What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

By the time of our arrival, 10,000 years ago, the ice had largely withdrawn across the present-day Canadian border. The ice sheets scoured the landscape down to bedrock. Over the next 10,000 years, life crept slowly back northward. Some species moved north faster than others; when Europeans arrived in New England, earthworms had not yet returned.

This smothering ocean of high-pressure meat would wipe out most life on the planet, which could—to reddit’s horror—threaten the integrity of the DNS system. So doing this on Earth is definitely not an option.

As far as I know, this steak question originally came up in a lengthy 4chan thread, which quickly disintegrated into poorly informed physics tirades intermixed with homophobic slurs. There was no clear conclusion.

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.

This example hints at a very deep idea, which is that information is fundamentally tied to the recipient’s uncertainty about the message’s content and his or her ability to predict it in advance.