This is really interesting! I think assuming the average density of the hourglass twins is the same as Mars is a bad estimate, though. A huge chunk of their mass is the flowing sand, which is a...
This is really interesting! I think assuming the average density of the hourglass twins is the same as Mars is a bad estimate, though. A huge chunk of their mass is the flowing sand, which is a lot less dense than the normal soil, so I'd expect their density to be significantly lower than that of Earth or Mars. I'm not knowledgeable enough about physics to really say how much this would affect the results of these calculations, however.
One thing that I know is true in the Outer Wilds' game engine is that the planets' gravity scales linearly rather than exponentially as in real life. It would've been interesting to see his thoughts on that as part of this experiment. There's a very comprehensive deep-dive into gravity in the Outer Wilds' universe in this reddit post, but iirc it doesn't do everything in-game and focuses more on measuring the behavior seen in game even when inconsistent rather than on calculating constants assuming physics works normally. (It also has more spoilers than this blog post does, so beware and go play the game first!)
This is really interesting! I think assuming the average density of the hourglass twins is the same as Mars is a bad estimate, though. A huge chunk of their mass is the flowing sand, which is a lot less dense than the normal soil, so I'd expect their density to be significantly lower than that of Earth or Mars. I'm not knowledgeable enough about physics to really say how much this would affect the results of these calculations, however.
One thing that I know is true in the Outer Wilds' game engine is that the planets' gravity scales linearly rather than exponentially as in real life. It would've been interesting to see his thoughts on that as part of this experiment. There's a very comprehensive deep-dive into gravity in the Outer Wilds' universe in this reddit post, but iirc it doesn't do everything in-game and focuses more on measuring the behavior seen in game even when inconsistent rather than on calculating constants assuming physics works normally. (It also has more spoilers than this blog post does, so beware and go play the game first!)