Thursday 3 July 2014

PokeScience: How much is Mega Diancie worth

We all know that diamonds are a girls best friend and that they can cost a lot of money.
These precious gems are renown for their beauty and their rarity and are used primarily as jewelry for the ladies.
But how do you judge the value of a diamond?
And most importantly, how much does that pretty diamond on Mega Diancie's head cost?


Let me introduce you to the 4 C's of diamonds:
Carat (weight)
Clarity (how clear or cloudy, caused by imperfections)
Cut 
Colour

So how does Mega Diancie fare?

Carat
The weight of diamonds is measured in a unit known as carats where 1 carat is equal to 200mg.
From the corocoro information, we know that Mega Diancie's head diamond is more than 2000 carats.
Mega Diancie's weight is 61.3lbs or 27.8kg. Now if we assume that about 75% of Diancie is diamonds (leaving room for the body and organs and whatnot), we can estimate there to be 104250 carats of diamond on Mega Diancie's body.

Clarity
Corocoro has given us another gem of information, it says "The impurities upon it's body's surface have fallen away, and it sparkles so brilliantly when reflecting light that you cannot look directly at it".
This tells us that Mega Diancie can safely get the highest rating for clarity, an F or IF (flawless/internally flawless).

Cut
The diamond on Mega Diancie's head is a heart shaped diamond, however the rest of it's body diamonds do not have a significant cut. Diamonds are generally cut in such a way that makes the refract light within and seemingly emit light. Apart from the head diamond, the other diamonds do not really have much of a useful cut.


Colour
Diancie's diamond is obviously not the standard clear variety, in fact it is quite pink. Coloured diamonds are far more rare than white diamonds. These fancy diamonds only make up 0.01% of the diamonds in circulation and therefore this jacks up the price of these fancy gems. Mega Diancie is made up of vivid pink diamonds that are not too deep and not too pale in colour.


Verdict
Mega Diancie can be broken down into 2 valuable parts. The 2000 carat heart shaped diamond on it's head and the shapeless 102250 carats of flawless diamond that make up the rest of it's body.

In 2013; a flawless, pink oval cut diamond weighing 59.6 carats called the pink star (pic on right) sold for $83.02 million.
This diamond shares all of the same characteristics as Mega Diancie's diamonds; same quality and same colour.
I have found a rough conversion from oval cut to heart cut at
heart = oval x0.925.

Therefore, if it were a heart cut diamond of the same carat weight, it would be worth $77 million, giving it a value of $1.29 million per carat.
Therefore, on it's own, the head diamond of Mega Diancie is worth $2.583 billion.

The body gems, assuming a very low estimate of 70% of the heart cut diamonds worth per carat. would come out at $903000 per carat and $92.332 billion total worth.

Giving a grand total of $94.915 billion.

Definitely worth the masterball!

PokeScience: Wailord is lighter than air?

So everyone knows what the largest pokemon is, Wailord, the massive leviathan of a pokemon that towers over all other pokemon. At a massive 14.5m (47'07") it would be the 6th largest animal (on physical dimensions) if it existed on our planet (beaten by 5 species of whale).




So surely this must be the heaviest pokemon as well? I mean, humpback whales are a very similar size and they weigh around 35 metric tonnes (80000 pounds).

Well no.
It barely scrapes the top 10.
There are 9 other pokemon (10 if you count primal Kyogre) that have more weight than this behemoth of a whale.
Weighing in at just 398kg (877.4lbs), Wailord is impossibly light.
But just how light is it? Could it even swim?

Warning, Science and Math ahead
Now, we have enough information to estimate the volume of a Wailord. We know it's mass and it's length and can estimate other dimensions from these measurements.

Now, pokemon only gives us one dimension of length in the pokedex, labelled height. Now I'm going to assume that this refers to the longest length of Wailord, giving it the specs of a whale which it is based off. Therefore, the length from nose to tail is 14.5m.
Now, from comparative measurements from pictures, I found a ratio of about 2.54 from height to length, giving it's other dimension as 5.71m
We can estimate Wailord as an ellipsoid (a 3D oval, pill, blimp shape), we can estimate it's volume to be about 247.54 cubic metres. [V=(4/3)(pi)abc].

Density = mass/volume, therefore we can calculate that density = 398/247.54
density = 1.61kg/cubic metre.

Now, for an object to float or sink in water, it's density must be less than or greater than the density of water respectively.
So if we have lead which is far more dense than water, it will sink, while a filled balloon which has less density that water will actively float and may be difficult to submerge.
The density of water at 20°C is 998.21 kg/m3. Which means, not only will Wailord float, it is almost impossible to submerge.

For that matter, lets check in on the density of air.
Air has a density of around 1.207kg/m3 at 20°C, which means our Wailord will almost float in air. However, consider that we have made a pessimistic estimation of Wailord's volume. Wailord is not an ellipsoid but is more like a cylinder with rounded ends.

If, instead we use the same dimensions but use a cylinder as the base shape (giving us an overestimated optimistic volume). We get Wailord's volume to come out as 371.3m3 and therefore his density as 1.07kg/m3. Therefore, Wailord's real density lies somewhere between these numbers and quite potentially, Wailord may be less dense than air.

I guess that's what you get from the float whale pokemon!


Now, lets quickly assume that height is the other dimension and therefore Wailord is 36.83m long making it larger than a blue whale. It's ellipsoid density is 0.0982 and it's cylinder density is 0.0654.
To put that in perspective, the least dense thing on our planet is hydrogen gas and that has a density of 0.082 meaning that Wailord could very well be less dense than hydrogen, and definitely less dense than air.