The High Cost of Pokemon Storage! | The SCIENCE of... Pokémon

If we could put Pokemon inside shulker boxes and ender chests and put those chests inside Pokemon PC's, imagine how much more Pokemon you could store inside.

I mean, according to the lore, each pokeball is actually a teeny pocket dimension, and better pokeball variants have better accommodations inside to make the pokemon want to flee less.

"You need terabytes of data for the millions of cells of each pokemon!!"

Austin, it's alright, I've been watching "MattPat spends 6 years of his life overthinking FNAF" and that seems to be going strong :)

As a coder, I can tell you that you can easily lower that size to reasonable ones by having a 'base' data for each type of pokemon, and then just use a 'difference' data file for each uploaded pokemon. That way 'generic' pokemon

Don't forget about how many can be stored in Pokemon Home

"Austin spends two years of his life overthinking Pokemon" is something I would actually watch

10:47

A random string of base pairs can only compress 75% since you're going from 8 bits per character to 2 bits per character. DNA is not random, and has lots of long repeating sections. In addition, every human has very similar DNA, and likewise they probably already have the standard genome for each pokemon egg group. From what I can find, someone compressed 1,092 genomes by a factor of 9,500 times. That means that all of those combined took less space than that 75% compression of one genome.

I think writing off Pokeballs out of hand was a mistake, because the Pokeball and the PC are inextricably linked in their purpose of compressing/storing Pokemon, and holding them in a form of stasis. Any conclusion you come to arises from a premise which fundamentally excludes a crucial part of the particulars of that compression process.

I cant wait for both him and pat to discover how in depth the Digimon series lore is in the first 3 seasons + the games. thats like 100 episodes right there.

My theory is that the secret sauce that makes this whole thing tick is actually analogue data storage and transmission, not digital.

So, anyone wanna start a petition for "Austin Spends TWO YEARS Overthinking Pokemon" to be a thing?

This whole thing gets a lot easier when you remember that extra dimensional travel is normal in Pokemon, as each individual cartridge is it's own dimension, and pokemon can be traded between them freely.

Funny thing- DNA is basically just information as pure as chemistry can get it, so it isn't that hard of a conversion, just as you said.

Dont forget massive pokemon like Wailord(Yes I know I most likely spelled that wrong) or those without physical form like Gastly. Have fun with that, Austin.

Epigenetics would likely inflate the memory overhead by quite a fair bit too, yeah? You would have to account for modifications to the DNA (methylation, acetylation, etc.) as well as likely track track the presence of transcribed RNAs. This would need to be done on a per-cell basis, multiplying the overhead of this data on the scale of trillions.

Austin, you're my favorite man in the universe, i've always had these thoughts, but never the means to figure it out, but you my guy, YOU HAD BOTH THANK YOU!

Austin defining an animal as a "set of organs arranged in a specific structure" makes me feel an emotion that doesn't exist.

Always remember that, just like magic, compressing storage comes with a price... and in this case, it's a really big price.