How much would you need to make to be in real trouble? Of course, thats getting a little far-fetched. More details. Red successfully cuts off Blue and then dies shortly thereafter. the probability of achieving a perfect SAT score by guessing) to completely fictional questions (e.g. How big a hole do I need to dig before people suffocate? You just might not be prepared for how big you will need to be dreaming. Since rainbows are caused by the refraction of the sunlight by tiny droplets of rainwater, what would rainbow look like on Earth if we had two suns like Tatooine? Repeat. What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? Meteorologist Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center explains (via Popular Mechanics) "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. Could it navigate? Could I cool down the Earth by capturing a comet and dropping it in the ocean, like an ice cube in a glass of water? like. At 53 megatons, the Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, and at 11 kilometers, the Mariana (s) Trench is the deepest part of the ocean. into the atmosphere, they heat to a glowlike meteorsigniting global For many people, the fact that Donald Trump thought nuking hurricanes would be a good idea automatically means it must be insane. At what numerical value would the number printed approximately equal the number of ink molecules used? What took more energy, the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Apollo Mission? Australia owns most of the galaxy at certain points in time. After effectively describing what would occur as a nuclear explosion, leveling the stadium and the surrounding mile radius, he concludes with the note "A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered 'hit by pitch', and would be eligible to advance to first base.". goes with citing temperature records and other trivia actually naming a Jeopardy master. Crypto What would be the best way of getting the energy from one to the other? How dangerous is it, really, to be in a swimming pool in a thunderstorm? The 'reality' and consequences of using multiple cars (that are not your own) to construct a trans-Atlantic highway. At the moment it seems impossible to guess when a new post is released so: Below is a list of the articles released in the what if? Then the Surely NOAA would tell people to dream big? After two 8 weeks breaks this one waited almost three months. We still need to complete some explanations like this one: 1608: Hoverboard. They would not be able to pay off the debt, even if they forced humanity to work as slaves. How close could I stand to watch it? Honestly, my main motivation is to baffle someone in the distant future, but it's an interesting scientific question: what would happen to my body in orbit over the course of years, decades or centuries? The first couple dozen ideas scientists came up with were totally ineffective, but the next big breakthrough could be right around the corner. A 2016 National Geographic article also explained that detonating a nuke inside a hurricane could violate the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. Is it possible for a spacecraft to control its reentry in such a way that it avoids the atmospheric compression and thus would not require the expensive (and relatively fragile) heat shield on the outside? Later he released a different countdown with comic 2636: What If? Is there any way to fire a gun so that the bullet flies through the air and can then be safely caught by hand? Thanks for looking at my book. Now imagine the energy required to stop five or six a year, every year. "Look how much we're paying now to deal with the hurricanes," Biden said. What would actually happen? (I don't know why six feetbut that's what he asked.). what if? It answers many important questions, including whether you could jump from a plane with a helium tank and inflate balloons fast enough to slow your fall and survive (yes) and whether you could hide from a supersonic windstorm in Finland (yes, but it won't help). asteroid hitting the Yucatanthe impact that killed most of the There's a lot of numbers involved, so let's have the experts at NOAA explain it: "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 201013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. I was absentmindedly stirring a cup of hot tea, when I got to thinking, "aren't I actually adding kinetic energy into this cup?" Would I be able to boil a cup of water by stirring? Far more than a book for geeks, WHAT IF: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions explains the laws of science in operation in a way that every intelligent reader will enjoy and feel much the smarter for having read. gigaton nuclear weapons as wave generators. What if there was a robot apocalypse? Reed died in 2007. It turns out, you'd need a lot of nukes and a lot of power. You are in a boat directly over the Mariana Trench. Could you get drunk from drinking a drunk person's blood? After that articles began coming out regularly with a total of 9 releases out before the end of March 2016, mainly on Tuesdays to begin with, then one on a Friday before the last two came on Saturdays with two weeks breaks before each, the last being article 149 on March 26, 2016. The story of the three wise men got me wondering: What if you did walk towards a star at a fixed speed? Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. What would happen if the Earth's rotation were sped up until a day only lasted one second? Better to just carry a sign. He hadn't let go of his idea as of 2004. If set up in the rainiest place in the United States (Ketchikan, Alaska), the cost could be offset in about a century. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License, fall into Jupiter's atmosphere in a submarine, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=what_if&oldid=304504. underwater. What is the farthest from Earth that any Earth thing has died? How hard would a puck have to be shot to be able to knock the goalie himself backwards into the net? Or standing in a graphite field? Just under four years passed before a new What If. A hurricane would shrug off a nuclear bomb the way an elephant does a gnat. The bubble grows to about a kilometer across in a couple of seconds. off the North American coast: Quantitative study of the destructive Granted, the Sun is much bigger, but it is also much further away, and as I learned in high school physics, the gravitational force is proportional to the square of the distance. If a meteor made out of diamond and 100 feet in diameter was traveling at the speed of light and hit the earth, what would happen to it? From here on standard release day was again Tuesday. Liquid gallium? Not in a "scatter my ashes" sense, but, like, "throw my naked corpse out the airlock" sense. ", "I never said that," Trump retorted. It seemed like a safe bet to test cloud seeding on the dying storm. The Sun. And it's not possible anyway, since nukes are not giant, cutting-edge fans. More details.. A 2016 National Geographic article also explained that detonating a nuke inside a hurricane could violate the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union (now Russia), possibly increasing the arms race tensions between the two countries. For example, in the first article, he discusses what would happen if a baseball were pitched at 90% of the speed of light. That's more than 666 times bigger than the "Little Boy" bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. The what if? How strong, compared to a regular cup of tea, would the lake tea be? After the meeting ended, we thought, 'What the f*ck? Dispatches from a horrifying alternate universe. Yes, but you need to talk to the Russians to do it right. Stack them. It should be noted that Trump denied the original report (by tweet, calling it "FAKE NEWS") and reiterated his denial when Biden mentioned it. Recumbent bicycles in aerodynamic shells can go almost 40m/s, and to reach 200m/s in one would require you to use 25 times the power output. The New START, signed by then-presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. Regardless of the context, Randall tends to take the questions extremely literally and responds seriously to them, even if they are whimsical (such as the Yoda question). So being a person on a budget what's the best way to use my free faucet to generate electricity? Answer: A literal Death Star. sprawling 400-page report produced for the Department of Defense by It was released. What injuries would occur and what would the associated crimes be? What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? The seminal work in the field of nuclear ocean waves is Water Waves Generated By Underwater Explosions, a He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them.'" before disintegrating into, in the words of the 1996 report, a mass of How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the Sun? Intense enough to cause a medium sized nuclear explosion. How dangerous is it to be in a pool during a thunderstorm? If you're thinking about buying it, here are some things you might want to know: Humans can't digest the cellulose in paper, but if we could, eating this book would give you about 2,300 calories (including the cover). I use one of those old phones where you type with numbersfor example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. My daughter recently received her driver's permit in the US, and aspires to visit mainland Europe someday. During a segment on climate change in the first presidential debate, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that Republican President Donald Trump's plan for managing hurricanes once included dropping a nuclear weapon in one. to rapidly intensify. less than an hour to encircle the Earth. At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime? Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet? At least two comics coming out right after this was referencing this article. Hurricane Where-the-Hell-Is-Bermuda enters from the east side of the map, wanders around the Atlantic in a scribble, goes north for a while, and then peters out. Randall Munroe left NASA in 2005 to start up his hugely popular site XKCD 'a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language' which offers a witty take on the world of science and geeks. Did WWII last longer than the total length of movies about WWII? If you made a beach using grains the proportionate size of the stars in the Milky Way, what would that beach look like? Even the U.S. government got involved in a big way. I jokingly sent him a photo of a parrot holding a pizza slice in its beak. The nuclear explosion at the Marshall Islands-which irradiated . 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions was released on September 13. But it would be the same problem with nukes. Don't take any chances. Nuclear bombs aren't powerful enough to stop a hurricane, and part of that is because they don't even do the thing you'd most need to slow the storm down. No, at least not without starving to death quickly and leaving our pets, belongings and everything else behind. You know your house will flood from the bottom up. It's annoying biking in the wintertime, because it's so cold. How many fairies would fly around, if each fairy is born from the first laugh of a child and fairies were immortal? I used to work on a fisheries crew where we would use an electro-fisher backpack to momentarily stun small fish (30 - 100 mm length) so we could scoop them up with nets to identify and measure them. memo from his father, and was kind enough to show it to me. How fast would I have to bike for my skin to warm up the way a spacecraft heats up during reentry? What a great axe that would be! My 12-year-old daughter is proposing an interesting project. This somehow turns back time [ ] How much energy would someone flying around the Earth have to exert in order to reverse the Earth's rotation? Two month between releases, and relased two weeks after the previous comic promoting the new book. What if I tried to re-enter the atmosphere in my car? Rough estimates indicate that the inundation This warm water creates humid air, which then gets thrust upwards by tropical winds to create storm clouds. See the [[what if]] ''{{what if|147|Niagara Straw}}''. Unlike other sites which answer readers' questions, what if? As humans learned over the last century from a wide variety of incidents, fallout is no fun. Randall announced his what if? What if every virus in the world were collected into one area? The release date in the archive is the wrong month June. Earths crust dozens of miles across, leaving a hole through which While the president was assured they would look into it, obviously this plan never went anywhere. I have had a particular problem for as long as I can remember. blog. August 26, 2019. Hurricanes are definitely worse than they used to be. The sixth two weeks break, tenth break in total. A CEO on the other hand, would be in trouble. How much physical space does the internet take up? Were they lonely? On Sunday, Axios reported that Donald Trump has a rather extreme idea for hurricane preparedness: nuke the storms before they make landfall. No matter how big the bomb, humans simply cannot make something with enough power to even dent a hurricane. What better weather to try to alter than hurricanes? that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. Since then only three more articles were released in 2016, the first two with about 8 weeks between them and then more than 12 weeks. . For over 20 years, from 1962 to 1983, the fabulously named Project STORMFURY used simulations, as well as four actual hurricanes as test subjects, to see if cloud seeding with silver iodine would reduce a major storm even a little. 48,364 views Sep 26, 2019 1.4K Dislike Share Science Insider 2.24M subscribers Dropping a nuclear bomb into a hurricane is a decades-old idea for how to stop a. National Geographic says it was a meteorologist named Jack W. Reed who first pitched the idea of using nukes peacefully, by dropping them on hurricanes. This has become known as the Countdown in header text, see all details on that page. What if you shined a flashlight (or a laser) into a sphere made of one-way mirror glass? What if we were to dump all the tea in the world into the Great Lakes? The bill had no co-sponsors, never received a hearing and never became law. What would happen if I dug straight down, at a speed of 1 foot per second? It's just a matter of time. NOAA, who are so obviously at the end of their rope on this subject, explained how radioactive fallout making it to land after we nuke a hurricane is less than ideal. Second two months break of at least two in a row, the 16th break in total. Liquid nitrogen? No, not even if we change the requirements to just the passengers staying alive. Explanation []. have been enough to strengthen it into a typhoon, much as the deep warm A decade or a century, depending if Facebook would still be popular. I heard that bananas are radioactive. I've occasionally seen "radar enforced" on speed limit signs, and I can't help but ask: How intense would radio waves have to be to stop a car from going over the speed limit, and what would happen if this were attempted? "People were astonished. (Assuming the average composition of rock were maintained.). What if you released a submarine into Jupiter's atmosphere? In addition to the heat energy from the water, The article is about the slope needed to be able to coast on a bike, without using the pedals, across mainland USA. "He made it up. What could I use as a clear medium? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is out! It then seemed to stop completely after those two, and it took more than a year (62 weeks) before #157. There you have it. If, on the other hand, you're being attacked by a coyote, it's higher top speed means you'll have only one chance to hit it. Using only pronounceable letter combinations, how long would names have to be to give each star in the universe a unique one word name? If my printer could literally print out money, would it have that big an effect on the world? The heat release is equivalent. Astrophysicists are always saying things like "This mission to this comet is equivalent to throwing a baseball from New York and hitting a particular window in San Francisco." Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. How long would the Sun last if a giant water hose were focused upon it? If you wanted to anchor an airplane into the ground so it wouldn't be able to take off, what would the rope have to be made out of? of 200-300 miles inland, whichever limit is reached first.. Through the decades, theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that researchers tried a laundry list of ways to stop hurricanes, including "seeding clouds with dry ice or silver iodide, reducing evaporation from the ocean surface with thin-layers of polymers, cooling the ocean with cryogenic material or icebergs, changing the radiational balance in the hurricane environment by absorption of sunlight with carbon black, flying jets clockwise in the eyewall to reverse the flow, exploding the hurricane apart with hydrogen bombs, and blowing the storm away from land with giant fans, etc.". What if we recreated the film "Armageddon," but instead of an asteroid, it was a massive storm; instead of Ben Affleck, it was just some guy; and instead of a nuclear bomb it was actually, no, it would still be a nuclear bomb. If winds reached 500 mph, would it pick up a human? Humanity would survive if the robots cared about keeping themselves alive as well. In 1962, physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a memo discussing eight possible Could you electrofish for a blue whale? What would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox (e.g. the only thing to do would be to make a swimming pool. Evin's scenario concerns neither. Coal: 24 NOAA. With the announced release of the what if? e.g. The tree and splash would be great. How big of a lawn would you have to have so that when you finished mowing you'd need to start over because the grass has grown? How many flyby runs would it take to stop Jupiter completely? And mess they did. There is an easy way to link to a given what if? A nuke set detonated, and at 11 kilometers, the Mariana(s) Trench is the deepest How many bananas would you need to power a house? Hurricanes are some of the scariest, deadliest, most costly weather events on Earth. Why don't we nuke them? What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key? Sanvu could whip up a spray containing fallout from the blast, and But first worry about what caused the 500 MPH winds How long would it take for people to notice their weight gain if the mean radius of the world expanded by 1cm every second? typically takes the question beyond the original scope likely intended by the reader and takes it to some extreme for humorous effect. What's the likelihood this could happen? If you carry a penny in your coin tray, how long would it take for that penny to cost you more than a cent in extra gas? To figure out how big The finger holes would collapse and then not much would happen. The . "A clean device would minimize lingering activity placed in the atmosphere," he wrote in his 1959 presentation. Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water? Just more FAKE NEWS!". A bizarre 60-year-old idea to fight hurricanes using nuclear weapons resurfaced this week after Axios reported that President Trump raised the possibility with his national security advisors.. When they do, you have to pause between letters, making those words annoying to type. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. That turbulent warm water is actually quite substantial. Weather Bureau said he could "imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb. Printing $100 bills 24/7 for a year can make you about $200 million per year. Until then, perhaps the best solution is just learn to co-exist with them.". In the year following that release only 8 articles where released including both #147 and #154. "As far as I know, there's no serious scientist doing this at all. The bar representing Uranium is so large that it extends onto a stack of paper taller than a human]] This memo has been declassified, but was never published. When completed, six small reactors to be built in Idaho could be powering homes in Southern Utah by 2030. If all the trees were one tree, Or something else? What would happen to the Earth if the Sun suddenly switched off? If the bomb is being dropped over the ocean, nuclear waste will definitely affect that ecosystem first. 'My friend and I were arguing about what would happen if a bullet got struck by lightning, and we agreed that you should resolve it . With practice, it's possible to throw a book every 800 milliseconds, which means that if human attackers are sprinting towards you, you'll have three or four chances to hit them before they reach you. If you suddenly began rising steadily at one foot per second, how exactly would you die? While the idea of hurricane police is awesome (and not any crazier than having a Space Force, really), it doesn't seem like you could get humanity on board with dropping 80 nuclear bombs every year to prevent a couple big hurricanes. The surrounding area would be obliterated and there would be mass panic for many following years. (a 2000 VW Jetta TDI). During the first presidential debate, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that Republican President Donald Trump once considered detonating a nuclear device inside of a hurricane to stop it. More details.. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. 40000 people and some magic. With close to 15 weeks this was the second longest break between articles so far. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. If we could convert the energy to build the Great Pyramid, would it be enough to send a rocket to the Moon and back? briefly glows the magma of the mantle. swept out to sea by a massive tsunami. In the UK edition of the book, Randall included a preface about his thoughts on the units used in the UK. firestorms. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). If so, how many golf balls would be required to reach the Moon? The debris takes You can almost visualize his wide-eyed innocence, wanting to take two deadly forces and use them to destroy each other, to benefit mankind. What if you built a siphon from the oceans on Europa to Earth? My 4 year old son and I were wondering about soccer ball sized hail today. If all digital data were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be? much less catastrophic than a direct nuclear attack. Other than being a really bad idea, what effect would it have? Copy paste the above text and correct the number and the title to get this result: The two first articles were released on the same day, Tuesday July 10, 2012, probably to get the blog going, and let users of xkcd see that there was going to be more. Let's say the racer has to survive. Would the storm cell be immediately vaporized? When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx? What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop? 0 618: Asteroid 696: Strip Games 786: Exoplanets 809: Los Alamos It's certainly the farthest from Earth we know about. I'm curious, though, what would happen if one person had all of the world's money? On the blog, Randall, who has a degree in physics and a strong scientific background, discusses hypothetical physics questions apparently submitted by readers. near future, and outlined the potential military uses and dangers of "Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems," the page states. But what if we could stop a hurricane in its tracks? Hurricane Florence battered the US East Coast last year. We would see a variety of benefits across our lives but we would also freeze and die. Freemans son, science historian George Dyson, got a paper copy of the Gasoline: 46 pressure from that six miles of water overhead causes it to collapse. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion. If there was enough water, and if the model held up, thisblast would Hurricane Screw-It-Let's-Just-Trash-Florida-Again comes from the east, starts to curve to the north, and then turns sharply to head straight for Florida and zigzag through it. This page was last edited on 11 January 2023, at 02:47. Bernard Le Mehaute and Shen Wang.
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