How long would the Sun last if a giant water hose were focused upon it? 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? The article is about the slope needed to be able to coast on a bike, without using the pedals, across mainland USA. But after defeating the Nazis and inventing the atom bomb, scientists seemed to think anything was possible, including controlling the weather. The Mariana Trench is gone, and with it Guam and the Mariana Islands. Is there enough energy to move the entire current human population off-planet? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. The column of deep, hot water from our nuke could conceivably If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince? The seminal work in the field of nuclear ocean waves is Water Waves Generated By Underwater Explosions, a What would happen from the impact of the mountain falling 1 inch? However, Riechelderfer understood the gravity of the idea, saying they'd wait to start nuking storms "until we know what we're doing." 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. This can never happen, even if we were to throw Earth at Jupiter. 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? Other than being a really bad idea, what effect would it have? The Sun. Now I've realized that a flamethrower is impractical, but what about a high-powered microwave emitter? More details.. Second two months break of at least two in a row, the 16th break in total. The Mariner 1 has traveled much farther than Voyager 1. Trench. What would it be like to swim in it? If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it? How close could I stand to watch it? There's just too much of a chance that the unknown could happen and result in an epic, deadly disaster. What If We Nuked A Hurricane? Let's say the racer has to survive. THAT number won't fit in the room? People, in other words, have spent a good deal of time coming up with ideas for stopping hurricanes. "As far as I know, there's no serious scientist doing this at all. Her 13-year-old friend would then drive the Ferrari around, while she sits in the chair enjoying uninterrupted views of the countryside. A tropical cyclone is a generic term for a low-pressure system that formed over tropical waters (25S to 25N) with thunderstorm activity near the center of its closed, cyclonic winds. detonated, and at 11 kilometers, the Mariana(s) Trench is the deepest bookprovides How much of the Earth's currently-existing water has ever been turned into a soft drink at some point in its history? Could a high-speed train run through a vertical loop, like a rollercoaster, with the passengers staying comfortable? Huge volumes of rock and water are blasted into space. The There is an easy way to link to a given what if? If there was enough water, and if the model held up, thisblast would And would it even work? 30 years to walk, much longer for the sentence. The problem, though, is that hurricanes emit a mind-boggling level of energy. 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. It's annoying biking in the wintertime, because it's so cold. Almost nobody would find their soul mate. First and shortest of two long breaks in a row, the 11th break in total. I also understand that by doing this, Jupiter slowed down very slightly. 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. Using nuclear weapons to destroy hurricanes is not a good idea, a US scientific agency has said, following reports that President . "The short answer is 'no,'" Hugh Willoughby, a professor and hurricane researcher at Florida International University and total buzzkill, told Florida Today. 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? This memo has been declassified, but was never published. Printing $100 bills 24/7 for a year can make you about $200 million per year. Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing? a wonderful account of the unraveling of that mystery. Whats the fastest way to get a hand-written letter from my place in Chicago to my mother in New Jersey? 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. sprawling 400-page report produced for the Department of Defense by memo from his father, and was kind enough to show it to me. Hurricane Illinois-Has-It-Too-Easy comes from somewhere to the northwest, goes through Illinois, and then back to the northwest. 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. No, but it does make some really cool patterns. Better to just carry a sign. Thanks for looking at my book. This work is licensed under a Would it flow once it's set up? In Armageddon, a NASA guy comments that a plan to shoot a laser at the asteroid is like shooting a b.b. What injuries would occur and what would the associated crimes be? Since then there was no new posts for almost four years. What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? It's baffling and has made me automatically adjust heating times to over 2 minutes. the surrounding waterthat lingers for some time. When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones? 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. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). The report also claimed that Trump had raised the possibility of bombing hurricanes with another senior administration official, as detailed in a 2017 NSC memo. What if you built a siphon from the oceans on Europa to Earth? Also, it would be many times the distance the Earth is from the Moon. He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them. Some words have consecutive letters on the same number. The larger fish tended to be stunned for slightly longer because of their larger surface area but I don't imagine this relationship would be maintained for very large animals. If we could convert the energy to build the Great Pyramid, would it be enough to send a rocket to the Moon and back? If we hooked turbines to people exercising in gyms, how much power could we produce? In the first Superman movie, Superman flies around Earth so fast that it begins turning in the opposite direction. Now imagine the energy required to stop five or six a year, every year. What if everything was antimatter, EXCEPT Earth? How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the Sun? On average, not just in spring or fall. This site is not under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License like xkcd is. ", "I never said that," Trump retorted. of 200-300 miles inland, whichever limit is reached first.. Rough estimates indicate that the inundation that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. After World War II, they started trying in a big way. How steep would the slope have to be to sustain the momentum needed to ride a bicycle the entire distance without pedaling? The result would be some kind of nuclear explosion. This new release is probably due to the upcoming release of the What If? What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? 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.. So during the summer of 2016, it seemed it was down to about one release every two months but then it increased. What if you exploded a nuclear bomb (say, the Tsar Bomba) at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns? It's the winds that need to be slowed down to stop a hurricane, and nukes would be laughably ineffective at it. you would not be warmed if you went to the surface. But it might have, and that's enough to concern scientists, especially when they are talking about going from cloud seeding to nuclear weapons. What a great splish-splash that would be! What do we do with this?'" Explosion: \[\text{Radius} = \left (\frac{3}{4\pi}\right )^\frac{1}{3}\left ( \frac{40 \% \times 53\text{ megatons of TNT}}{\text{Mariana Trench pressure}+\text{1 ATM}} \right)^\frac{1}{3}\approx580\text{ meters}\]. Fast enough so you would need a speedometer in scientific notation. '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 . Liquid nitrogen? Crypto the continental shelf. Assuming the stereo is indestructible then yes. Before publishing the first what if? like. 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