revival but still the potato death was a pretty big shock to any fans of this thing okay but enough talk about minecraft drama it’s time to talk tuber this is the food channel after all we

Need to answer at x shadowcasterx’s question could dream have actually done this is this just a classic case of video game logic going or could you actually kill someone with a potato clearly i’m going to be the first person to conduct a scientific investigation into the potential lethality of taters

So wait what’s this risk assessment of blunt ballistic impact trauma due to potato cannons huh okay so apparently i’m not the first person to scientifically investigate the risks of getting clobbered by a rogue spud sure the academic research paper is looking at potato guns but it’s a good enough

Place to begin and a good reminder that anything can be lethal if it’s moving fast enough however a high-speed projectile is a far cry from what we’re actually talking about here dream’s weapon of choice was a potato of the handheld variety less potato gun and more potato club potato club just sounds

Like a very carb-heavy sandwich to be honest obviously his potato club isn’t gonna be striking with the same amount of speed and most of us intuitively understand that faster equals more dangerous a high speed highway crash is going to be a lot more deadly than a low-speed fender bender but it’s

Important to understand why weapons like bullets are sometimes described as kinetic projectiles or kinetic energy weapons and that’s largely because their deadliness comes from the kinetic energy that is the energy of motion if you paid attention in physics class you might remember that kinetic energy equals one-half mass times velocity squared

That mass part shouldn’t be all that surprising getting hit with a heavy thing hurts more than getting hit with a light thing double the mass double the kinetic energy obvious logic is obvious but the velocity squared part is what makes speed particularly deadly double the speed and you get four times the

Kinetic energy ten times the speed a hundred times the kinetic energy that’s how a tiny bullet despite being a lot lighter than your fist or a potato can be that much more lethal it’s traveling so fast so to understand how much kinetic energy tommy and its poor little

Noggins absorbing each time he gets bopped on the head we need to know the mass of the potato and how fast it’s moving the current record holder for world’s largest potato weighed in at 11 pounds or 5 kilos but if you just go to your local grocery and pick out the

Biggest potato you can find it’s going to be closer to around 1.75 pounds or 0.8 kilos fun fact the us department of agriculture actually has official standards about the diameter and weight of what can be legally defined as a large potato medium potato or small potato because without those guard rails

In place the starchy root vegetable economy would be completely out of control so the next time you hear someone dismissively refer to something as small potatoes you know that technically they’re talking about something that weighs less than six ounces and is less than two and a half inches in diameter actually they’re

Probably not using that precise of a definition because nobody actually knows about official food labeling guidelines but now you know thanks to me and thanks to the fine folks over at the usda who are responsible for coming up with those sorts of definitions anyway moving into other variables of our equation as for

Speed of the attack most professional boxers are able to punch with a speed of 25 miles an hour or 11.2 meters per second though the best pros can reach speeds of over 30 miles an hour or 13.4 meters per second the world’s fastest punch hit at a speed of 45 miles an hour

Or 20 meters per second we do want to give dream his best shot at this but we also have to acknowledge that you know he’s not a boxer not yet at least creator clash 2 is coming anyway let’s go with the average of 25 miles per hour

At least to start with plugging all of that into our kinetic energy formula using metric units like the civilized world 0.8 kilograms times 11.176 meters per second squared equals 99.92 joules of kinetic energy meaning a top-tier boxer smack me in the face with a large potato would be delivering

Almost exactly 100 joules of kinetic energy which as usual when we calculate energy on these channels means absolutely nothing to anyone is it a lot it turns out uh maybe it’s actually just a matter of probability the faster an object is moving when it hits you in the

Head the more likely it’s going to kill you shock of all shocks according to a report titled lethality criteria for debris generated from accidental explosions the probability that getting hit with an object will be fatal is shown by this graph i know this looks suspiciously like 11th grade math which

None of us really want to revisit but stick with me here the probability of a blow being fatal increases logarithmically this is also known as an s curve we don’t need to know the ins and outs but one thing’s plain to see that number smack dab in the middle

There represents 100 joules a number that we just calculated for our pro potato punch getting hit with that much kinetic energy presents a 50 chance of fatality basically a coin flip as to whether mr potato is gonna be lethal when he collides with mr head that said

We need to consider that in our dream smp scenario tommy and it is being hit repeatedly by dream each blow with a 50 chance of fatality if each hit with a potato decreases tommy’s health by half a heart and he starts the interaction with 10 hearts that means that he’s

Being hit at least 20 times at 50 odds per hit the chance that number of blows is not fatal is a dismal zero zero zero zero nine percent practically zero probability of survival meaning that in this scenario the likelihood of death by youtuber tuber is assured but okay you

Say so much of this has to do with the power of the blow behind the potato a spud is only as powerful as the idiot deciding to use it as a blunt force weapon we calculated a modified pro boxer landing this punch but why would

We assume that dream is a pro boxer by any standard well first off it’s not that unreasonable to think that he would be strong it’s confirmed that dream possesses special powers including raising people from the dead encoding the actual game i mean it is the dream

Smp after all for all we know he could be canonically way stronger than a pro boxer we also know that in the world of minecraft characters are able to carry like infinite amount of materials so you know there is some level of super strength here that said for the purpose

Of this kind of discussion and to make sure dream doesn’t have an unfair advantage in calculations let’s run another scenario assuming that he has no special strength or skills he’s just a regular joe a regular steve more accurately who can throw a punch or wield a pickaxe but isn’t going to be

Stepping into the ring with tyson anytime soon or jake paul what even is boxing anymore for this calculation we’ll use a study of 16 amateur boxers that found that the typical punch ranged in speed from 6.7 meters a second to 9.5 meters per second let’s take the average

Of those numbers again nothing special there and assume that someone is trained enough with their potato punches that they can swing a spud with that speed run in the calculation again 0.8 kilograms times 8.1 meters per second squared and you get 52 joules of kinetic energy going back to our graph we see

That getting hit with an object with 52 joules of energy gets us around a 10 chance of lethality in other words it definitely can be fatal but it probably won’t be provided of course it only happens once however remember dream is delivering a rapid flurry of at least 20

Potato strikes each landing with a velocity of an average punch it’s only a matter of time before that 10 chance of death becomes an inevitability the probability of surviving all 20 hits that we see in this clip to bring tommy down from 10 full hearts to 0 is 12

It’s not nothing but odds are definitely not in your favor by sheer probability 1 in every 10 punches kills you there are twice that number of punches happening here odds of killing you are now almost 90 those are the kind of odds that not even tom cruise could survive in top gun 2

Which honestly sounds like it should be an episode of film theory in conclusion that scene of dream smacking tommy ended up side the head over a dozen times and the tragic loss of our beloved brit by spud to the dome isn’t just a case of video game logic in fact it’s almost

Exactly how this sort of scenario would play out in real life i swear it’s the episodes that i think are going to wind up the craziest that ultimately end up working out you end up cooking your steak in the dryer surprisingly i don’t even know anymore but i do know that

Aside from the fact that tommy was immediately revived and dream broke all his canon rules seemingly for the sake of convenience this bud smackdown is a hundred percent supported by science but hey lunch and raw potatoes might restore your health and minecraft but they’re not doing all that much for you up here

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