One comet, lowered from space down to the surface, could supply the entire world's energy consumption for a year. Sure, it would release a little CO 2, but it would be nothing compared to the pollution from our current sources of energy. A comet crane generator could cut our energy-related greenhouse gas emissions to almost zero. The comet isn't the important part, the crane is. But what's really crazy, is how Munroe takes bland questions and hypes them into incredible zingers. For example, " If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?" The answer, of course, is "no". But Munroe never stops with an answer like that. He ups the ante, increasing the power of the laser pointers, to the point where he becomes really dangerous! star for including the weird and worrying questions from the inbox that he refused to answer--we should know our limits, people Munroe announced in March, 2014 that he had signed a deal with publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to compile a large number of his What If? entries into a book. What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions would eventually be released in September that year. [9]

Comets are more dust than ice, but they're not particularly dense. A tiny piece of a comet would float for a short time until it became waterlogged, melted, and broke apart. A full-size comet wouldn't be strong enough to support its own weight, and would collapse like a drying sand sculpture. Outer space is a lot higher up than Niagara Falls, [ citation needed] so the plunge down into the atmosphere at the bottom of Earth's gravity well adds a lot more than 0.1 degrees worth of heat. A chunk of ice from space that falls to Earth gains enough energy to warm the ice up, melt it, boil it into vapor, and then heat the vapor to thousands of degrees. If you built an icy waterfall from space, the water would arrive at the bottom as a river of superheated steam. This exponential growth means that a 9-stage vehicle, able to lift you 45 meters, would need almost 300 million pigeons, roughly equal to the entire global population. Reaching the halfway point would require 1.6 × 1025 pigeons, which would weigh about 8 × 1024 kilograms—more than the Earth itself. At that point, the pigeons wouldn’t be pulled down by the Earth’s gravity—the Earth would be pulled up by the pigeons’ gravity. The full 65-stage craft to reach the top of the Q1 would weigh 3.5 × 1046 kilograms. That’s not just more pigeons than there are on Earth, it’s more mass than there is in the galaxy.”What would happen of everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same time? I took the book into work with me to show it around - you know - hipster-esque and what not. I'm reading this trendy, new book first. All in all, for my money/for my brain, the best way to learn science. Yeah, make it pop – make it popular, make it fun. Make it applicable to impossible scenarios. Make it fascinating. Science is already awesome. It just needs someone like Munroe to do its publicity. The questions throughout What If? 2 are equal parts brilliant, gross, and wonderfully absurd and the answers are thorough, deeply researched, and great fun. . . . Science isn’t easy, but in Munroe’s capable hands, it surely can be fun." — TIME But there could be a correlation (or inverse correlation?) between how reviewers reacted to such a rule, and the day job they had – or the “purity” of the field they worked in.

Through all of this, I carried my precious ARC around, waiting for the time when I'd be able to spare the brainpower to read it. I even took it on tour with me. (Honestly, this book has more frequent flier miles than any three of you put together.) If you call a random phone number and say “God bless you,” what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed? How tall can a swing set be while still being powered by a human pumping their legs? Is it possible to build a swing set tall enough to launch the rider into space if they jump at the right time? (Assuming the human has enough energy, which my 5-year-old seems to have.)" There are even a few proposed experiments that DO NOT result in the destruction of our planet. My favorite involves the speed of the International Space Station AND the 1988 song by the Proclaimers, "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqq4B...The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to. The book is easy to understand and studded with comics, which keeps things light, even though the subject matter frequently leads to the Earth being rapidly destroyed, most impressively in "what if the Earth was made completely of protons and the Moon was made completely of electrons?" but also in "what if Niagara Falls were sent through a straw?" and several others. All that is to say, I am most likely not this book's target audience, being a completely ridiculous ball of anxiety over things that nearly 100% will never, ever, ever happen. (I have been reading XKCD since college, though. It is a constant fixture in my life, and is not terrifying.) If you saved a whole life’s worth of kissing and used all that suction power on one single kiss, how much suction force would that single kiss have?

You should definitely not use your arc welder as a defibrillator, and after reading your question, I honestly don’t think you should be allowed to use it as an arc welder, either. Some simple models clearly give you the only plausible answer: Netherlands will become a supraplanetary entity. To see how, you need to read for yourself. “Supposing you did drain the oceans, and dumped the water on top of the Curiosity rover, how would Mars change as the water accumulated?” Again, the answer is clear — it’s a future that will be Netherlands-shaped: Sam Hewitt of Varsity and Marla Desat of The Escapist noted that the first print run had some issues processing mathematical symbols, as a square box was displayed where a delta is supposed to be printed. [10] [11]

Success!

The edge of the crowd spreads outward into southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Any two people who meet are unlikely to have a language in common, and almost nobody knows the area. The state becomes a chaotic patchwork of coalescing and collapsing social hierarchies. Violence is common. What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is a 2014 non-fiction book by Randall Munroe in which the author answers hypothetical science questions sent to him by readers of his webcomic, xkcd. The book contains a selection [Note 1] of questions and answers originally published on his blog What If?, along with several new ones. [1] The book is divided into several dozen chapters, most of which are devoted to answering a unique question. [Note 2] What If? was released on September 2, 2014 and was received positively by critics. A sequel to the book, titled What If? 2, was released on September 13, 2022. [6] Conception of the blog [ edit ] Randall does not provide a response to that one but I would have said Kenneth, if only life were like that. Wouldn’t it be fabulous? As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur?" [not much, probably a lot less than there is in you, for example]