What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

They say there are no stupid questions. That’s obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.

Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.

In the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell “rings” so quietly it’s almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out.

apricity

This is why, even though matches and torches are about the same temperature, you see tough guys in movies extinguish matches by pinching them but never see them do the same with torches.

This is my single favorite word in the English language. It means the warmth of sunlight in winter.

Q. If my printer could literally print out money, would it have that big an effect on the world? —Derek O’Brien A. You can fit four bills on an 8.5" × 11" sheet of paper. If your printer can manage one page (front and back) of full-color high-quality printing per minute, that’s $200 million dollars a year. This is enough to make you very rich, but not enough to put any kind of dent in the world economy. Since there are 7.8 billion $100 bills in circulation, and the lifetime of a $100 bill is about 90 months, that means there are about a billion produced each year. Your extra two million bills a year would barely be enough to notice.

It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles at hurricanes.

A submarine is about as safe as a submarine safe (a submarine safe is not to be confused with a safe in a submarine—a safe in a submarine is substantially safer than a submarine safe).

It was written in 1942. That’s an interesting time to write about asteroids, because in 1942 we didn’t actually know what asteroids looked like. Even in our best telescopes, the largest asteroids were visible only as points of light. In fact, that’s where their name comes from—the word asteroid means “starlike.”

Water is very nearly incompressible, so the impact isn’t spread out over time—it comes as a single sharp shock. The momentary force on the glass is immense, and it breaks.

This “water hammer” effect (which is also responsible for the “clunk” you sometimes hear in old plumbing when you turn off the faucet) can be seen in the well-known party trick of smacking the top of a glass bottle to blow out the bottom. When the bottle is struck, it’s pushed suddenly downward. The liquid inside doesn’t respond to the suction (air pressure) right away—much like in our scenario—and a gap briefly opens up. It’s a small vacuum—a few fractions of an inch thick—but when it closes, the shock breaks the bottom of the bottle.

Destroying angel is a small, white, innocuous-looking mushroom. If you’re like me, you were told never to eat mushrooms you found in the woods. Amanita is the reason why.3 If you eat a destroying angel, for the rest of the day you’ll feel fine. Later that night, or the next morning, you’ll start exhibiting cholera-like symptoms—vomiting, abdominal pain, and severe diarrhea. Then you start to feel better. At the point where you start to feel better, the damage is probably irreversible. Amanita mushrooms contain amatoxin, which binds to an enzyme that is used to read information from DNA. It hobbles the enzyme, effectively interrupting the process by which cells follow DNA’s instructions. Amatoxin causes irreversible damage to whatever cells it collects in. Since most of your body is made of cells,4 this is bad. Death is generally caused by liver or kidney failure, since those are the first sensitive organs in which the toxin accumulates. Sometimes intensive care and a liver transplant can be enough to save a patient, but a sizable percentage of those who eat Amanita mushrooms die. The frightening thing about Amanita poisoning is the “walking ghost” phase—the period where you seem to be fine (or getting better), but your cells are accumulating irreversible and lethal damage.

But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

In 1982, Larry Walters flew across Los Angeles in a lawn chair lifted by weather balloons, eventually reaching several miles in altitude. After passing through LAX airspace, he descended by shooting some of the balloons with a pellet gun. On landing, Walters was arrested, although the authorities had some trouble figuring out what to charge him with. At the time, an FAA safety inspector told the New York Times, “We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, some type of charge will be filed.”

Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet. I don’t know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase “shoot jets of blood from their eyes” in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.

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.

While 140 characters may not seem like a lot, we will never run out of things to say.

It’s hard to suck in air against the weight of the water, which is why snorkels can only work when your lungs are near the surface.

If a date took you home and you saw a row of working printers set up in his or her living room, what would you think?

Right now, next of kin can convert a dead person’s Facebook profile into a memorial page. But there are a lot of questions surrounding passwords and access to private data that we haven’t yet developed social norms for. Should accounts remain accessible? What should be made private? Should next of kin have the right to access email? Should memorial pages have comments? How do we handle trolling and vandalism? Should people be allowed to interact with dead user accounts? What lists of friends should they show up on? These are issues that we’re currently in the process of sorting out by trial and error. Death has always been a big, difficult, and emotionally charged subject, and every society finds different ways to handle it. 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.

Niagara Falls has a power output equal to a Hiroshima-sized bomb going off every eight hours! The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki had an explosive power equal to 1.3 Hiroshima bombs! For context, the gentle breeze blowing across a prairie also carries roughly the kinetic energy of a Hiroshima bomb.

And thank you to my wife, for teaching me how to be tough, teaching me how to be brave, and teaching me about birds.