To figure out how big The debris played a key role in identifying the She has learned enough about the rules of the road to know never to drive into the ocean; however, she jokingly suggested that given a sufficient quantity of rental cars, she could eventually get to Europe by driving east repeatedly. Probably not. The sixth two weeks break, tenth break in total. What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies? As long as you don't touch strange things and you don't swim too close to the fuel rods, it would be just like a regular pool. Her 13-year-old friend would then drive the Ferrari around, while she sits in the chair enjoying uninterrupted views of the countryside. goes with citing temperature records and other trivia actually naming a Jeopardy master. 'My friend and I were arguing about what would happen if a bullet got struck by lightning, and we agreed that you should resolve it . 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. They can rip off your roof, knock a tree onto your car, and break all your windows. Better to just carry a sign. Also, it would be many times the distance the Earth is from the Moon. Various Theoretical Models For Underwater It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. "He made it up. 2 book, in. 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.. much less catastrophic than a direct nuclear attack. More details.. Here's What Would Happen If You Nuked A Hurricane, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). What's the likelihood this could happen? If cows could photosynthesize, how much less food would they need? Don't take any chances. If everybody in the US drove west, could we temporarily halt continental drift? Honestly, my main motivation is to baffle someone in the distant future, but it's an interesting scientific question: what would happen to my body in orbit over the course of years, decades or centuries? If you drop a 7kg bowling ball over the side, how long would it take to hit the bottom? And if so, what kind of bird would it take? effects has not been made. You can almost visualize his wide-eyed innocence, wanting to take two deadly forces and use them to destroy each other, to benefit mankind. If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time? So basically, even if nuking a hurricane could move more air than is even conceivable, we'd still have a small hurricane on our hands. What a great sea that would be! Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? What would kill me first? NOAA. Absolutely! For the answer, the universe would be destroyed. Explanation []. improbable typhoon interaction, the overall effect of the bomb isnt . to rapidly intensify. How many perfect scores would there be? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. What if the mountain's base were raised to the present height of the summit, and then the whole thing were allowed to drop to the earth? I just moved into a new apartment. Why not nuke a hurricane? Regarding the question it could be done, but why did the guy asking the question whish to do such a horrible thing Randall ends up asking back. Earth would be unaffected but the human race would be wiped out due to everyone trying to get home at the same time. Tropical cyclones derive their energy from vertical temperature differences, are symmetrical, and have a warm core. What would happen if the Earth's rotation were sped up until a day only lasted one second? It turns out, you'd need a lot of nukes and a lot of power. What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? waters of the Gulf of Mexicos Loop Current sometimes cause hurricanes More details.. When they reached It is just like 'xkcd:volume 0' a compilation of some questions from the website, but half of them are new. In most cases this tends to heat the bowl or plate more than the food. I use one of those old phones where you type with numbersfor example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. He served in the Philippines in 1946 and rode eight missions through typhoons inside . book, articles were posted weekly. As the first two were released on week 1, this means that there were 134 articles released over the next 143 weeks, meaning there were only 9 weeks without an article. After the meeting ended, we thought, 'What the f*ck? First after 25 releases was there a two week Christmas break before article 26 was released on December 31, 2012. Whats the fastest way to get a hand-written letter from my place in Chicago to my mother in New Jersey? Am I right to be afraid of pressure cookers? Crypto What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? First and shortest of two long breaks in a row, the 11th break in total. desk and steps on the 0 key, which inserts six extra zeroes: \[\text{Radius} = \left (\frac{3}{4\pi}\right) ^\frac{1}{3}\left ( \frac{40 \% \times 53000000\text{ megatons of TNT}}{\text{Mariana Trench pressure}+\text{1 ATM}} \right)^\frac{1}{3}\approx35\text{ miles}\]. If you suddenly began rising steadily at one foot per second, how exactly would you die? The only three weeks break, the sixth break in total. 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions was released on September 13. Most of the time it would not hit anyhing. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License, fall into Jupiter's atmosphere in a submarine, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=what_if&oldid=304504. How big a hole do I need to dig before people suffocate? Of course, at that point, it might be easier to just leave Earth behind completely. Reed wasn't worried about fallout. "Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". THAT number won't fit in the room? }}, xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 31 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS, https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/log_scale.png, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. The final six articles in this period were released on four different week days, only two of them with one week apart. If you carry a penny in your coin tray, how long would it take for that penny to cost you more than a cent in extra gas? early, and expend most of their energy creating a narrow surf zone on The area is now marked by a 100-kilometer-wide scar of magma sizzling 8000+ feet)? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, More Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, Water Waves Generated By Underwater Explosions, Evaluation of It might sound crazy (okay, it definitely sounds crazy), but this is something serious people have put a lot of thought into. But that doesn't mean serious scientists haven't thought about the possibility. This second article was released on the same day as the first, probably to get the blog going, and let users of xkcd see that there was going to be more. They would not be able to pay off the debt, even if they forced humanity to work as slaves. At 53 megatons, the Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever But why would you. The seventh two weeks break, 13th break in total. What is the furthest one human being has ever been from every other living person? water above bulges up, though only slightly, over a large area. But this raised the question: could a bird deliver a standard 20" New York-style cheese pizza in a box? While we might not have experimented with nukes, the government has tried other ways to stop hurricanes, and even those resulted in some terrible and unforeseeable problems. dinosaurs. Order here! What would happen if one tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw? In the absence of an What if you were flashing your BIOS during a thunderstorm and you got hit by lightning? At least two comics coming out right after this was referencing this article. Could you get drunk from drinking a drunk person's blood? Earlier this year, Severe Tropical Storm Sanvu passed over the Mariana No underwater test has involved bombs anywhere near You are in a boat directly over the Mariana Trench. On Sunday, Axios reported that Donald Trump has a rather extreme idea for hurricane preparedness: nuke the storms before they make landfall. Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing? "People were astonished. What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Nuking hurricanes is in line with his long-held fascination with and trust in nuclear power and nuclear weapons. A tropical cyclone is a generic term for a low-pressure system that formed over tropical waters (25S to 25N) with thunderstorm activity near the center of its closed, cyclonic winds. What would it be like to swim in it? 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? Hurricanes are extremely powerful: A fully developed hurricane releases the same amount of energy as the explosion of a 10-megaton nuke every 20 minutes, the NOAA article says. More details.. have been enough to strengthen it into a typhoon, much as the deep warm guns? How would the Earth change as the water is being drained? This page was last edited on 11 January 2023, at 02:47. When (if ever) did the Sun finally set on the British Empire? 0 618: Asteroid 696: Strip Games 786: Exoplanets 809: Los Alamos We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced. like. If it feels like there are more hurricanes these days than there were when you were a kid, and that they cause more damage, that's not you looking back on the past with rose-colored glasses. How dangerous is it to be in a pool during a thunderstorm? It would be vapourized before it got close to the Sun. If you had a printed version of the whole of (say, the English) Wikipedia, how many printers would you need in order to keep up with the changes made to the live version? 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. He liked these questions so much that he started up What If. ", "You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting," the source told Axios. Assuming that you have a spaceship in orbit around the Earth, could you propel your ship to speeds exceeding escape velocity by hitting golf balls in the other direction? Instead, it blows a hole in the This came out after a three week countdown revealing the image from the cover of the new book over 136 frames released with about 4 hours between each frame. They're so huge, they're so powerful." Partway down the side of that skyscraper there's a flagpole sticking out, sans flag! I've long thought about putting a flamethrower on the front of a car to melt snow and ice before you drive across it. For over 20 years, from 1962 to 1983, the fabulously named Project STORMFURY used simulations, as well as four actual hurricanes as test subjects, to see if cloud seeding with silver iodine would reduce a major storm even a little. For a more brief and arrangeable list, see. 95 minutes at the right place at the right time. And it's not possible anyway, since nukes are not giant, cutting-edge fans. (We have an idea for selling bottled Europa water.). It seemed like a safe bet to test cloud seeding on the dying storm. Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters. The eight two weeks break, 14th break in total. The Sun. Weather Bureau said he could "imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb. What if you were changing the light at the top of a radio tower and lightning struck? 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 it eventually reach a point where it would float? What if you somehow managed to make a stereo travel at twice the speed of sound, would it sound backwards to someone who was just casually sitting somewhere as it flies by? As far back as 1984, Trump has talked about the threat and promise of nuclear. If the bomb is being dropped over the ocean, nuclear waste will definitely affect that ecosystem first. Of course, thats getting a little far-fetched. What would be the best way of getting the energy from one to the other? The comet either burns up in the atmosphere or speeds up global warming. In the UK edition of the book, Randall included a preface about his thoughts on the units used in the UK. Presuming that it is sheltered in a regular atmosphere, in some giant dome or something. See the [[what if]] ''{{what if|147|Niagara Straw}}''. Were they lonely? The heat release is equivalent. I bike to class sometimes. What if all of the sun's output of visible light were bundled up into a laser-like beam that had a diameter of around 1m once it reaches Earth? ", Still, we shouldn't stop people from dreaming. How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation? This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). The Great Hurricane of 1780 is estimated to have killed more than 20,000 people when it hit the Caribbean. Then, while falling, I release the helium and fill the balloon. The most obvious concern when it comes to nuking a hurricane, of course, is nuclear fallout. Then the And, for reasons we'll get into, it would be. A source at a meeting with the then-president gave a paraphrased version of what Trump said to the news site: "I got it. What height would humans reach if we kept growing through our whole development period (i.e. The finger holes would collapse and then not much would happen. what if? And if the great man took the great axe, In the first Superman movie, Superman flies around Earth so fast that it begins turning in the opposite direction. I've often joked I'd like to have my remains put into orbit. At what numerical value would the number printed approximately equal the number of ink molecules used? "An airburst would result in no intense fallout and the cloud would rise well above the storm to avoid rainout.". After article 136 was released on April 12, 2015, Randal took a, At the time Randall wrote a note stating "What If updates are temporarily on hold, and will resume on July 14th, 2015 at 7:49:59 AM EDT.". After the meeting ended, we thought, 'What the f*ck? This memo has been declassified, but was never published. It's just a matter of time. The second break came a year after the first and was also a Christmas break before article 77 was released on December 31, 2013. near future, and outlined the potential military uses and dangers of How many bananas would you need to power a house? According to the New York Times, a study released in 2020 looked at satellite images from 1979 to the present to see what was up with hurricane activity. But the winds of a hurricane can destroy anything, on any level. After that they were released weekly for almost three years, with just a few times with two (and once three) weeks between releases, up until article 136 was released on April 12, 2015 (2 years and 40 weeks). Evin isnt the first person to think of setting off nuclear weapons Or looking straight up at the bolt? From here on standard release day was again Tuesday. What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? Could a high-speed train run through a vertical loop, like a rollercoaster, with the passengers staying comfortable? The result would be some kind of nuclear explosion. In that year (assuming no more comics before February 26 2017), only 8 articles where released including both 147 and this one. Most of the tests, however, involved either small bombs or shallow . ' What path would you trace on the Earth? How many molecules of the ink would be used? We've had examples of it before. . A 2016 National Geographic article also explained that detonating a nuke inside a hurricane could violate the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. Luckily for the coast, later research paints a less dire picture. Earths atmosphere is really thin compared to the radius of the Earth. What would happen if you exploded a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane? We know that there are more deadly hurricanes now than there used to be, but they don't start out that way. The release date in the archive is the wrong year 2014. How strong, compared to a regular cup of tea, would the lake tea be? "People were astonished. You just might not be prepared for how big you will need to be dreaming. What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? convulsions. Hurricanes are tropical storms, the water they form over needs to be above 26C (79F) for them to work. Could a (small) rocket (with payload) be lifted to a high point in the atmosphere where it would only need a small rocket to get to escape velocity? What would happen if all of the rivers in the US were instantly frozen in the middle of the summer? a result of such a deep-water closed bubble creation and dissipation, There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop." If all the trees were one tree, It turns out not only is that hard to help her appreciate this size, I am not at all able to explain all of the other difficulties you'd have to overcome. Every now and then we have to insert a leap second because the Earths rotation is slowing down. A CEO on the other hand, would be in trouble. The larger fish tended to be stunned for slightly longer because of their larger surface area but I don't imagine this relationship would be maintained for very large animals. If you cheat, a bag a little smaller than the Moon. The questions Randall tackles range from realistic possibilities (e.g. The story of the three wise men got me wondering: What if you did walk towards a star at a fixed speed? Is it possible for a spacecraft to control its reentry in such a way that it avoids the atmospheric compression and thus would not require the expensive (and relatively fragile) heat shield on the outside? Those storms don't even get names, so they can't be that big a deal. Since rainbows are caused by the refraction of the sunlight by tiny droplets of rainwater, what would rainbow look like on Earth if we had two suns like Tatooine? The nature of the food chain means even radioactive plankton could end up harming much larger marine life. What about using a squirrel suit? If all the seas were one sea, And let if [sic] fall into the great sea, [[An unlabeled map shows the region roughly between central Canada and northern Brazil. How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva? Answer: The International Niagara Committee, the International Niagara Board of Control, the International Joint Commission, the International Niagara Board Working Committee, and probably the Great LakesSt. Hurricane Florence battered the US East Coast last year. Explosion. Thisis what it looks The second longest break up til summer 2016, the only one to have been announced. Would the storm cell be immediately vaporized?
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