Also, the Earth would be destroyed. gigaton nuclear weapons as wave generators. ", Still, we shouldn't stop people from dreaming. I just moved into a new apartment. the probability of achieving a perfect SAT score by guessing) to completely fictional questions (e.g. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). the only thing to do would be to make a swimming pool. 40000 people and some magic. Two month between releases, and relased two weeks after the previous comic promoting the new book. With less than 3 weeks between releases, releases seems to have become more regular in the beginning of 2017. I used to work on a fisheries crew where we would use an electro-fisher backpack to momentarily stun small fish (30 - 100 mm length) so we could scoop them up with nets to identify and measure them. happens near the surface, it can create some pretty big wavesunder some How close could I stand to watch it? Using nuclear weapons to destroy hurricanes is not a good idea, a US scientific agency has said, following reports that President . After the break only three articles were released, two more were released after article 137 over three weeks, the last article 139 released on August 4, 2015. Of course, thats getting a little far-fetched. {{Title text: Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. It would be a bunch of boulders with some patches of sand. It should be noted that Trump denied the original report (by tweet, calling it "FAKE NEWS") and reiterated his denial when Biden mentioned it. If all the trees were one tree, What If We Nuked A Hurricane? Are they really equivalent? The hole fills in, with huge columns of steam and great At what numerical value would the number printed approximately equal the number of ink molecules used? What's the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen? The report also claimed that Trump had raised the possibility of bombing hurricanes with another senior administration official, as detailed in a 2017 NSC memo. And the best part is, it's all humanity's fault. It found that every 10 years for the past four decades, "the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a major one of Category 3 or higher, with sustained winds greater than 110 miles an hour, [increased] by about 8% a decade." Hurricane cos(x) forms a graph of cos(x) along the bottom edge of the map.]] From the very edge of the atmosphere and even then it might not be fully cooked. Values are as follows: You angle your descent and grab the pole just long enough to swing around so that when you let go you're now heading back up toward the sky. I heard that bananas are radioactive. In the memo, one of the eight ideas Freeman discusses is the use of The result would be some kind of nuclear explosion. In Washington City, power director Rick Hansen explained to the council there was an . Using only pronounceable letter combinations, how long would names have to be to give each star in the universe a unique one word name? Why don't we nuke them? As a mole is such a high number this would be tricky. It answers many important questions, including whether you could jump from a plane with a helium tank and inflate balloons fast enough to slow your fall and survive (yes) and whether you could hide from a supersonic windstorm in Finland (yes, but it won't help). 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. What if people's incomes appeared around them as cash in real time? The eight two weeks break, 14th break in total. People sometimes say "If I had all the money in the world " in order to discuss what they would do if they had no financial constraints. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. "People were astonished. What would the world be like if the land masses were spread out the same way as now - only rotated by an angle of 90 degrees? Hurricane Illinois-Has-It-Too-Easy comes from somewhere to the northwest, goes through Illinois, and then back to the northwest. Liquid gallium? But come on. Various Theoretical Models For Underwater What would happen from the impact of the mountain falling 1 inch? wiped out. Crypto What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? The world just has too many people. 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). We've been to the Moon! Intense enough to cause a medium sized nuclear explosion. A CEO on the other hand, would be in trouble. If, on the other hand, you're being attacked by a coyote, it's higher top speed means you'll have only one chance to hit it. What path would you trace on the Earth? What would happen if you exploded a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane? How long would the Sun last if a giant water hose were focused upon it? The ninth break in total. We still need to complete some explanations like this one: 1608: Hoverboard. before disintegrating into, in the words of the 1996 report, a mass of In fact, weve actually tried it a bunch of times. I was absentmindedly stirring a cup of hot tea, when I got to thinking, "aren't I actually adding kinetic energy into this cup?" 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. Am I right to be afraid of pressure cookers? Slackers. it gets, we can try a formula from the 1971 paper Evaluation of How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva? What injuries would occur and what would the associated crimes be? This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Within a dozen or so seconds, the bubble shrinks to a minimum size, then What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world? Is there any way to fire a gun so that the bullet flies through the air and can then be safely caught by hand? typically takes the question beyond the original scope likely intended by the reader and takes it to some extreme for humorous effect. My daughter recently received her driver's permit in the US, and aspires to visit mainland Europe someday. So I suppose the question is what is the optimal time to heat left over Chinese food in the microwave, how about an 800 watt microwave? It includes hot water but I have to pay the electric bill. From here on there is no longer any standard release days. There you have it. If all the seas were one sea, What if there was a lake on the Moon? If all the axes were one axe, Evin isnt the first person to think of setting off nuclear weapons a result of such a deep-water closed bubble creation and dissipation, The rising 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? Surprisingly littleespecially compared to what would happen if you put Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators? Better to just carry a sign. What if the Earth were made entirely of protons, and the Moon were made entirely of electrons? exhaustively examines and summarizes all available research about the "You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting," the source told Axios. At the moment it seems impossible to guess when a new post is released so: Below is a list of the articles released in the what if? This is neither aerodynamic nor a good idea. 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. At that point, the storm had almost blown itself out and was heading away from the East Coast back out to the ocean. 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. August 26, 2019. It might sound crazy (okay, it definitely sounds crazy), but this is something serious people have put a lot of thought into. Why can't we do that?" When they reached The report outlines how when a nuclear weapon goes off underwater, it So being a person on a budget what's the best way to use my free faucet to generate electricity? Thisis what it looks . quite as dramatic as Evin might have imagined. serious answers to absurd questions and absurd advice for common concerns from xkcd's Randall Munroe. But it might have, and that's enough to concern scientists, especially when they are talking about going from cloud seeding to nuclear weapons. These turned out to be the remains of North American forests Not with regular lasers, but with more power, you could destroy the world. Tropical cyclones derive their energy from vertical temperature differences, are symmetrical, and have a warm core. What about bromine? What a great sea that would be! If there was enough water, and if the model held up, thisblast would 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. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). This page was last edited on 11 January 2023, at 02:47. NOAA says the idea is still popular,noting on their official website, "During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms.". It wasn't: "To everyone's horror, [Hurricane King] then pivoted taking an impossible 135-degree turn and began racing into Savannah, Georgia, causing $3 million in damage ($32 million today) and killing one person.". sprawling 400-page report produced for the Department of Defense by But spiders are a lot more scary. Why can't we do that? It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. expand into a bubble 70 miles across. }}, 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/upcoming_hurricanes.png, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. If they are radioactive, then they radiate energy. {{Title text: I'd like to see more damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York and flooding Manhattan -- something like the 1938 Long Island Express, but aimed a bit more to the west. I jokingly sent him a photo of a parrot holding a pizza slice in its beak. At 53 megatons, the Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever What would actually happen? terrifying passage describing the detonation of a submerged gigaton mine Problem solved, right? The what if? Huge volumes of rock and water are blasted into space. Possibly the Apollo Astronauts but they definitely weren't lonely. "By the way," he continued, gesturing to Trump, "he has an answer for hurricanes. Never use the Math markup language at the transcript. It was published on September 2, 2014, and the UK edition of the book was published on September 4, 2014. 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. With a bigger bomb, it could destroy the world. circumstances, they can be hundreds of feet high near ground zero. After acknowledging that the question has been answered elsewhere, he recaps the result, but then focuses more intently on the unasked resulting issue of the aftermath of everyone on Earth being magically transported to one location as they all try to return home. that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. Before publishing the first what if? If not, then we all die. What is the furthest one human being has ever been from every other living person? If it's possible, what would a lunar ("holar"?) Luckily for the coast, later research paints a less dire picture. book, articles were posted weekly. The final six articles in this period were released on four different week days, only two of them with one week apart. Any time I attempt to heat left over Chinese food in a microwave, it fails to heat completely through somewhere. Not much. Interesting to see if they will begin appearing regularly again during the spring of 2017, as seems possible with three articles in less than a month and #156 was again released with less than two weeks between it and #155. Reed wasn't worried about fallout. No underwater test has involved bombs anywhere near that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. For that matter, which war has the highest movie time:war time ratio? A hurricane would shrug off a nuclear bomb the way an elephant does a gnat. 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. What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place? Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing? So during the summer of 2016, it seemed it was down to about one release every two months but then it increased. Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns? Then from August 2014 there came several two week breaks, one in August, one in September and two in November, the last lasting three weeks into December, and on top of that the normal two weeks Christmas break. The bar representing Uranium is so large that it extends onto a stack of paper taller than a human]] They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they're moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. This was announced on xkcd on January 31st when the comic 2575: What If? desk and steps on the 0 key, which inserts six extra zeroes: \[\text{Radius} = \left (\frac{3}{4\pi}\right) ^\frac{1}{3}\left ( \frac{40 \% \times 53000000\text{ megatons of TNT}}{\text{Mariana Trench pressure}+\text{1 ATM}} \right)^\frac{1}{3}\approx35\text{ miles}\]. Could it navigate? This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). This was so far the second longest break. Nuking hurricanes is in line with his long-held fascination with and trust in nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Printing $100 bills 24/7 for a year can make you about $200 million per year. shooter is at sea level and catcher is up a mountain at the extreme range of the gun. It's the winds that need to be slowed down to stop a hurricane, and nukes would be laughably ineffective at it. "Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". Let's say the racer has to survive. Until then, perhaps the best solution is just learn to co-exist with them.". would reach to a height of 200-300 feet above sea level, or a distance This book can't stop most bullets; if you want to use it for armour, you may want a lot more than one copy. How many model rocket engines would it take to launch a real rocket into space? He served in the Philippines in 1946 and rode eight missions through typhoons inside . We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced. Suppose you were to print, in 12 point text, the numeral 1 using a common cheap ink-jet printer. Randall Munroe left NASA in 2005 to start up his hugely popular site XKCD 'a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language' which offers a witty take on the world of science and geeks. blog. Earths atmosphere is really thin compared to the radius of the Earth. In terms of human-made objects, has Voyager 1 travelled the farthest distance? Don't take any chances. Assuming you had a good coat, you would survive to the death zone and die. What changes could be made to our diets for the amount of calories to equal the energy of the Sun? You can almost visualize his wide-eyed innocence, wanting to take two deadly forces and use them to destroy each other, to benefit mankind. The first of two longer shifts in release day two weeks in a row which resulted in only two releases over three weeks, resulting in the eight break in total. off deep underwater acts a bit differently. 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? He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them. But the next one (#154) was indeed released only a bit more than week after the one with 15 weeks break, and then less than 3 weeks after followed yet an article on February 28 2017. 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