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

by Randall Munroe

Trying to answer silly questions can take you through some serious science. And even if the answers aren’t useful for anything, knowing them is fun.

You can feel this “cold radiation” by looking up at the stars on a summer night. Your face will feel cold since your body heat is pouring away into space.

“Stand on the other side from where the physics is happening” is actually a good general rule for scientific equipment.

Once the stars have burned out, you’ll have to find a new source of entertainment. Even if you bring every audiobook ever recorded and every episode of every podcast, that won’t even last you to the edge of the Solar System.

😂

If you live in New York and you see a T. rex, don’t worry. You don’t have to choose a friend to sacrifice; just order 80 burgers instead.

A half of human equals to 80 pieces of burgers???

So far, I’ve read . . . the Goosebumps book.

And I read none of them

Humanity lives in the shade under your panels. People are probably pretty mad at you at this point.

Darkness era

That’s fine, you just need to remove more rock, perhaps with some kind of Sun-powered vegetable peeler.

Wait, what??? Our earth was like... a potato?

You’re one pound heavier.

Damn!

After 3,750 kilometers of rock, you finally achieve your goal of losing 20 pounds. At this point, you’ve removed 85 percent of the Earth’s mass. But you’ve lost weight!

But it's no longer like our planet right?

“Are there more grains of sand than stars in the sky?” is a popular question that has been tackled by many people. The short answer to that question is that there are probably more stars in the visible universe than grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches.

Wow

You would no longer be welcome in that IKEA.

😂

Space may be hot, but it’s the hottest place you can freeze to death.

The bad news is that space is full of broken spaceships and satellites and pieces of junk, all flying around at random. If you build a mega-mega-skyscraper, spaceship parts will eventually smash into it.

. . . it would still cost you less than if you lost.

Aish

In other words, your plastic toys contain a lot less dinosaur than you do.

But if you’re open to leveraging our monetary system’s legal authority to impart value into an arbitrary inanimate object . . . . . . you could just write a check.

Well, this is definitely a better idea