What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

If humans put on artificial wings to fly, we might become Titanian versions of the Icarus story—our wings could freeze, fall apart, and send us tumbling to our deaths.

Throwing is hard.1 In order to deliver a baseball to a batter, a pitcher has to release the ball at exactly the right point in the throw. A timing error of half a millisecond in either direction is enough to cause the ball to miss the strike zone. To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm. That means that when your arm is still rotating toward the correct position, the signal to release the ball is already at your wrist. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the tenth story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat.