What If? 2 Quotes

“Removing Japan would also have a big effect on ocean currents.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“This plan has some flaws. It destroys the Earth, yes, but it’s also unnecessarily inefficient.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“* If you drink all of someone’s blood, there’s a 100 percent chance that they’ll die.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“It might seem confusing that someone navigating toward Earth’s north pole would be attracted to the MRI’s south pole, but that’s because the Earth’s pole names are backward. The “north” end of a magnet is the one that points toward the Earth’s north pole, which means the Earth’s north magnetic pole is technically a south magnetic pole, and vice versa. This is deeply annoying to me, but there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well move on.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“What would happen if you microwaved a smaller microwave, while the smaller one was on as well? —Michael You would no longer be welcome in that IKEA.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“High-quality diamonds are expensive, but it’s hard to get a handle on their exact price because the entire industry is a scam”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“This is one of those questions that sounds like it’s going to create a disaster, but when you think about it for a moment, it actually doesn’t seem like it would be so bad. Then, if you think about it a little more, you realize it would be extremely bad.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“If a chip is running at 3 GHz, light—and electric signals—don’t have time to cross from one end of the computer to the other during a single clock cycle. Different parts of your computer are out of sync with one another. If two parts are going to go back and forth quickly, circuit board designers need to place them physically close to one another, so they’re not held back by the sluggish speed of light.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“If you built an iPhone with vacuum tubes instead of transistors, packed together with the same density as they were in UNIVAC, the phone would be about the size of five city blocks when resting on one edge. Conversely, if you built the original UNIVAC out of iPhone-size components, the entire machine would be less than 300 microns tall, small enough to embed inside a single grain of salt.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“Birds that are startled frequently try to take off and fly toward what looks like open space, which is often how they end up hitting windows. If the window is close enough, the bird won’t have time to get up enough speed to injure itself too badly, which is why the Audubon Society recommends that if you can’t put bird feeders more than 10 meters away from your window, you should put them closer than 1 meter.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“The “north” end of a magnet is the one that points toward the Earth’s north pole, which means the Earth’s north magnetic pole is technically a south magnetic pole, and vice versa.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“In 1956, oceanographer Henry Stommel suggested that, because of differences in temperature and salinity between the surface and the deep ocean, if you connect the surface and the deep ocean with a tube and push water through it, it might continue flowing indefinitely.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“If we look at a polka-dot shirt with dots 5 centimeters apart, then we can use the visibility distance formula to calculate that if you see the shirt from more than 200 meters away, the individual dots won’t be visible and it will look like the fabric is a solid color.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“You’d also run into problems scaling up the retina—if you made the individual cells bigger, they’d no longer be able to detect visible light wavelengths.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“By weight, the single most valuable thing that’s been bought and sold on the open market is probably the Treskilling Yellow postage stamp.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

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― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“Wepyng and waylyng, care and oother sorwe I knowe ynogh, on even and a-morwe,” Quod the Marchant, “and so doon other mo That wedded been.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“270,000,000,000,000,000,000,000”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“In 2009, the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant found themselves dealing with what they called an “extreme spider situation.” As described in a fascinating and horrifying article published by the Entomological Society of America, [*] an estimated 80 million orb-weaving spiders had colonized the plant, covering every surface with heavy sheets of web.  [*]”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“In addition to later sunsets, taller people also experience earlier sunrises, which means that days last longer for them in general. If you’re near the equator at sea level, every extra inch of height corresponds to nearly a minute of extra daylight per year,”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“in human populations, 60 percent of humans who had any children at all ended up in the family tree permanently, and 73 percent of people who survived to adulthood had children.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“Q What is the average size for every man-made object on the planet? —Max Carver Not too big, not too small. About average.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“For example, 42 U.S. Code § 2141(b) sets limits on the Department of Energy’s ability to distribute nuclear materials. If you’re not the Department of Energy, you don’t need to worry about that.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions