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Dear Bethesda,
You still haven’t written me back about your laser and plasma weapons. That’s alright.
I can wait. But since I’ve had all this time on my hands to just sit and think, I
got around to thinking about another aspect of your lore: Alduin. Now, don’t worry,
you didn’t do anything wrong with Skyrim that I can think of at the top of my head
But no, this is about something more fun than your mistakes. I like looking at those too
closely, but I think you need a break from the constant onslaught of mathematics-laden
complaint letters I send to you on a regular basis, of which only a tenth or so get turned
into videos.
Back to Alduin. The draconic antagonist of Skyrim, the king *** of dragons. Based
off of such things out of Nordic legend like Jörmungandr the Midgard Serpent. He’s the
world-eater, the badass *** possibly created by Akatosh to destroy the world and
pave the way for the next one. Which got me thinking: Alduin is called the World Eater
as a kind of poetic way of describing his job of destroying the planet--or so we think.
What if, instead, Alduin is called the World Eater because he’s literally going to eat
the world bite by bite?
You know, I originally asked myself this question, I was convinced that it was impossible to
answer. Not because, you know, we don’t have anything in our real world to compare
the eating habits of dragons to--but rather because I didn’t have any way I could think
of to measure the mass of Nirn to any degree of satisfaction. I thought about dropping
buckets from the top of the Throat of the World and measuring how long it took to hit
the bottom, but even if that were doable, I don’t know anything about the atmospheric
pressures of Nirn, nor do I have a reliable way to measure distance that I can think of.
It’d all be super rough, and I didn’t want rough estimates.
Of course, I could have just used the Earth as a stand-in, but that seemed lazy. You know
what’s not lazy, though? Swiping the work someone else did and using it to build your
theory on. That’s what science is all about. And luckily for me, reddit user bengle was
able to piece together the closest estimate of Nirn’s mass and density that anybody
probably ever has, or ever will again. Using a unit of measurements called Skyrim Widths
to determine the circumference to calculate volume and the speed of falling objects for
density, he determined that the mass of Nirn is Ninety-Four Sextillion kilograms. For those
of you playing along at home who don’t know what 94 sextillion is, that’s 94 followed
by 21 zeros. Around here is where a trillion is.
It’s a big number. It is. I’m not going to lie. It’s like “that’s no moon it’s
a space station” big. Actually--wait a minute. The Earth’s mass is, for comparison, 5.97
SEPTillion kilograms--which at this point might as well be in a different language.
Sextillion, septillion--who *** cares? All tillions look alike. And you know, this
is what I thought, too, until I did the math. It’s clear that 94 sextillion is smaller
than septillion--it has less zeros. But how much smaller is it? Turns out, quite a lot.
I mean, you have to keep in mind that there’s 1,000 sextillion in each septillion. So I
did some quick math, and, holy ***--Nirn is only 1.59% the size and mass of The Earth.
It’s barely more massive than our moon, in fact. Holy ***. That’s small as hell.
How the hell does this thing even have an atmosphere, let alone culture, roads, and--you
know what, I’m getting off track. This isn’t what I wanted to talk about--although it does
make some of the physics in Morrowind more believable.
You know what, this actually works in our favor, because the smaller Nirn is, the easier
it’ll be for Alduin to eat this thing, and the more believable this whole thing becomes.
Anyway, thanks for doing the math, Bendle, you saved me a hell of a lot of time.
I don’t know the eating habits of dragons in real life, since they were all killed long
ago by my ancestors, or tricked into being servants to Baba Yaga at the local bath house.
Because of this, I have nothing in our world to compare to to solve the problem of how
long it would take for Alduin to eat his way through all 94 Sextillion kilograms of Nirn.
Blue Whales are the biggest eaters on our planet when it comes to sheer mass. They can
eat nearly 3,600kg of food a day during the feeding season. They eat something called
“krill,” this tiny-as-***, shrimplike creature. They basically just vacuum up a
bunch of water, filter out the krill, and get rid of the water. Like, um, eating the
stuff that gets stuck to your vacuum cleaning filter. Which I don’t recommend.
Blue Whales are kinda big. Alduin is kinda big. How long would it take Alduin to eat
a not-quite-as-big-as-we-thought-it-might-be Nirn at 3,600kg/day? This math is pretty easy.
Just amount divided by time.
Oh. Only 364 Quadrillion years. No big deal. Except our entire Universe right now is estimated
at being only 14 Billion years old, so to say that it would take Alduin more time to
eat the world than our entire universe has even existed would be the understatement of
the century. Or the millennium. Anyway, Blue Whales aren’t going to do for our purpose.
Y’see, Blue Whales, while they do eat a LOT, have really, really slow metabolisms.
All that eating is crammed into a 130-140 day “eating season” where they fatten
up so they can travel to warmer waters to *** and make baby whales. They’re not eating
with efficiency of time in mind, they’re eating slowly to build up a lot of blubber
for their journey.
The Lesser Pygmy Shrew, by contrast, has an incredibly high metabolic rate, and very small
energy reserves. In fact, it has to eat every few hours, otherwise it’ll just straight
up die. THAT’s the model we need for our little Alduin The World Muncher. That way
he gets to keep his slim figure. Sorex Minutissimus eat roughly 2.17 times their body weight a
day.
So how massive is Alduin? Well, using an infallibly scientific method similar to last week’s,
I determined Alduin to be as massive as approximately 10 Skyrim horses. Horses in Skyrim are modelled
after Clydesdales, which at their heaviest weight 998 kilograms. So let’s go with that,
which gives us a dragon that weighs 9980kg, or roughly 22,000 pounds--OR about as much
weight as an F-16, since I know you probably have one of those in your garage right now
for a sense of scale.
How long would it take a 9980kg Alduin to devour his way through Nirn like a beast,
consuming over 2.17 times his body weight? ***. that only cut it down to 29.8 quadrillion
years. Jesus Christ. You know, we don’t exactly know what will call the probably-inevitable
end of the Universe. There are a lot of theories. Some of the most liberal estimates are among
heat-death theorists, who think heat death of our known universe will occur somewhere
in the next 100 trillion years. Maybe that’s why Alduin is known as the herald of the end
of times. By the time he finishes eating the planet, the entire *** Universe will have
died of boredom.
Clearly, realistic numbers aren’t working anymore. Let’s cut the ***, though. How
much would Alduin have to pack away in order to consume Nirn at a more believably scary
rate? Like how much of the planet would he have to eat in order to consume Nirn in...100
years? 13 sextillion kg a day. ***. That’s a big diet. That’s like eating over 9000
Deimoses a day. Deimos is the smallest moon in our solar system. It orbits Mars. Hah.
Each of Alduin’s bites would have to be like consuming a small moon. Excellent. I’m
guessing he has some sort of cartoonishly stretchy jaw that can open to extreme widths.
One of the many perks of being handcrafted by Akatosh for the destruction of the world.
While it would still take him 100 years to fully consume the world, Nirn would start
experiencing full environmental collapse much sooner than that--likely seeing negative effects
in as little as a few weeks as the mass, and therefore gravity, of the planet began to
wane. The atmosphere would eventually drift off, the seas would boil away, and everyone
would suffocate. So Alduin would be free to consume the world in peace.
Of course, this leads to all sorts of unanswerable questions about where Alduin poops. Not in
an outhouse, obviously, since they don’t exist in Skyrim. Huh. You know, Parthurnax
did say that Alduin wasn’t just destroying our world, but creating a new one. Does that
mean all his *** out in space starts to gravitate toward one another, forming the next planet?
Damn. That really puts the creation of the Orcs in perspective.
Okay, so, fine. Turns out, your world eater doesn’t really check out mathematically
speaking, Bethesda. Unless, of course, you were in fact being poetical, and didn’t
intend for Alduin to literally eat the world and poop out the next one. But that would
be boring, wouldn’t it?
Sincerely, Austin