What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (What If?, #2)

by Randall Munroe

Based on US crash rates, the odds of a driver traveling 46 billion light-years without a crash would be about 1 in 101015. That’s roughly the same as the probability of a monkey with a typewriter typing out the entire Library of Congress, with no typos, fifty times in a row.

Robin Dunbar famously suggested that the average human maintains about 150 social relationships. The total number of humans who have ever lived is somewhere north of 100 billion. A 1017-year road trip would be long enough to replay the lives of every one of those people in real time—in a sort of unedited documentary—and then rewatch every one of those documentaries 150 times, each time with a different commentary track by the 150 people who knew the subject best. By the time you finished watching this complete documentary of human perspective, you’d still be less than 1 percent of the way to the edge of the universe, so you’d have plenty of time to rewatch the whole project—each human life with all 150 commentary tracks—100 times before you finally arrived.

It might seem strange that a metal that’s cool to the touch in small amounts would be so hot when collected together in a big ball, but this is just a consequence of scale. Since volume grows faster than surface area, larger objects produce more heat per unit of surface area, so they have to get hotter to radiate it away. Really big objects can get extremely hot from even a tiny amount of heat production per unit of volume. Even the core of the Sun, where nuclear fusion happens, would be pretty cold if you could somehow isolate a piece of it. A cup of solar core material2 produces about 60 milliwatts of thermal energy. By volume, that’s about the same heat production rate as the body of a lizard, and less than that of a human. In a sense, you’re hotter than the Sun—there’s just not as much of you.

But making laws simpler and vaguer doesn’t necessarily move that power from the state to the people. You could get rid of a lot of laws and replace them with “everyone just needs to behave properly.” But that leaves it up to law enforcement to decide the meaning of “properly.”