[Miss Frizzle]: All right children, who's
ready to go on a field trip to see the stars? [Arnold]: You mean somewhere like a planetarium or
a museum? Please let this be a normal field trip. [Keesha]: Psshhh, As if! You know
that's not how the Frizz rolls. [Dan]: Ah, has anyone seen Matt?
[Miss Frizzle]: We're going to blast off towards the heavens for science.
[Dan]: Miss Frizzle? [Miss Frizzle]: Blasting off in 3.
[Dan]: Miss Frizzle? [Miss Frizzle]: two,
[Dan]: We're missing Matt! [Miss Frizzle]: one. Blastoff!
Hello Internet. Welcome to Film Theory, where it's time for a pop quiz. Question one: Do you
recognize this voice? It's me, Head Editor Dan. Hi, Hello. Matt lost his voice at VidCon so you
got me. Question two: Are you subscribed? Are you? Are you sure? You should probably go double check.
Unknown Good! A+ for you, loyal theorist. Now,
it probably wouldn't come as any surprise to you that I liked me some science class in grade
school. Why else would I edit for these channels? Fun fact. In the third grade I was so into science
that they let me go to Challenge, which is where we just basically made slime for an hour.
Now, if only I had the foresight to make a YouTube channel. Imagine
the amount of money I could have made. But anyway,
you knew a day in science class was going to be extra special when the teacher wheeled in
that ginormous CRT TV and popped in a VHS tape packed with some classic good old edutainment.
*whispers* Yes. Thank you. I'm totally aware that I just aged myself by mentioning VHS. I'm
an Internet boomer and I'm DEALING WITH IT! But something nerds of the nineties,
aughts and 20-teens can all agree on though, The Magic School Bus was frickin awesome.
Miss Frizzle was the embodiment of the perfect teacher, engaging her class with legitimately
interesting topics and taking our students on wacky field trips to give some real hands-on
learning. Whether it was traveling through time to visit the age of the dinosaurs,
or that one time when they traveled inside one of the students, Arnold, to study the human body,
or when the whole class got turned into bees. Not the Bees!
Yeah. Okay sometimes those trips were a bit, um… Well, how do we put this? Mildly dangerous
and life threatening? But also theorizable? Oh, definitely. But Matt insisted that he wasn't
going to ruin his own childhood. That lasted the whole day before he came in and said, quote, okay,
fine, let's just ruin everything. So we dusted off our VCRs, kicked back on the couch. Then Creative
Director Lee pointed out that we can't watch the VCR on the modern TV, so we just streamed it.
And from the first episode of The Magic School Bus, “Gets Lost In Space”. Our theorists'
sensibilities got the best of us. In this episode, a mundane trip to the planetarium is scrapped due
to Miss Frizzle not calling ahead to see if it was open. She then decides to do the next best thing
and kidnaps, I mean, escorts the children to the cosmos and takes a tour around the solar system.
They visit the sun, some of the planets. And the trip culminates with the gang landing on Pluto,
which was the ninth and final planet when the show aired. And as much as it
hurts that this guy got demoted to a dwarf planet…
It was totally justified. There are five confirmed dwarf planets in our system,
and if Pluto's a planet, they all are. RIP-a-ronis.
Anyway, near the very end of the very first episode, as the class are exploring the
surface of the Gimli-sized Pluto, one of the kids Arnold has had enough. In a fit of rage
he rips off his space helmet and instantly freezes. I mean, 1 second and boom. He looks
like one of those janky Sonic the Hedgehog ice cream pops you get from an ice cream truck.
Now, hold up, hold up, hold up. I know I'm trying to enjoy this as some fun romp
through some Clinton era edutainment, but that can't be possible, right? I know space is cold,
but you can't just go from annoying Arnold to X-Men Iceman in an instant,
can you? So, like the very normal human being Matt is, he dove into
the scientific realism of this nineties cartoon with a magical type A school bus.
Just a very normal thing to do because while looking into the truth behind the science here,
Matt fell into a rabbit hole bigger than our own solar system. You see,
loyal theorists. Miss Frizzle's antics would have gotten the whole class killed many times
over before they reached the edge of the solar system, dooming not only Arnold but all of the
kids in the classroom to painful deaths worse than what we could have imagined.
Buckle up, friends. This one's going to be a wild ride. So to explain,
I guess we should start with the final scene and move backwards from there. As I just explained,
after ripping off his helmet, Arnold transforms into Frosty the Snowman pretty much instantly. So
would that really happen? Well, at first glance, it's not as ridiculous as you might think.
See, deep space is cold. Like, stupid cold. According to NASA,
the surface temperature of Pluto reaches a frostbite inducing -400 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's -240 degrees Celsius. Just to give you a comparison here,
the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was in Antarctica at -89.2 degrees Celsius or -128.6
Fahrenheit. So when Arnold takes off his helmet, he's a goner, right?
Well, not necessarily. And to understand why, we need to discuss what temperature is at an atomic
level. When we talk about the temperature of something, whether it's the frigid vacuum of
space or that scalding cup of coffee you spilled in your lap, what we are actually talking about
is how much the molecules in said empty space or boiling seed soup are bouncing into each other.
When two molecules collide, they release a small amount of energy in the form of
heat. The more collisions, the more heat is released and the higher the temperature of
something is. When something hot makes contact with something cold. Like say,
I don't know, the face of a redheaded fourth grader being exposed to the bleak void of
space. That energy transfers from the hot thing to the cold thing until it evens out.
Fun fact, there is a limit to how cold something can be. This is known as absolute zero,
which is the point where the molecules don't move at all and thus don't release any heat.
And when you look at that number, which is -273.15 Celsius or -459.67 Fahrenheit or zero
Kelvin for you nerds out there. It's pretty close to that surface temperature of Pluto.
However, despite the nearly 500 degree difference between the average human temperature of 37
degrees Celsius or 98.6 Fahrenheit. It's not like all of Arnold's heat is going to rush
out at once. It would take somewhere between 12 to 26 hours for a human to freeze solid out in space.
And given that only Arnold's head is directly exposed, that would likely take much longer.
And thankfully, the kids think quickly and get Arnold back on the school bus in a matter of
seconds. So while it wouldn't be comfortable, Arnold wouldn't be becoming an ice sculpture as
quickly as we see in the cartoon. And speaking of, where is the world's best teacher, Miss Frizzle?
Well, she's standing by as her students are being the responsible ones in saving their friend.
Her principal is probably going to have to have a word with her when they get back to Earth. Now,
while Arnold might survive his brief encounter with the chill of Pluto,
this little maneuver still would have killed him. Just not for the reasons
you might expect. As soon as Arnold takes off the helmet, the pressure of the oxygen
inside his lungs would be released into space like a shaken up can of Diet Coke.
We briefly touched on this in our episode about Portal 2's brief pitstop on the moon over on our
sister location Game Theory, but it's worth reiterating here. A Dan Seibert survival tip:
If you’re ever stupid enough to remove your helmet off in space,
don't hold your breath. Why? Because, as I just said, in a vacuum, all the oxygen
in your lungs immediately wants to expand and rush out into the void.
And if you hold your breath, then there's nowhere for that oxygen to go except tearing through
your lungs. I don't know about you, but if my choices are gasping for air or ruptured lungs,
I'm going to pick the option that doesn't cause one of my major organs to, you know,
literally explode. It doesn't look like Arnold makes a point to empty his lungs in this scene.
So while the cold might not have killed him, the ruptured lungs might have, just might have. But
even if he did breathe out before taking off his helmet, the whole no oxygen thing is obviously
going to be bad news for Arnold. Without oxygen flowing through your bloodstream,
your organs and especially your brain would begin to shut down after about 3 minutes.
But that's three whole minutes to get somewhere where you can breathe again. The quick thinking
from the other kids likely did save Arnold's life here, making most of this memorable scene
something entirely survivable. But, well, as I alluded to at the top of this episode,
Arnold, and the rest of the class wouldn't have ever made it to Pluto.
Just before the gang reaches Pluto, they take a jaunt around the outermost planets
in the solar system, known collectively as the gas giants. They pass by this planet,
I'll let you decide if you want to giggle at Ur-anus or Urin-us,
as well as Neptune, and observe the rings of Saturn without much fanfare.
Also worth noting that the children are driving the bus at this point because Miss Frizzle has
gone M.I.A. And has turned finding her within the depths of space into a game.
You know, the more I talk about this,
the more I’m like, Miss Frizzle was really irresponsible, wasn't she?
Yeah. It's going to take more than a trip to the guidance counselors office to work
through this trauma. Anyway, the gas giant they actually spend time at is Jupiter,
the largest planet in our solar system. And what do they do? They fly right into the
great red spot. Now, if you've seen a picture of Jupiter, you probably recognize this thing.
It's one of the planet's most iconic features. But what you might not know that it's not just a
cool aesthetic feature or a beauty mark. It's a massive hurricane-like storm that's been raging
since at least the 1830s. And what's more, as of April 3rd, 2017, the storm is approximately
16,350 kilometers in width, 10,160 miles, meaning that Jupiter's great red spot is wider
than the entire earth. And size isn't the only frightening factor the storm has going for it.
Its speed is also insane. The fastest wind speed ever recorded on Earth was a blistering
231 miles per hour, or about 372 kilometers per hour, recorded on Mount Washington in New
Hampshire in 1934. But wind speeds in the great red spot can reach upwards to 400 miles per hour,
or about 644 kilometers per hour, just under double the speeds on earth.
Now flying into the dense atmosphere of Jupiter with speeds that fast would easily tear a typical
school bus to shreds. But this is a magic school bus, after all, so I'll leave that be. But magic
wouldn't protect the kids from letting the storm in to the bus. In order to collect proof of their
visit the kids open a spigot that allows the gasses of the red spot to pour into the bus.
Now, with those 400 miles per hour speeds, this would be like opening a window on the
fastest train. But that is nothing compared to the sheer weight of the atmosphere that
would begin pouring into the bus at that incredible speed. Remember earlier when
we talked about all of the air wanting to get out of Arnold's lungs in the vacuum on Pluto?
That happens because of air pressure, basically. How much the air inside of
something pushes up against the walls of its container. Since there isn't a
ton of gas in Pluto's atmosphere, the air pressure would be higher in Arnold's lungs
than on Pluto. But on Jupiter? you have the opposite problem. The air pressure
on the quote unquote surface of Jupiter is roughly 5 to 10 times that of Earth.
Or say, the interior of a magic school bus meant to keep earthlings comfortable. The long and short
of it is Jovian gas wouldn't just trickle in with the spigot, it would instantly flood the interior
of the bus. And that could cause some serious complications, depending on what it's made of.
Despite decades of study, scientists aren't 100% sure what the big red spot is made of.
Some theories suggest it's ammonia reacting to acetylene, both of which would burn
the inside of your lungs and throw it on contact. Others suggest that the red spot,
like the rest of Jupiter, is composed of hydrogen and helium. Either way,
this would be awful news for the children who would likely be thrown around by the
400 miles per hour wind spewing toxic or unbreathable gasses into the bus's cabin.
And frighteningly, this would likely be the least painful cause of death
for these kids on this field trip from hell before suffocating on Jupiter.
The class dodges some asteroids in the asteroid belt and makes a quick pit stop to Mars. Now,
without a magnetic field and a painfully thin atmosphere,
a prolonged stay on the Martian surface could be dangerous due to radiation exposure.
But that's nothing compared to the dangers of the class landing on Venus. Let's just
say things wouldn't be looking so hot for Miss Frizzle class after this. Actually,
scratch that. Things would be looking very hot. See, despite being further from the
sun than Mercury, Venus is actually the hottest planet in the solar system. With
its average surface temperatures racing 850 degrees Fahrenheit or 454 degrees Celsius.
That's ten times hotter than a painfully warm 85 degree day here on Earth. Why is it like
this? Well, 96.5% of the Venetian atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide. And if you know
anything about CO2 here on Earth, you'll know that it's a greenhouse gas that means it likes
to absorb the heat coming from the sun. Earth's atmosphere is approximately 0.04% carbon dioxide.
So that 96.5% figure, that's insane. And it's basically turned Venus's atmosphere
into a giant blanket that's holding in all of the heat it absorbs over a few million
or billion years. It's so hot that even metals like lead start to melt at those temperatures.
The longest a space probe has ever landed on the surface of Venus is just over 2 hours.
If something the smartest scientists on the planet literally built and designed to work
on Venus couldn't even outlast the runtime of an Avatar movie. This would mean that
Miss Frizzle's class would be dismissed pretty much the moment they step out onto
the surface. And even if they somehow survived this hellscape of heat, they'd rather be dead
the next time it rained because, what were those clouds made of Miss Frizzle?
Speaking of utterly painful death. Man, what a transition. You pretty much encounter all of the
same issues on the bright side of Mercury, which can reach temperatures of roughly 800 degrees
Fahrenheit or 427 degrees Celsius. But that. That would be nothing compared to what comes next,
since Miss Frizzle decides to start this field trip of death and destruction by visiting the sun.
You know how you're told constantly to not look at the sun without some serious eye protection?
That's because even here on Earth, 92 million miles away from the sun and with a thick
atmosphere protecting us from the worst of it. The star our planet orbits outputs so
much light and energy that it can permanently damage your retinas in under 2 minutes. Now
imagine driving directly up to the sun, getting closer than any manmade object.
To be fair to Miss Frizzle, she does realize this and has the class wear...
But your eyes aren't what you should be worrying about here. It's a bit difficult
to tell exactly how close the class gets, but we do see the bus flying close to a plume of
plasma that blasts off the solar surface. These are known as coronal mass ejections,
which can sometimes stretch as far as a million miles away from the sun's surface,
which means that at best, the bus just traveled within a million miles of our local star.
That might sound like it's far, but in terms of astronomical distances,
it isn't. The sun is big, loyal theorists. I'm sure you knew that. And getting that close would
be devastating. The Parker Solar probe, which is on its way to the sun right now,
will be the closest manmade object ever to go near the sun. It was specifically designed
to get close to our star, but at its closest it will still be about 4 million miles away.
At about 3 million miles away the temperatures of just being near the sun will already be enough to
cause those NASA's space suits to fail. Basically, if you were really going to get close to the sun,
it would look less like a fun edutainment cartoon and more like the sci fi horror movie Sunshine.
So every step of the way, every planet these kids stomped on would have been a death trap
for them. Except the one that created such a terrifyingly memorable moment, ironically enough.
But here's the thing, loyal theorists. It's not just the planets that would have hurt these kids.
Miss Frizzle doomed these children to a long, agonizing, painful death before they even set
foot on another planetary body or flew too close to the sun. And it all comes down to one thing:
radiation. See, there's a lot of radiation in space, and I mean a lot.
But there are special kinds that you should be extra concerned with if you
ever find yourself in space. The first is solar radiation. While we're on earth, we don't have
to worry about this stuff. As I mentioned earlier when we briefly talked about Mars,
an atmosphere or electromagnetic field protects us from most of this stuff, and even the things
that get through, the ultraviolet light, can be negated by slathering on a layer of sunscreen.
But in space? There's nothing to block the dangerous solar particle events, galactic
cosmic rays, ionizing radiation like X-rays or gamma rays that the sun emits. And no, I don't
mean the sort of gamma radiation that turns you into the Fantastic Four or the Incredible Hulk.
The stuff is much less cool, damaging your DNA in ways that give you cancer instead of superpowers.
NASA specifically builds their spaceships, space stations and space suits to shield the astronauts
from this sort of radiation. That's partially why the suits are so bulky and why they have those
cool golden visors. Details that the Magic School Bus space suits don't have. And as a result,
these particles would be cutting through kids like a radioactive knife through children's
shaped butter, likely making the kids very, very sick just by exiting Earth's atmosphere.
In the end, every decision Miss Frizzle made along this field trip from allowing
the kids to collect Jovian gas to stop by on the surface of Venus and Mercury,
to flying by the sun and even just exiting the Earth's atmosphere without the proper
precautions would have led to the deaths of these children multiple times over. She
exposed them to lethal doses of radiation, subjected them to inhumane temperatures,
and left them to get crushed and suffocated in a hurricane literally bigger than Earth.
While I love learning and passing on knowledge,
doing so in this way was irresponsible. These kids should have been scared far
sooner than when Arnold took off his helmet. The one thing in this trip that ironically,
they would have survived with minimal injuries. All in all, Miss Frizzle gets an F for fired.
And yet, despite all of this information Matt is having me read,
I would want nothing more than to go on this field trip. I want to go to space!
But hey! That's just a theory. A FILM THEORY! aaaaaaaaaand cut.
Man kids programs could sometimes be scary. And, hey, we got some more videos just like that.
You can go ahead and click this one about Paw Patrol and how well that one's a little spooky.
And then, oh, what's this? This is a Bluey episode. It's about why it's kind of spooky,
despite how much I love this show. Anyway, I… Um.. Yosi, play me out!