Scenario 1: Changing Atoms Directly#

Imagine Midas touches a duck. With this first kind of magic, all the light stuff the duck is made of – like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen – would somehow gain protons, neutrons, and electrons to become gold.

Here’s the problem with that:

• The duck would suddenly be 33 times more massive.
• It would also be way, way too dense. The new gold atoms would be packed much closer than they want to be.
• They’d violently push away from each other, causing the golden duck to explode with the energy of half a ton of TNT.
• All that would be left is gold dust… and a very dead Midas standing too close.

Clearly, this isn’t a great way for Midas’s power to work out.

Scenario 2: Rearranging Existing Particles#

Okay, so what if instead, Midas’s power just uses the atoms that are already there? What if it simply takes all the little bits – the protons, neutrons, and electrons – in the stuff he touches and rearranges them to build gold atoms? No new matter is created or destroyed. The old atoms just dissolve, and the pieces are put back together as gold.

This avoids the explosion issue. However, gold is super dense, about 20 times denser than a duck. Without adding any new matter, the golden duck would end up being a really weird, awkward kind of foamy gold. It would have lots and lots of tiny, microscopic gaps inside. It’s funky, sure, but hey, it doesn’t explode! That’s progress.

Applying the Rearrangement Magic to Earth#

Now that we have a kind of magic that doesn’t immediately explode everything, what happens if Midas stumbles? What if he touches the Earth itself?

Let’s hit pause on time for a second and rearrange all the matter inside Earth. Just like with the duck, Earth is now solid gold, but with tons of tiny gaps, down to the atomic level.

While those gaps weren’t a huge deal for a duck, they are a massive problem for a whole planet. A spongy planet just can’t exist. Gravity kicks in and starts compressing Earth, squeezing it hard to close up all those gaps.

What happens because of this compression?

• Earth contracts, shrinking down to just 2/3 of its original radius.
• If you were standing on the surface, you’d suddenly feel like you’re in freefall, like on a crazy roller coaster, as the ground drops away from you.
• But since the ground is falling too, it doesn’t actually get farther from you. It would feel like gravity itself just turned off, and you (and everything else not tied down) would start to float.
• This weird ride doesn’t last forever, though. It takes only about 10 minutes for everything to crash down. And yeah, it would be a very weird 10 minutes indeed.
• Then, just as suddenly as it started, it stops. The collapsing Earth has hit its new, smaller size, and gravity is instantly “turned back on” for you.
• Hope you enjoyed your few minutes of floating, because now you (and the ground) crash into the planet at a speed of 30,000 km an hour. Your body would just splatter like a water balloon hitting pavement.

In that single instant, pretty much all of humanity gets smashed into red puddles.

But wait, there’s more! This is only the beginning of our problems. Earth didn’t just collapse, it imploded supersonically. The sheer force of this implosion, the kinetic energy, is basically like detonating a planet made entirely of TNT.

What else happens?

• Crushed under unbelievable forces, Earth’s core heats up to a scorching million degrees Celsius. That’s hotter than anything we’re used to on Earth – closer to the temperature inside a star.
• As Earth crashes into itself, it creates an incredibly powerful shock wave. This wave blasts upwards, catapulting the entire atmosphere right off the planet and into space.
• The Earth’s surface temperature skyrockets to hundreds of thousands of degrees. Everything on the surface is instantly vaporized into a fluffy cloud of plasma.
• This golden plasma cloud starts to expand, but not by much. Lots of the rearranged atoms might get mixed into this cloud, while others just boil away and escape the atmosphere entirely.
• This glowing golden plasma would actually outshine the sun.
• The enormous amount of radiation would lift tons more material off into space.

Over the next few days, the plasma cloud cools down. Eventually, it would freeze into a small, shiny golden ball.

Okay, so maybe this kind of magic, where you rearrange the particles, doesn’t work either.

Scenario 3: Replacing with Same Volume of Solid Gold#

So, the first idea (replacing atoms directly) made Earth too dense and it exploded. The second idea (rearranging particles) made Earth “under-dense” (with gaps) and it imploded. There’s got to be a sweet spot, right? A type of magic where Earth does neither.

What if Midas’s power works like this: the object he touches is instantly replaced by an object of the exact same volume, but made of solid gold? This magic is probably “a little bit more magic” and definitely “cuts a few extra corners,” physics-wise. But let’s see where it takes us.

So, Midas stumbles again. Earth turns into solid gold, keeping its original size. It’s not expanding or contracting. BUT, it’s suddenly way, way more massive. Gold is about 3 and a half times denser than the average stuff Earth is made of. That means the new gold Earth is suddenly 3 and a half times more massive.

Here’s what happens now:

• Surface Gravity: Everyone now has to deal with gravity that’s more than three times stronger.
• Impact on People: Unless you’re a champion weightlifter used to carrying a few times your body weight on your shoulders, you’re probably getting slammed hard to the ground by your own weight. Depending on exactly where you were when it happened, this alone could seriously hurt or even kill you.
• Impact on Structures and Nature: Trees and buildings weren’t built to handle three times the weight pressing down; they just collapse. Birds, planes, anything that was flying or floating? They all just splash down to the ground all around you.
• Atmosphere: You’re not the only thing feeling the extra weight. The entire weight of the atmosphere, and thus the atmospheric pressure, nearly quadruples. On its own, this pressure boost wouldn’t immediately kill you – scuba divers handle pressures like this for a while.
• Atmospheric Temperature: Unfortunately, squeezing the atmosphere that much heats it up significantly. It reaches 150° C. That’s like being inside a hot oven. The entire surface of Earth gets baked, roasting everything and anything living. There’s absolutely no escape from this.
• Geology: Gold might be a metal, but it’s not the best mountain builder. It’s about three times weaker than steel and very easy to squish (malleable). The tallest mountains gold can support are only about 2 kilometers high. Whole mountain ranges would basically compress and crush themselves at their base under their own increased weight. It’s tough to say exactly how this plays out, but you’re probably in for some giant earthquakes and landslides as the planet tries to squish itself into a new shape it can support.
• Oceans: The differences in height between the continents and the ocean floor get squashed and level out. This causes the ocean basins to overflow, sending massive tidal waves sweeping over the surface of the Earth.

What’s left after all this? A planet made of gold, entirely covered by a global ocean about 3 kilometers deep, under a super hot atmosphere, and with a whole lot of dead people.

Hmm. Okay, so maybe there’s a lesson in all this, but we’re not quite sure what it is yet. We did all the math, though! It’s in our sources document if you’re curious to see the numbers.

If you learned anything from watching this, let us know what it was!

Supporting the Channel and a Story About Learning#

So, you might already know this, but the things we sell in our shop are a big part of why we can keep making videos for free. But for us, it’s much more than just that. Here’s a quick story and a look behind the scenes.

A little while ago, we posted an image on social media. We just wanted to share something nice-looking. Immediately, a lot of people got pretty upset about it because, well, it was actually wrong. It really showed us how seriously you guys take what we put out!

So, we took the image down. We reached out to experts to help us make something new and better. We ended up spending hundreds of hours on research and illustration for this one thing. What we created was a new, really extensive map of evolution – a brand new way to visualize how living things are related that didn’t even exist before.

Making this was obviously a ton of work and, honestly, pretty stressful at times. But it’s stories like this that really show why working on this channel is so satisfying. Because you people care so much about getting it right. That makes us work harder, and we end up learning things we didn’t know before.

So, honestly, thank you. Thank you for supporting our crazy ideas and, yes, sometimes our crazy merch! Because of your support, we can keep putting out our videos for free for everyone, and we can afford to pour hundreds of hours into these new, in-depth projects and concepts. We are truly super grateful for that.

You can find the new evolution poster, along with lots of other things made with love, in our shop.

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