What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

the processor in a midrange mobile phone could do calculations about 70 times faster than the entire world population.

world’s ant brains have a combined complexity similar to that of the world’s human brains.

Losing your DNA would most likely result in abdominal pain, nausea, dizziness, rapid immune system collapse, and death within days or hours from either rapid systemic infection or systemwide organ failure.

“It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.”

If you’re in Sacramento, Seattle, Canberra, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Phnom Penh, Cairo, Beijing, central Japan, central Sri Lanka, or Portland, space is closer than the sea.

Gravity in low Earth orbit is almost as strong as gravity on the surface. The Space Station hasn’t escaped Earth’s gravity at all; it’s experiencing about 90 percent the pull that we feel on the surface.

When you look at the sky near sunset, you can sometimes see the ISS go past . . . and then, 90 minutes later, see it go past again.6 In those 90 minutes, it’s circled the entire world.

FedEx is capable of transferring 150 exabytes of data per day, or 14 petabits per second—almost a hundred times the current throughput of the Internet.

there’s roughly a 1 in 1,000,000,000 chance that the person you’re calling just murdered someone.

The basic pieces that make up a human life don’t change. We’ve always eaten, learned, grown, fallen in love, fought, and died. In every place, culture, and technological landscape, we develop a different set of behaviors around these same activities. Like every group that came before us, we’re learning how to play those same games on our particular playing field. We’re developing, through sometimes messy trial and error, a new set of social norms for dating, arguing, learning, and growing on the Internet. Sooner or later, we’ll figure out how to mourn.

A magnitude 9 earthquake already measurably alters the rotation of the Earth; the two magnitude 9+ earthquakes this century both altered the length of the day by a tiny fraction of a second.