Episode 151: How would you improve Quidditch?
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On this episode of Absurd Hypotheticals, Marcus Lehner, Chris Yee, and Ben Storms improve sports that don’t exist!
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:06 - Marcus’s Answer - Quidditch
00:14:02 - Ben’s Answer - Pokemon Battles
00:24:41 - Chris’s Answer - Podracing
00:33:45 - Would you rather: 5% of the population have telepathy OR telekinesis?
00:41:13 - Outro
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TRANSCRIPTION
Marcus Lehner:
Hello everybody and welcome to Absurd Hypotheticals. The show where we overthink dumb questions so you don't have to. I'm your host Marcus Lehner and I'm joined here today by Chris Yee and Ben Storms. Say, hi, guys.
Chris Yee:
Hey. I'm Chris.
Ben Storms:
Hey. I'm Ben.
Marcus Lehner:
Are you guys ready to improve some more sports?
Chris Yee:
Maybe.
Ben Storms:
Sure.
Marcus Lehner:
Okay I was waiting for Ben to respond.
Ben Storms:
Maybe threw me for a loop a little bit.
Chris Yee:
Well that's because we're not improving real sports, we're doing fake sports.
Marcus Lehner:
We're going to improve fictional sports. Yes. Fantasy sports, sports that don't actually exist in the real world for one reason or the other. It's something we like to do on the show a bunch of times we improved lots of real sport. But I'm excited to get into these... and as promised in our episode preview, I'm going to start with our first fictional sport that I will improve, which is Quidditch from the Harry Potter universe.
Chris Yee:
There is a real version of this, right?
Marcus Lehner:
Yes, there is online rules for a real life version of Quidditch that you play like... I think it's with the football and you run around and depending on your setups. I've seen it played with made hoops. I've seen it played like lawn chairs a whole bunch of different things of... You're basically playing rugby but pretending it's Harry Potter related.
Ben Storms:
I remember back when we were in college there were teams that would play it over in Boston Common. And I would see it when I was walking by there sometimes.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's very much like a college sport.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
It's just that age group, is playing it. The college age group that we're not longer part of.
Chris Yee:
Haven't been for a long time.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
I know it's scary.
Chris Yee:
Still feels like it though.
Marcus Lehner:
My age starts with a 3. Who am I?
Marcus Lehner:
But Quidditch so, for those of you who are not familiar with the Harry Potter game or just want a quick reminder, basically, this game is played above the ground where two teams are flying on broomsticks. And there's two main goals: One of them is scoring goals. There's three hoops suspended in the air, that if you throw the ball or specifically the Quaffle through the hoop, you score 10 points; And then there is the golden Snitch, which is the most exciting aspect of the game. There's a tiny little ball that has wings that fleets around very fast, very hard to catch and if you catch that Snitch then it is worth 150 points and the game ends, generally with your victory.
Marcus Lehner:
So each team is composed of seven people. There are three chasers, two beaters, a keeper and a seeker. The keeper is just the goalee, he blocks the quaffle from going in the hoops. The chasers are basically the regular players, they are the ones that are trying to score, primarily. There's two beaters, who hit away bludgers. So in addition to the quaffle, that's the main ball, and the golden snitch which is like the bonus points ball, there's also two bludgers, which are effectively enchanted cannon balls that just try to bump into players. And the beaters, their job is to hit away the bludgers with bats. And they fly around kind of protecting their team from getting significantly injured.
Chris Yee:
Pretty dangerous sport.
Marcus Lehner:
And then the last player is the seeker, who is typically like the best part of the team. He's the only person allowed to catch the golden snitch. So his whole job is to go around the thing that's the bonus points. I'm going to start with my biggest hang up about this, which is the scoring system. Goals are worth 10 points, if you score on the other team you get 10 points going through the hoop. If you catch a golden snitch, the game immediately ends. And the golden snitch is worth a 150 points, which means, unless you have a 15 goal lead, whoever catches the snitch wins the game. Which really just doesn't make the game work at all, because it's just, who ever catches the snitch wins, and the rest of the things that they are doing doesn't matter.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Could you like end the game in just like two minutes?
Marcus Lehner:
You could. That's the whole thing. Like you could end the game in two minutes or it goes the other way if nobody can catch the freaking snitch.
Chris Yee:
Oh so. It keeps on going until you catch the snitch?
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
From the book, according to... I think it was Viktor Krum talking to Harry Potter. The longest Quidditch game lasted over three months. That's not okay. That's not a good game. It's not a good game.
Chris Yee:
What's the longest baseball game?
Marcus Lehner:
Not three months. I think it's 20 something innings. It was played over a couple of days.
Ben Storms:
There have been Cricket matches that gone multiple days or over a day, I think. But I think that's the closest they can get to. And its nowhere near months.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. And the things is it's not like it got postponed to the next day and they play it again. They had to get new players to work in shifts so other player could sleep. But I'll say this, I think it's a problem. What does J.K. Rowling think? Because J.K. Rowling herself replied to a tweet that was just, the scoring system of Quidditch makes no sense. From J.K. Rowling's twitter. "It makes total sense. There's glamor in chasing elusive lucky break, but team working persistence can still win the day. Everyone's vulnerable to blows of faith and obstructive people and success means rising above them. Quidditch is the human condition. You're welcome."
Chris Yee:
A lot of things she says are questionable.
Marcus Lehner:
You say team work and persistence can still win the game. That's not really true. 150 points is a 15 goal lead. It's not if you score 15 goals you win or if you catch the golden snitch you win. If you are leading by over a 150 points and then the other team decides to catch anyway, then it matters. Otherwise, it doesn't matter.
Chris Yee:
So if the other team is 15 goals ahead then... and you're the losing team then it makes sense for you not to catch the snitch, right?
Marcus Lehner:
Exactly. I won't get in to this. I actually removed it from my notes, because it'll just gets into too many complications. The league scoring system in Quidditch also includes how many points... You get points based on how many points you win by as well, as if you win or lose, which also add incentives not to catch the snitch at certain times. Where if both teams need a big win, they might just both refuse to catch the snitch until they are ahead by 20 goals. You can have position where, you have two 3rd place teams fighting over the league, and they both need to win by 300 points to qualify, and they both know that just way they will just play forever until they have an astronomical lead which may never happen. So, that's a whole another problem.
Marcus Lehner:
So luckily, to see how this sport got developed, where this whole golden snitch thing coming in and messing with this games coming from. There is a book that was released. Real life book, Quidditch Through The Ages, which is theoretically, it's an in fiction book that was released, it was fully written up and released in the world. I think it was probably charity thing, Quidditch Throughout The Ages. I will know that the book market was 14 Sickles and three Knuts.
Ben Storms:
Heh.
Marcus Lehner:
K-N-U-T-S. Knuts. Ben get your head off the gutter.
Ben Storms:
Too late.
Marcus Lehner:
So here's where the golden snitch came from. The history of the golden snitch, because the golden snitch was not always this little gold mechanical ball with wings. Back in the day, it was a snidget, which was a small spherical actual magic bird. Actual bird and that it was a living magic creature that was just like a little spherical bird, that looks like the Snitch if it was a real animal.
Marcus Lehner:
The Chief of the Wizards' Council, Barberus Bragge, just was watching a game or he was attending a Quidditch game and he just decided to start to release a snidget in the middle of the game, with a promise of 150 galleons, i.e. like real cash money, to whoever could catch it during the course of the game. What ended happening at that game was, a woman in the audience was like, "Oh my god, animal cruelty, save the snidget." And ran away with it. But the end result was that it's still caught on and then every game going forward had a live snidget in it that was people trying to catch during the game.
Marcus Lehner:
And by, "caught" it also explicitly means kill. And the only reason they went and evolve and created the mechanical one was they started to deplete the local snidget population to extinction. So, that's fun fact. Bird murder is the reason there's a golden snitch. And the only reason it's still part of that game even in their own history, is that it just was too popular they couldn't get rid of it.
Marcus Lehner:
So, that's kind of that. Two games combined that don't work together. Because now... like I said, there's three quarters of the balls and six out of seven of the teams are basically elaborate side show. Nothing besides the one dude catches the snitch matters.
Marcus Lehner:
But even more so than just function, like from a game design perspective not being particularly good. This sport's also kind of boring. Considering it's the top sports specifically for freaking wizards. Like who really cares about athletics, like your athletes are able to move around a bit better, when they could also like shoot fireballs or explode things at will. Like get some excitement going in these things. No one's excited to see people walking broomstick in the wizarding world, sure. For us muggles, yeah. "Hot shit. Oh my god. Flying around, that's cool." But it's like the scooter of the wizarding world. How many sports do we have that are played on scooters? None.
Chris Yee:
We should have more.
Marcus Lehner:
One scooter sport maybe.
Ben Storms:
I do love the idea that the equipment... aside from the flying brooms in Quidditch is madly recently cool. It's just like a goddamn bat. It's just like a bat.
Marcus Lehner:
Also this, it is a fancy bat. And that it's enchanted. And there's a whole back and forth of... they have keep making the bludgers more and more dangerous because the bats keep getting more and more magically reinforced, so the metal balls were no longer hard enough, so they had to like go from like Lead to Iron to make them stronger, so that they wouldn't get beat up too much, because they'll lose their aerodynamicness. So they decided just keep upping the danger level on that.
Ben Storms:
Okay. That's actually pretty hilarious.
Marcus Lehner:
It's also kind of hilarious where the explained reason, why you'd want to be a seeker or not is, the seeker is where the best player goes, and is the most popular and the most important. But because of that he's at them most risk of getting killed. That's the trade off. You have to choose if you care about the game enough to want to get murdered while playing it, if you want to be a seeker.
Marcus Lehner:
So without further ado, here's my proposal: First off, get rid of all the goal scoring nonsense. If the game is going to be about catching the snitch, and apparently we can't make it, not about catching the snitch, let's make it about actually catching the snitch; Second if it's about catching snitch, were going to add more snitches, because games could end too quickly. Like Chris, you were saying, it could end in two minutes if there's just one thing to do.
Marcus Lehner:
So I'm adding two more, and catching snitches is going to be just two out of three. Now we got some room to add some wizarding back end. Again, brooms, kind of boring, we got to do some cool wizard stuff. That's going to be cool even for the wizards. So what I want to see is, I want to see some transmogrification. So the hoops will no longer be goal post. The hoops will still be there but when you go through the goal post, it will transform you into a random animal or mythical creature. So now each game already is going to be different and you go through and, boom, you're now a hippogriff. And with that now we got some plays to play.
Marcus Lehner:
There's three hoops there's basically three size categories of creatures that you can go to. And that there's going to be three golden snitches corresponding to those size. You're going to three sub play fields. One's going to be real small, where like you go in and you're like a frog, or like a mouse or something.
Marcus Lehner:
Then you have the mid size animals, like wolves and eagles and things. And then you got the big hoop, that's going to be like dragons, and hippogriff, and basilisk, and all these crazy giant ones. So you basically have a big snitch, a medium snitch, and a small snitch.
Marcus Lehner:
And I'm going to say the players can just... you just go where you think your team needs help. You go and see your dude he turns into a worm, and you're like, "Ah shit, we're going to need some help in the small battle field. Let's see if we get a better animal." Your guy turns into dragon, it's like, "He can go solo that top thing."
Chris Yee:
Are they still on brooms? Are they still flying?
Marcus Lehner:
I was debating about that. And I think the answer is yes. So it'll depend on your animal of course. Not every animal can be quick coordinated enough to be on a broom stick.
Chris Yee:
Worm on a broom.
Marcus Lehner:
Worm on a tiny broom. You just have this little coffee stirring the little plastic coffee stoppers that looks like brooms. It will be those. And if your animal can ride a broom having a broom is still fair game. It really adds a new type of athleticism now that I think about it, because how coordinated are you as a frog? Are you a good frog? Are good as an eagle? Where are you naturally more athletically gifted? And now you got some stats going on, because pros will have their specialty animal, it's like, "Oh man, Viktor Krum, turned into a griffin again so were fucked, because he's just really good as a griffin." If he had turned into a toad he's really not good at those, so he would have trouble. And then see the pros with their stats for the animals. You can change up the pool of creatures between seasons to keep it fresh year after year. And you'll have multiple exciting things to watch simultaneously, because now excitement will be happening on three fronts, it's going to be like the NFL red zone but with just one wizard game.
Marcus Lehner:
And the scoring will make sense. You can actually just have some game tension with a simple 2 out of 3. You don't need to have 150 bonus points special to make your game work. Because it doesn't, it doesn't make it work. And that my friends is my plan for improving Quidditch.
Chris Yee:
I like it.
Ben Storms:
Great. It's not a bad plan. Way more magical.
Marcus Lehner:
Exactly. It's wizards. They literally could go anything. Anyway. Ben, what did you cover? Are you as angry bad as I am?
Ben Storms:
So I came in to mine quite angry. And became less angry as I have learned more. Through the power of knowledge I looked at pokémon battles. So for those of you who don't know what pokémon battles are, which I feel like, not going to lie, has to be a very, very small segment of people who will be listening to this podcast. Pokémon was a video game from... I guess the '90s. Was the first one in the '90s?
Marcus Lehner:
'90s is safe to say.
Ben Storms:
'90s is safe to say? Yeah.
Chris Yee:
I would think so.
Ben Storms:
Game Boy age. Where you collect these cute/sometimes scary monsters, that have all these cool abilities they do, and basically dog fight them. That's pretty much what it comes down to. You raise them and you fight them. And that's kind of what you do.
Chris Yee:
But they have cool abilities.
Ben Storms:
They have really cool abilities. Sometimes they're an actually dragon. Sometimes they're a 12 pounds fuzz ball that sings really good. Sometimes they're a weird burly muscle male with four arms. It just it could be anything.
Chris Yee:
Sometimes they're a lamp.
Ben Storms:
Sometimes they're a lamp. They got a little bit carried away, and ran out of ideas, as time went on. My favorite actually of that is... There's always the legendary pokémon that at first were like this big god birds and stuff, and then eventually it become wolf holding shield or wolf holding sword.
Marcus Lehner:
Or the ghost that just enchants appliances. Where it just like, "Welp, I am just flying washing machine. Yep."
Ben Storms:
Anyway. In the games, the way the battle works is pretty simple. You have up to six pokémon. And soon after that, one at a time they, they beat on each other until one them falls unconscious. And then the winner is the person whose team still has anyone on it, who's not unconscious. The game calls it, fainting, but I think that's either a mistranslation or trying to break it gently to the kids playing it, they're unconscious at best.
Marcus Lehner:
You bring them to the hospital and they get better, so it's not like they're dead.
Ben Storms:
Well not dead, but they didn't faint. You don't faint by being hit a bunch. That's not how a fainting word is. There are a thing about the pokémon battles is that, obviously, there is a whole structure to this. And the idea is, there's the Pokémon League. The way the league works is, there are eight gyms around, each gym has a leader who is its gym champion. For some reason, each of those gyms always has, which occurred type of pokémon in it. So all the pokémon there will be electric type or grass type, whatever, which goes against basically everything anyone tells you to do in making a team in pokémon. But I guess this people have their kink or whatever.
Marcus Lehner:
They're all very eccentric like he has all the electric pokémon and his personality is, "Hey, I'm electric."
Ben Storms:
Right exactly that's kind of how it goes.
Marcus Lehner:
Like it's just all very on brand. It's all about branding bed.
Ben Storms:
It really is about winning. If you defeat that gym leader you get a badge. If you get all eight badges, you get to fight the elite four, who are like the four super trainer type people. And then eventually the current champion, if you beat all of them you become the champion.
Ben Storms:
Flaws inherent in this system: One, it's pretty easy to just... through the power of persistence, get eight badges.
Marcus Lehner:
Well forgive to the young 10 year old boys.
Ben Storms:
Well, yeah. That's maybe the best point in favor of that, is that any random 10 year old can do it. It doesn't take a brain genius to figure out that if there's a gym following plants, you fight it with that breathes fire and go to town. It's not that complicated. And then once you have these eight badges, suddenly you're just stringing off five lucky wins in a row and to being the champion of pokémon, apparently, which feels like maybe not the most rigorous system for determining this. And I was all ready to go into this whole, different structure to do with this, you can do all these in a much more consistent way, and then I found out, that apparently... So I knew, and you may also know there was also a pokémon anime.
Ben Storms:
And in that there is actually pretty big change to this whole system: So one, there are more than eight gyms. It just that, in order to get to the next of competition you have to collect eight badges. It could be from any of the eight gym, just go around go to eight of them, get the badges; And then you can go to the Pokémon League Conference, which is basically, what I was going to suggest, a large scale tournament. Where you go there... It's kind of the Olympics, there's very much a Olympic torch and it lights this big torch with the flame on it or whatever, everything.
Ben Storms:
It's just most today thing where there is qualifying tournaments, where people get weeded out who are ready yet. And eventually you get down to the top 16, and those people will fight a single elimination tournament and who ever wins that, is the person who can go and attempt to challenge the elite four and become the champion.
Ben Storms:
And this is obviously a way better system. There's not this perpetual being a contender once you just kind beat eight people randomly. But there's still has major problem over all in pokémon battles, which is really just... When you sit down and look at it, why are we only fighting? Pokémon in a whole, they have all these weird abilities and all we do is make them hit each other. And they justify it in the game by saying pokémon fight on their own, it's the thing they do, and they enjoy it, apparently. Which I always thought was kind of weird thing. Dogs fighting fine. Dogs eat other animals in the wild.
Marcus Lehner:
Right.
Ben Storms:
The dogs love it. But it always felt very constrained to me, if all you're going to do is fight of course you're going to ignore the weird large mouse versus the literal dragon. So my solution to really make this whole system just seeing a little bit more is, move outside of just fighting. What I propose is basically a... for each of these conferences, will keep this conference system, because I think that does actually work pretty well. I think at the start of it, or maybe slightly before so you have a little bit of time to do some last minute training. You do basically a randomized decathlon. Well yes, there will be fighting in there. Probably with different type. You'll have like sumo, and just the traditional pokémon battles, of course, that are in there. But also like... I want to see Machamp, the four armed wrestler/bodybuilder, I want to see him knitting real good. I think it could do that the guy has four arms. That'll be fun.
Chris Yee:
Knitting in the decathlon?
Ben Storms:
Yeah. There are so many things this pokémon can do, that I want to give some of the more, let's say, unique ones a chance to shine. The ones that maybe can't survive getting punched by a four armed bodybuilder. I guess, really my main take away is that I feel like we are putting these pokémon in a box they don't belong to be in, where all they can be is a fighter. And whereas, I think if they have many other skills we can showcase instead.
Chris Yee:
Why isn't there a pokémon Olympics game? There should be.
Marcus Lehner:
There really should be. I'm going to make a semantic point for some of our poké fans out there, who are very familiar with the games, myself included. In some of the games, they have introduced non-fighting pokémon competition.
Ben Storms:
That is true. There's a-
Marcus Lehner:
There's a beauty contest one. And I think there is actually one area that has two or three Olympic type sports, like racing, I think is one of them. It's probably like racing, weightlifting, and something that's not strength, speed based.
Ben Storms:
...chess or some shit, who knows. Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Archery or some finesse type nonsense. But also to your point Ben, is that... nobody ever cared about any of these things.
Ben Storms:
Right because all that matters is the fighting.
Marcus Lehner:
All that matters-
Ben Storms:
We need to rework our word system here. Let these other things shine.
Chris Yee:
We need knitting.
Ben Storms:
We need knitting. I just like the idea of the Machamp knitting. I just want to bring that up. I think it will be very funny. Ideally, because what you would do, you setup for a team of six, but you wouldn't know what they'll be doing until you got there. You have to have a balance team that could do any of these things.
Chris Yee:
You got to have a pokémon that has arms. We got to have pokémon that has arms.
Ben Storms:
Right and he has four of them.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Why didn't we have more shows that are... get a group of individuals that you think are generally talented and we're just going to have you do some sort of... I mean, I guess it's just random competitions, but a very specific... like you build a professional team of people who are good at stuff.
Chris Yee:
You are basically just describing the Olympics.
Marcus Lehner:
But you don't know what the events are.
Ben Storms:
Right exactly.
Chris Yee:
Oh yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
It will be like, if you have to show up with just six athletes.
Ben Storms:
I guess, unrelated to our actual questions, but speaking to the Olympics and just athletes, I saw a suggestion once where we should do the Olympics where each country only get to send one person who does all the events.
Chris Yee:
Well now you just ruined our, how do you improved the Olympics episode.
Ben Storms:
I did. That's just the answer.
Marcus Lehner:
It lasts for like... How many events were in the Olympics?
Ben Storms:
Oh man, too many.
Marcus Lehner:
How many events are in the Olympics?
Ben Storms:
It gets inflated because there's 40 swimming events and you probably cut back on some of those but-
Marcus Lehner:
I don't think this is right because it says, "The 2020 Summer Olympics include 33 sports. The 2020 Winter Olympics will include seven sports. I don't think either of those are true.
Ben Storms:
Wait no. That's not... Okay, how can it be possibly be 33 sports?
Marcus Lehner:
Okay. A total of 33 sports and 339 events.
Ben Storms:
That could be right. Seven for the Winter Olympics feels very little low.
Marcus Lehner:
It will be just like downhill, ice related.
Ben Storms:
Hold on, wait. Let me just... okay. So skiing, This can't be... hold on.
Chris Yee:
Skiing, skating...
Ben Storms:
Well because there's figure skating and speed skating. And those two feel like different sports.
Chris Yee:
Yeah and I don't know what counts as a sport/event.
Ben Storms:
Curling, hockey...Gosh what sport are in the winter Olympics? Luge. Yeah?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I'm on olympics.com and in Winter Olympics sport does have more than seven. But it's like 14, it's Alpine Skiing, Biathlon, Bobsleigh, Cross-country, Curling, Figure Skating, Freestyle Skiing, Ice Hockey, Luge, Nordic Combined, Short Track Speed Skating, Skeleton, Ski Jumping, Snowboard, and Speed Skating. Speed skating has two. There's more than this.
Ben Storms:
There has to be more than that.
Marcus Lehner:
Is this always this many sports and we just feel like there's a billion?
Ben Storms:
I don't know. Alright anyway. Long story short, we need to make pokémon knit. Chris what did you do?
Chris Yee:
So for my fictional sport I chose podracing from Star Wars. Specifically, episode one of Star Wars. I think episode one is the only one that shows up it.
Ben Storms:
That sounds right. Yeah.
Chris Yee:
As far as I know.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I think it was just episode one.
Chris Yee:
But it does exist throughout all the timeline of Star Wars obviously. So how do you make podracing better? Podracing is basically just super fast racing and my impulse to make racing better is just to make it faster and more dangerous. But podracing is already very, very, very fast and also very, very dangerous.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's kind of capped out at the moment.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I was going to say that like, "If the question was how I would improve NASCAR? It would just be to make podracing.
Ben Storms:
Podracing? Yeah.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. So I'm already at a good spot with podracing, I think. I don't really think I need to-
Marcus Lehner:
All right cool. I'll do it.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I don't need to change podracing at all. So instead I want to try to improve the spectator experience of podracing because right now in episode one, it shows bleachers, just really big bleachers with a bunch of people at the starting line, and that's basically it. So the majority of the race takes place away from the bleachers and then the spectators only see the racers when they start the race, when they finish a lap, and then when they finish the race.
Chris Yee:
And I watch a bunch of clips, as far as I could tell in the movie, there aren't any TV screens, there's no jumbo screens or anything, so when the racers aren't near the bleachers, they're kind of sitting there doing nothing. So I'm to figure out how long does the audience actually see the racers during the race, because pod racers are really, really fast. So they probably don't see them for that long. So according to the Star Wars fandom page, the podracers top speed is around 900 kilometers per hour or 560 miles per hour.
Chris Yee:
And on a clear day on Earth with no obstructions, based on the curvature of the Earth, we can see an object 2.7 miles away from where we are before it dips below the horizon. Now podracing... it takes place on a bunch of different planets, but in the movie, we see it take it place on Tatooine. And Tatooine is actually smaller than Earth. Earth is 7,900 miles in diameter and Tatooine is 6,500 miles in diameter. So being slightly smaller means that it has a higher curvature, which means that we can see a shorter distance before it deeps below the horizon.
Chris Yee:
It's only slightly shorter so on Tatooine we can see 2.5 miles away, assuming there are no obstructions. So that means that, from the bleachers we'd be able to see a total of 5 miles, as the pod racers are approaching and leaving us, so that's a total of 32 seconds. That's assuming that there are no obstruction, but there are obstruction. In podracing, obstacles are very big part of it. Big chunks of the race takes place between rock formations or going through canyons and stuff. And that's what makes it more interesting. It'd be boring if there were no obstacles.
Chris Yee:
So I just pulled a random number, I'm going to say that for a one mile stretch at the bleachers, there's no obstacles, that's when they are crossing the finish line. And then the rest of it has obstacles. So you can always see them for that one mile. And based on that, the audience really only sees the racer for six seconds as they pass by.
Chris Yee:
Now, in the movie the race lasts seven minutes and it goes for two laps. So what happens for the spectators is, they see the racers for three seconds when it starts then they sit there for three and half minutes doing nothing, then they see the racers come back for six seconds, then they sit for another three and a half minutes and do nothing, and then they see the last three seconds. So they only really only see three percent of the race.
Marcus Lehner:
Ben, remind me, is this the better or worse, action to viewing ratio than football?
Ben Storms:
It's similar. Slightly worse.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I forget the number but the amount of actual game time in a football game compared to the length of the event is like-
Ben Storms:
I'm pretty sure it was single digit percentage. But-
Chris Yee:
We've covered it before because you answered how do you improve football, right?
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. But I'm not counting on people in this episode having heard whatever episode we have that mentioned that.
Ben Storms:
It was like in the mid 20s or something.
Chris Yee:
I don't remember what number was that. Something like that.
Chris Yee:
Yes. They only see three percent of the race and it's really the least interesting part of the race because there are no obstacles, they're just going straight. So how can we make this more interesting for the spectators? My instinct was to make the bleachers move with the podracer, so that you can see the action more. So I looked at, moving transport vehicles, because I want to use an existing Star Wars vehicle, one that actually exist. I don't want to just make up a thing. So I found a transport vehicle, it's called the K79-S80 Imperial Troop Transport. It's a ground vehicle that used to transport storm troopers. And it has three slots on either side on the exterior of the vehicle, where people can stand.
Chris Yee:
So I felt like this is perfect for people that are trying to watch this race. They can go into these slots and then you can just get a whole bunch of this vehicle and they're on the race track with the podracers, they're in the action it's a lot more exciting. The one problem is that, these vehicles they only go 93 miles per hour compared to the pod racers which go 560 miles per hour, so it's not nearly fast enough. So we need to solve that somehow.
Chris Yee:
So the 2.5 miles distance, max distance before it goes down below the horizon was based on if your eyes are five feet above the ground, but that distance gets higher as you go higher up into the sky. So obviously if you're higher up then you can see further. So I figured, "Why don't we do this, why don't we just... We're in Star Wars, we have ships that can fly, obviously we can do this." And it allows you to see into the canyon and rock formation. It just makes the whole experience a lot better.
Chris Yee:
So the Imperial Troop Transport is a ground vehicle so it can't actually fly, but there is something called a low altitude assault transport carrier a.k.a. a tank lifter. I think it was originally designed to carry an AT-TE which is like a different version of the Walkers, kind of. But it can also carry our vehicle. Specifically it said it can carry our vehicles as well. This vehicles can go 385 miles per hour, still not as fast as the pod racer but since it can fly it doesn't need to be because we can see further. So it'll just stay above the track and you can get a whole view of the track from above. And you just get a whole bunch of them.
Chris Yee:
And even though these are transport vehicles they also are gunships too. So they have guns, so we might as well use the guns, because they are there. You don't want to waste the guns, why would you do that?
Chris Yee:
So the Imperial Troop Transport has two laser guns on the front and a laser turret on the back. And then the tank lifter has four laser cannons and four rockets. So basically the spectators, maybe if they pay extra or get VIP tickets, then they get to shoot these at the racers, down below. And it'll add some obstacles for them.
Marcus Lehner:
Adding "some obstacle" is really tame way of saying, "I'm giving the audience guns and rockets."
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Well I mean, I'm trying to make it more fun for them. And I figured since we're already using ships that were used by the galactic empire, like these are empire ships. That were used to transport storm troopers, we might as well just put storm troopers in them instead of normal people, well just use podracing as target practice for storm troopers, because they need the training they can't hit anything. And that's the purpose of podracing now, it's just target practice for storm troopers. And let's be honest, the racers are probably going to be fine. It's probably just an added obstacle and they probably finish the race and it'll just be more exciting.
Marcus Lehner:
I mean, that might just already be the case. I think it's canon because really early on in the first Star Wars movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi was looking at the blaster marks. It's like only Imperial trooper marks are this accurate and maybe the Tatooine ones with the pod racing are just that much better than all the other storm troopers.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Exactly.
Marcus Lehner:
Maybe he was pleasantly surprised when he went to dust storm like, "Wow, these can't shoot for shit. I was worried for nothing."
Chris Yee:
Yep.
Marcus Lehner:
All right. And with that, that will bring us to our, Would you rather, portion of the episode.
Marcus Lehner:
Ben are you ready?
Ben Storms:
Sure.
Marcus Lehner:
Would you rather, five percent of the population have telepathy or five percent of the population have telekinesis? You are not part of the five percent that has it.
Ben Storms:
Okay. I don't know who has which one.
Chris Yee:
Is this a public thing or...
Marcus Lehner:
I think you generally know some percent of the population has one of these two ability. You know that people exist with this but you don't know who is. There's no public registry or forced people to know what it is.
Ben Storms:
So my gut instinct is that, I would rather people have telekinesis. Simply because if someone has telekinesis and uses it, it's much more obvious.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. It's obvious that they are using that. A lot of privacy issues with the-
Ben Storms:
Telepathy.
Chris Yee:
...telepathy.
Ben Storms:
Effectively if five percent of the people have telepathy, you have to act as though every one has telepathy.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I feel like if five percent had telepathy then some laws would come up. That you had to declare that you have it or something.
Ben Storms:
But how would you prove that someone has telepathy?
Chris Yee:
I guess you can't.
Marcus Lehner:
"What's my card? Any card. Guess my card."
Ben Storms:
I'm just seeing the... like the replicant test in Blade Runner but it's just like a guy with a playing card like, "What suit is this?"
Chris Yee:
Yeah. But I mean they could easily lie if they don't want to-
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Exactly. Because-
Chris Yee:
...because this means there's no biological change.
Ben Storms:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Marcus Lehner:
Well actually if you have someone with telepathy, you would know if they have telepathy.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. That's true
Ben Storms:
That is true actually. See I don't like this world. This world is scary and dystopian.
Chris Yee:
You could hire somebody you know has telepathy to become the telepathy verifier.
Ben Storms:
I don't know. I feel like I would rather have the ability that is more obvious out in the world than the one that is entirely unverifiable.
Marcus Lehner:
I have the same gut reaction, although I'm thinking about telekinesis crimes.
Ben Storms:
Go on.
Chris Yee:
With what?
Marcus Lehner:
Home security, does it really work very well on someone with telekinesis?
Ben Storms:
I mean the camera does.
Marcus Lehner:
Well you could just destroy the camera.
Ben Storms:
Or you could do that now.
Chris Yee:
You could do that now. How does this telekinesis work, do you have to see the thing?
Marcus Lehner:
I think for the sake as hypothetical we're going to supe it up to both pretty strong and pretty to easy use telekinesis.
Chris Yee:
Okay. So from a really far distance. You don't have to see it. And you're pretty strong with it. You can lift heavy things?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Let's say you're kind of a tour de force, like main character two thirds away through the movie powerful, with your telekinesis. So now you have people that are like individually very destructive if they want it to be.
Chris Yee:
I still think it's way easier to enforce telekinesis crimes than it is telepathy crimes.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh yeah. Enforcing it. Yeah. You can arrest the telekinesis people, but also then you have to imprison them somewhere, somehow, which also be difficult.
Chris Yee:
We'd figure out a way.
Marcus Lehner:
I'm confident in our ability to incarcerate anybody, regardless of their powers.
Chris Yee:
I mean there's still just one person, if you put enough guards on them then they can't really do anything.
Marcus Lehner:
Well it's five percent of the people. I mean not all are going to be criminals.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Ben Storms:
I guess. I don't know.
Marcus Lehner:
I'm really trying to play Devil's Advocate, because I'm really try to find the thing... telepathy is a lot grosser and a lot more invasive of a power, I think, for other people to have. I could see an argument for destructive criminals abusing their actual super... Telepathy is a super power but it's not really a super, super, power and that it's a lot easier to subdue somebody who has telepathy. Even if you know everything, omniscience is not omnipotence. You can know all the stuff that's going to happen to you and be able to not stop it because you're just a dude. "Oh, I determined that the SWAT team coming to my house is intending to arrest me." Is not going to stop you from getting arrested.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I think if... the question was, what power would I rather have my self? Then I think I would choose telekinesis.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. This ones specifically the opposite. Mm-hmm (affirmative). But yeah. You know what, I'm going to go with telekinesis. I think to really get the end of it, telepathy might be easier to deal with. Telepathic people might be easier to deal with than telekinetic people. And telepathic people could also do good. I mean, therapy becomes probably a lot more effective in the industry.
Ben Storms:
I actually have one place where telekinesis is bad. I do have one, which is that all of our existing spectators sports no longer work. Pretty hard to sink a basketball when an opposing fan can just block it.
Marcus Lehner:
The tape reviews are going to include physicist doing back in the napkin calculations.
Ben Storms:
Right.
Marcus Lehner:
"Oh, the ball hit the ring and bounced off at 37 degree angle. Uh-oh."
Chris Yee:
Yeah. And then you can't pin down who actually did that.
Ben Storms:
So I still think that over all... Well, okay. Strictly, as far as actually versus that game it does mean that basically all pro athletes would be telekinetic. Which will be pretty cool, however, I think over all telepathy is still probably will be the worst to have.
Chris Yee:
I'm thinking of like telepathy others games, like chess, and poker, and stuff.
Ben Storms:
Chess is kind of interesting actually.
Marcus Lehner:
I'm thinking about... Ben, maybe you remember... this is when we went to our friend's wedding in California, and we stayed at that Air BNB, and they have a bunch of random books on the shelf. And one of them was the strategy guide to rock, paper, scissors.
Ben Storms:
Oh yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
I swear to Christ this was a, honest to God book, about actually someone writing a whole book about rock, paper, scissor strategy. And one of the chapters was about, what to do if your opponent is actually telepathic. And it was like, "Okay, if you want to throw scissors, you should think rock so they throw paper, so that you beat them." But it did warn you, don't get into the habit too strong because it might mess your throws against non telepathic people if you're too much into thinking of the other one habit.
Chris Yee:
Then they'll hear you thinking, that you're thinking that. And they thought you're going to throw something else.
Marcus Lehner:
But then you're also thinking, thinking that you're not going to think that, to not think that and you just keep leveling up. And you'll keep-
Chris Yee:
But then they'll think that, that you thought that.
Marcus Lehner:
But you're also telepathic. So you know they're thinking, if they think you thought that.
Chris Yee:
Yeah we both... okay.
Marcus Lehner:
So maybe rock, paper, scissors becomes a real sport.
Ben Storms:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Marcus Lehner:
All right. I'm going to stick on my Devil's Advocate side, I'm going to say telekinesis. I think there's a shape of a problem worth than telepathy in there, that's going to ruin more things.
Chris Yee:
What do you mean? You mean you don't want people to have telekinesis, or you do?
Marcus Lehner:
Correct. I rather they had telepathy.
Chris Yee:
Okay.
Marcus Lehner:
Maybe I just think the world could use some more honesty.
Chris Yee:
I'd rather they have telekinesis.
Ben Storms:
I would rather they have telekinesis as well.
Marcus Lehner:
All right. That does it for that. If you have determined what the real telekinesis problems is, and want to let us know, feel free to send us an email with that. Or if you have any ideas for questions we're more than happy to receive listener questions and try incorporate them in the podcast. Best is direct via email, send it to absurdhypotheticals@gmail.com. Other things you can do to help the show, leave us a review.
Marcus Lehner:
Reviews are great way to get people watching the show, or people find the show. I always check the reviews before I listen to anything. And if there's not enough of them, or if they stink? I tend to click away. So reviews are important, you can do that in your favorite podcast player, of if you're listening to this. And of course, you can't do better support than direct hard cash money, de niro, donations, so if you got some Sickles, Knuts, and Galleons lying around and you want to send them our way, www.patreon.com/absurdhypotheticals click it by, become a Patreon button. You get access to our bonus content, we release every month, specifically for our Patreons, it's behind a singular dollar pay wall. One dollar of muggle money gets you right in there and unlocks everything for you.
Chris Yee:
Plus tax I think? I think plus tax.
Marcus Lehner:
Plus tax? Oh man.
Chris Yee:
Maybe. I think.
Marcus Lehner:
Well, I just promoted it Chris. And now I'm learning that it's not such a good deal after all.
Chris Yee:
I know.
Marcus Lehner:
It's still a good deal. The tax, although sad, is not really changing the needle much. Anyhow if you don't have that extra tax money to spare to us, you are more than welcome to join us next week for our regular scheduled episode, where we answer the following question, "What if people didn't need to do things?" And by, things I mean like important things, like breath or sleep, or eat/drink. That kind of thing. It's a grab bag.