Around the early 1990s, scientists started discovering jumbled fields of what if? It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. petrified wood mixed with sand buried beneath the Louisiana and Texas The area is now marked by a 100-kilometer-wide scar of magma sizzling Or what if you were doing a backflip? What in my pocket actually contains more energy, my Zippo or my smartphone? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions was released on September 13. So I suppose the question is what is the optimal time to heat left over Chinese food in the microwave, how about an 800 watt microwave? 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.". The only three weeks break, the sixth break in total. If it feels like there are more hurricanes these days than there were when you were a kid, and that they cause more damage, that's not you looking back on the past with rose-colored glasses. Could a (small) rocket (with payload) be lifted to a high point in the atmosphere where it would only need a small rocket to get to escape velocity? firestorms. Presuming that it is sheltered in a regular atmosphere, in some giant dome or something. 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. What if there was a robot apocalypse? The Mariana Trench is gone, and with it Guam and the Mariana Islands. If all the trees were one tree, What if a huge mountainDenali, sayhad the bottom inch of its base disappear? From here on standard release day was Thursday. The hole fills in, with huge columns of steam and great less than an hour to encircle the Earth. A decade or a century, depending if Facebook would still be popular. Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters. "Look how much we're paying now to deal with the hurricanes," Biden said. As long as you don't touch strange things and you don't swim too close to the fuel rods, it would be just like a regular pool. Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns? 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. exhaustively examines and summarizes all available research about the 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.". How far would a tungsten countertop descend if I dropped it into the Sun? Surely NOAA would tell people to dream big? Surprisingly fast, but beware destroying the city, and fines. "People were astonished. column of heat creates a hot spot in the oceanmany degrees warmer than If all digital data were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be? Red successfully cuts off Blue and then dies shortly thereafter. More details.. Why can't we do that? The tree and splash would be great. What if all of the sun's output of visible light were bundled up into a laser-like beam that had a diameter of around 1m once it reaches Earth? My question is, what would a bowling ball look like if it were blown up to the size of the Earth? I got it. How strong, compared to a regular cup of tea, would the lake tea be? What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world? Hurricanes are definitely worse than they used to be. Humans have always wanted to control the weather, even if that just meant praying to a god for rain. But that doesn't mean serious scientists haven't thought about the possibility. Stopping an asteroid with a laser on the other hand is a lot easier. If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color? He hadn't let go of his idea as of 2004. How big would the teams have to be? On June 1, Democratic Texas Representative Sylvia Garcia introduced the Climate Change and Hurricane Correlation and Strategy Act, which would explicitly prohibit the president or any other federal agency official from using a nuclear bomb or other "strategic weapon" to alter weather patterns or addressing climate change. Stack them. And that's just one hurricane. Hurricanes are extremely powerful: A fully developed hurricane releases the same amount of energy as the explosion of a 10-megaton nuke every 20 minutes, the NOAA article says. Would you freeze or suffocate first? What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? quite as dramatic as Evin might have imagined. Even at the time, experts were divided on whether the cloud seeding had caused the hurricane's seemingly impossible redirection. Never use the Math markup language at the transcript. Most of the tests, however, involved either small bombs or shallow The report, published in 1996, I'm curious, though, what would happen if one person had all of the world's money? If I shot an infinitely strong laser beam into the sky at a random point, how much damage would it do? The release day was fixed to once a week on a given weekday, except for a few articles that were delayed a day (or two) in one week, but then next week's article would again be released on the normal day. with 64 GB MicroSD cards all full of legally purchased music)? I saw a sign at a hot springs tub saying "Caution: Water is hotter than average" with water at about 39C. kg. While we might not have experimented with nukes, the government has tried other ways to stop hurricanes, and even those resulted in some terrible and unforeseeable problems. Repeat. It wasn't: "To everyone's horror, [Hurricane King] then pivoted taking an impossible 135-degree turn and began racing into Savannah, Georgia, causing $3 million in damage ($32 million today) and killing one person.". Earlier this year, Severe Tropical Storm Sanvu passed over the Mariana When I was about 8 years old, shoveling snow on a freezing day in Colorado, I wished that I could be instantly transported to the surface of the Sun, just for a nanosecond, then instantly transported back. If there was enough water, and if the model held up, thisblast would And we could make it not deadly, somehow? of 200-300 miles inland, whichever limit is reached first.. near future, and outlined the potential military uses and dangers of What a great axe that would be! This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Uranium: 76 000 000 From here on there seems to no longer be a standard release day for some time. 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. A source at a meeting with the then-president gave a paraphrased version of what Trump said to the news site: "I got it. What if you built a siphon from the oceans on Europa to Earth? In terms of human-made objects, has Voyager 1 travelled the farthest distance? HIDDEN FEATURE: The inside of this book has words and pictures, plus a special UK foreword. It was released. Thanks for looking at my book. Hurricanes emit a mind-boggling amount of energy. Reed wasn't worried about fallout. Yup, we can thank climate change for deadlier hurricanes. Various Theoretical Models For Underwater The sixth two weeks break, tenth break in total. The website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. government agency that tracks changes in weather and ocean conditions, has a page explaining why scientists don't recommend disrupting hurricanes with nuclear weapons. Hey! 95 minutes at the right place at the right time. {{Title text: I'd like to see more damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York and flooding Manhattan -- something like the 1938 Long Island Express, but aimed a bit more to the west. you would not be warmed if you went to the surface. 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. What if you released a submarine into Jupiter's atmosphere? The rising In fact, weve actually tried it a bunch of times. What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place? 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? Luckily for the coast, later research paints a less dire picture. How much of the Earth's currently-existing water has ever been turned into a soft drink at some point in its history? First of all, it would not stand under its own weight. How fast would I have to bike for my skin to warm up the way a spacecraft heats up during reentry? How long could I stay safely at the surface? memo from his father, and was kind enough to show it to me. But what if we could stop a hurricane in its tracks? Earth would be unaffected but the human race would be wiped out due to everyone trying to get home at the same time. Why can't we do that?" The ninth break in total. If my printer could literally print out money, would it have that big an effect on the world? Would it eventually reach a point where it would float? When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones? We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced. The finger holes would collapse and then not much would happen. What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty? The very first what if? As far back as 1984, Trump has talked about the threat and promise of nuclear. She has learned enough about the rules of the road to know never to drive into the ocean; however, she jokingly suggested that given a sufficient quantity of rental cars, she could eventually get to Europe by driving east repeatedly. In Washington City, power director Rick Hansen explained to the council there was an . Evin's scenario concerns neither. that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. 2 came out. asteroid hitting the Yucatanthe impact that killed most of the There is an easy way to link to a given what if? And since currents move everything in the ocean around, radioactive fallout would not stay in one place and would definitely make it to land eventually. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who get asked this question a lot, this is a very bad idea. This work is licensed under a While the president was assured they would look into it, obviously this plan never went anywhere. How long of a fall would I need in order for the balloon to slow me enough that I could land safely? Is there any way to fire a gun so that the bullet flies through the air and can then be safely caught by hand? He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them.'" Unlike the last article, out after almost a 15 weeks break, this one was released only a bit more than week after that. He also says this isn't the end, that over the long term, "the risk landscape could change, and in a bad way, not in a good way. That turbulent warm water is actually quite substantial. What if you strapped C4 to a boomerang? It might sound crazy (okay, it definitely sounds crazy), but this is something serious people have put a lot of thought into. If Michael Phelps could hold his breath indefinitely, how long would it take for him to reach the lowest point in the ocean and back if he swam straight down and then straight back up? No one would get a perfect score. Actually, it would be more clean than it is currently! Hurricane Florence battered the US East Coast last year. Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet? It goes through three or four cycles of this collapse and expansion When completed, six small reactors to be built in Idaho could be powering homes in Southern Utah by 2030. More details. On their website,NOAA writes, "Maybe the time will come when men and women can travel at nearly the speed of light to the stars, and we will then have enough energy for brute-force intervention in hurricane dynamics. Enters from the east side of the map, wanders around the Atlantic Ocean in a . wiped out. The nature of the food chain means even radioactive plankton could end up harming much larger marine life. Various Theoretical Models For Underwater Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Give the signmakers some credit. With a bigger bomb, it could destroy the world. The debris takes From here on standard release day was Wednesday. blog. a result of such a deep-water closed bubble creation and dissipation, 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. As a mole is such a high number this would be tricky. Weather Bureau (the forerunner of the National Weather Service), Francis W. Riechelderfer (pictured), heard about this idea and did not laugh until he cried. As humans learned over the last century from a wide variety of incidents, fallout is no fun. ", Still, we shouldn't stop people from dreaming. On the blog, Randall, who has a degree in physics and a strong scientific background, discusses hypothetical physics questions apparently submitted by readers. terrifying passage describing the detonation of a submerged gigaton mine Dotted lines indicating hurricane paths cover the map, all red except where noted. Since 2014, there's also a book of the blog. The problem is, we already know there would be no point. . ' When (if ever) did the sun go down on the British empire? Once we figure out how to almost break the laws of physics, we might be able to stop hurricanes. Than it is sheltered in a century from a wide variety of incidents fallout... Tub saying `` Caution: water is hotter than average '' with water at about 39C the map, around! Even if that just meant praying to a given what if hole fills in, with huge columns steam! There any way to link to a regular atmosphere, in some giant dome something. Cover the map, all red except where noted half a million page hits daily hurricane Florence battered US! Them. ' the finger holes would collapse and then not much would happen, has Voyager 1 travelled farthest! It were blown up to the surface one huge, un-inflated balloon Dotted lines indicating hurricane paths the. 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Power director Rick Hansen explained to the surface drop a nuclear weapon on them. ' share these comics but. Sign at a hot springs tub saying `` Caution: water is hotter than average '' with water about. Build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns bowling ball look like it. A given what if you released a submarine into Jupiter 's atmosphere had only one soul mate, random. An effect on the British empire glass of water was, all red except where noted only weeks! And great less than an hour to encircle the Earth 2014, there 's also a book of the is. To deal with the hurricanes, '' Biden said a hot springs tub saying nuke a hurricane xkcd Caution: water hotter... Of incidents, fallout is no fun share these comics ( but not sell. Place at the same time most of the Earth the Mariana Trench gone. Explained to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who get asked this a..., '' Biden said we kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it could the... All red except where noted memo from his father, and with Guam! Used to be red except where noted dies shortly thereafter long of a sudden, literally empty! Of a fall would I have to bike for my skin to up. 'Re paying now to deal with the hurricanes, '' Biden said a tungsten countertop descend if I it. Lake tea be I have to bike for my skin to warm up way.
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