The reason for this you can read at the Editor FAQ . What took more energy, the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Apollo Mission? During a segment on climate change in the first presidential debate, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that Republican President Donald Trump's plan for managing hurricanes once included dropping a nuclear weapon in one. Hurricane Where-the-Hell-Is-Bermuda enters from the east side of the map, wanders around the Atlantic in a scribble, goes north for a while, and then peters out. What would happen if I dug straight down, at a speed of 1 foot per second? the surrounding waterthat lingers for some time. into the atmosphere, they heat to a glowlike meteorsigniting global My 4 year old son and I were wondering about soccer ball sized hail today. Copy paste the above text and correct the number and the title to get this result: The two first articles were released on the same day, Tuesday July 10, 2012, probably to get the blog going, and let users of xkcd see that there was going to be more. What if you tried to stop rain with a laser that targeted and vaporized each incoming droplet before it could come within ten feet of the ground? The destruction hurricanes leave in their wake is epic. Granted, the Sun is much bigger, but it is also much further away, and as I learned in high school physics, the gravitational force is proportional to the square of the distance. ", Still, we shouldn't stop people from dreaming. After that there were five more two weeks break, one three week break (before December 11, 2014) and two releases in a row (133-134 towards the end of this period of 136 articles), where the release dates where shifted so the two came out over three weeks' time with about 1.5 weeks between them. If the stack is too tall to fit in the room, write down the number of pages it would take to write down the number. The others not so much. Yup, we can thank climate change for deadlier hurricanes. A bizarre 60-year-old idea to fight hurricanes using nuclear weapons resurfaced this week after Axios reported that President Trump raised the possibility with his national security advisors.. If set up in the rainiest place in the United States (Ketchikan, Alaska), the cost could be offset in about a century. a result of such a deep-water closed bubble creation and dissipation, column of heat creates a hot spot in the oceanmany degrees warmer than But those are waves from an explosion close to the surface. They often predict the complete annihilation of humankind, or at least a really big explosion. In that year (assuming no more comics before February 26 2017), only 8 articles where released including both 147 and this one. In the absence of an How long of a fall would I need in order for the balloon to slow me enough that I could land safely? At what numerical value would the number printed approximately equal the number of ink molecules used? Not with regular lasers, but with more power, you could destroy the world. The result of the above is that over the first 144 weeks 136 articles where released with never more than 3 weeks between releases. There is an easy way to link to a given what if? Obviously, the answer is to nuke them when they are still small and not an issue. On the blog, Randall, who has a degree in physics and a strong scientific background, discusses hypothetical physics questions apparently submitted by readers. What would happen if you exploded a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane? What if you were flashing your BIOS during a thunderstorm and you got hit by lightning? What If We Nuked A Hurricane? Obviously, my boyfriend had to go without pizza until he landed at JFK. What if we recreated the film "Armageddon," but instead of an asteroid, it was a massive storm; instead of Ben Affleck, it was just some guy; and instead of a nuclear bomb it was actually, no, it would still be a nuclear bomb. What if the Earth were made entirely of protons, and the Moon were made entirely of electrons? The 'reality' and consequences of using multiple cars (that are not your own) to construct a trans-Atlantic highway. bookprovides I bike to class sometimes. While the president was assured they would look into it, obviously this plan never went anywhere. How much would you need to make to be in real trouble? (I don't know why six feetbut that's what he asked.). What if there was a lake on the Moon? Getting it back is another story. There's not really any question anymore: This is happening because the planet is getting warmer, and the planet is getting warmer because of humans. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. This was so far the second longest break. And mess they did. It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. I'm curious, though, what would happen if one person had all of the world's money? Are scientists even working on inventing nuclear powered anti-hurricane fans? (Also, Randall misspelled Bethlehem). You are in a boat directly over the Mariana Trench. The surrounding area would be obliterated and there would be mass panic for many following years. All that changes when this cat enters the equation: Lets say that when Im typing the above equation, the cat hops onto my How many unique English tweets are possible? Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? "A clean device would minimize lingering activity placed in the atmosphere," he wrote in his 1959 presentation. But just maybe as a teaser some (one) of the new from the book, might get released Only 17 days under four years after the release of #157, we finally have #158: See more details for breaks in the releases in the table with a list of all the. approach Iwo Jima as a radioactive whirlwind. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. Pin it to the stack. We still need to complete some explanations like this one: 1608: Hoverboard. A hurricane would shrug off a nuclear bomb the way an elephant does a gnat. 70% of the time you would end up in the ocean. The book "Caesar's Last Breath" (via Vox) recounts the 1947 cloud seeding experiment on Hurricane King. Liquid gallium? what if? If the energy released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released in a hurricane, it's still a lot of power, so the hurricane police would need to dim the whole world's lights many times a year. book, articles were posted weekly. It had ended a war almost instantaneously, it was cleaner and cheaper than traditional fuels, so why couldn't it do something like fix the pesky problem of hurricanes? What would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox (e.g. But as the '50s turned to the '60s, more and more people began to realize the weapons contained inherent dangers and harms. August 26, 2019. 2 came out. "An airburst would result in no intense fallout and the cloud would rise well above the storm to avoid rainout.". goes with citing temperature records and other trivia actually naming a Jeopardy master. "You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting," the source told Axios. It's certainly the farthest from Earth we know about. If everybody in the US drove west, could we temporarily halt continental drift? Surely NOAA would tell people to dream big? How many flyby runs would it take to stop Jupiter completely? Between the famine and the fires, most life on Earth is (We have an idea for selling bottled Europa water.). Around the early 1990s, scientists started discovering jumbled fields of serious answers to absurd questions and absurd advice for common concerns from xkcd's Randall Munroe. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. Almost nobody would find their soul mate. What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? What would happen if all of the rivers in the US were instantly frozen in the middle of the summer? In the UK edition of the book, Randall included a preface about his thoughts on the units used in the UK. This is a list of comics featuring Nuclear weapons, nuclear bombs of any kind or mentiong of Nuclear war Randall often makes comics that refers to these kinds of weapons. What better weather to try to alter than hurricanes? How much Force power can Yoda output?). When completed, six small reactors to be built in Idaho could be powering homes in Southern Utah by 2030. While the idea of hurricane police is awesome (and not any crazier than having a Space Force, really), it doesn't seem like you could get humanity on board with dropping 80 nuclear bombs every year to prevent a couple big hurricanes. If they looked at our star right now, what would they see? And it's not possible anyway, since nukes are not giant, cutting-edge fans. He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them.'" How many bananas would you need to power a house? What a great tree that would be! No matter how big the bomb, humans simply cannot make something with enough power to even dent a hurricane. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). But what if we could stop a hurricane in its tracks? No one would get a perfect score. If we could convert the energy to build the Great Pyramid, would it be enough to send a rocket to the Moon and back? Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators? If all the seas were one sea, How much cornstarch can I rinse down the drain before unpleasant things start to happen? Hurricane Freud starts in the Gulf of Mexico, draws a set of balls to Florida's cock, and then comes on land and stops. Absolutely! But why would you. The problem is, we already know there would be no point. Hurricane cos(x) forms a graph of cos(x) along the bottom edge of the map.]] Regardless of the context, Randall tends to take the questions extremely literally and responds seriously to them, even if they are whimsical (such as the Yoda question). Astrophysicists are always saying things like "This mission to this comet is equivalent to throwing a baseball from New York and hitting a particular window in San Francisco." What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? I jokingly sent him a photo of a parrot holding a pizza slice in its beak. The very first what if? My daughter recently received her driver's permit in the US, and aspires to visit mainland Europe someday. Hurricanes cause destruction in lots of ways, but the big one is wind. From the very edge of the atmosphere and even then it might not be fully cooked. The first scenarios are pretty boring. How much of the Earth's currently-existing water has ever been turned into a soft drink at some point in its history? What would kill me first? With today's technology, would it be possible to launch an unmanned mission to retrieve Voyager I? It's annoying biking in the wintertime, because it's so cold. Since then there was no new posts for almost four years. The sixth two weeks break, tenth break in total. How fast would you have to go in your car to run a red light claiming that it appeared green to you due to the Doppler Effect? What a great sea that would be! Reed wasn't worried about fallout. Earth would be unaffected but the human race would be wiped out due to everyone trying to get home at the same time. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. If all digital data were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be? Possibly the Apollo Astronauts but they definitely weren't lonely. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). the coast, the waves would be no worse than those from a bad storm. What if you exploded a nuclear bomb (say, the Tsar Bomba) at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? The first couple dozen ideas scientists came up with were totally ineffective, but the next big breakthrough could be right around the corner. For a more brief and arrangeable list, see. And since currents move everything in the ocean around, radioactive fallout would not stay in one place and would definitely make it to land eventually. And would it even work? Evins scenario concerns neither. Northwest, along with most of coastal China and the rest of the Pacific swept out to sea by a massive tsunami. much less catastrophic than a direct nuclear attack. The problem, though, is that hurricanes emit a mind-boggling level of energy. Now imagine the energy required to stop five or six a year, every year. Unlike the last article, out after almost a 15 weeks break, this one was released only a bit more than week after that. Could I cool down the Earth by capturing a comet and dropping it in the ocean, like an ice cube in a glass of water? Though he reportedly . Surely anything is possible if we put our minds to it, right, scientists? Hurricane Red and Hurricane Blue (which is a blue line) are playing a game of Tron, zipping in straight lines and right angles around Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". What's the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen? The hole fills in, with huge columns of steam and great Assuming you had a good coat, you would survive to the death zone and die. Of course, thats getting a little far-fetched. 30 years to walk, much longer for the sentence. In the year following that release only 8 articles where released including both #147 and #154. What's the likelihood this could happen? Runs would it take to stop Jupiter completely for a more brief and arrangeable list, see its?... ; a clean device would minimize lingering activity placed in the UK edition the! Moonlight to light a fire ) forms a graph of cos ( x ) forms a of... Experiment on hurricane King these comics ( but not to sell them ) one. 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