What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

by Randall Munroe

As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur?

if you try to eat a cloud, you’ll just burp out more cloud faster than you can eat it.

Good news: You can’t inhale a person, and also dust is not mostly dead skin.

The average kid produces about half a liter of saliva per day, according to the paper “Estimation of the Total Saliva Volume Produced Per Day in Five-Year-Old Children,”

you don’t see a lot of ropes made of snow—but

The sour receptors on our tongue are activated by free hydrogen ions, which we usually encounter in food in the form of acidic liquids. The bulk of a star’s atmosphere is made of hydrogen ions, so it would very directly activate those receptors, giving a star an overwhelmingly sour taste.

You get shorter throughout the day as your body compresses a little!)

Lemon drops and gumdrops are denser than water,