The bill had no co-sponsors, never received a hearing and never became law. In the first Superman movie, Superman flies around Earth so fast that it begins turning in the opposite direction. And let if [sic] fall into the great sea, You can almost visualize his wide-eyed innocence, wanting to take two deadly forces and use them to destroy each other, to benefit mankind. What is the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving, assuming we are obeying the speed limit and driving on paved roads? In 2022 the follow up book What If? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? Here's What Would Happen If You Nuked A Hurricane, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports. off the North American coast: Quantitative study of the destructive Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? My 12-year-old daughter is proposing an interesting project. The comet either burns up in the atmosphere or speeds up global warming. 48,364 views Sep 26, 2019 1.4K Dislike Share Science Insider 2.24M subscribers Dropping a nuclear bomb into a hurricane is a decades-old idea for how to stop a. But scientists know they don't know everything and that is even scarier. If you could teleport to a random place of the surface of the Earth, what are the odds that you'll see signs of intelligent life? This can never happen, even if we were to throw Earth at Jupiter. Hurricane Illinois-Has-It-Too-Easy comes from somewhere to the northwest, goes through Illinois, and then back to the northwest. Hurricane Katrina was the costliest hurricane ever recorded, with an estimated $176.3 billion in property damage and economic impact (via NOAA, adjusted for inflation.) Or what if you were doing a backflip? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? And since I am already feeling like Bilbo in this one, is there anything else in my pocket that would have unexpected amounts of stored energy? Just under four years passed before a new What If. kg. We've had examples of it before. that engulf the forests of Indonesia, California, and the Pacific The report, published in 1996, 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? My daughter recently received her driver's permit in the US, and aspires to visit mainland Europe someday. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. That's more than 666 times bigger than the "Little Boy" bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? What a great tree that would be! Yes, but you need to talk to the Russians to do it right. What if every virus in the world were collected into one area? Assuming you are in a area with a reasonable amount of birds. The what if? After two 8 weeks breaks this one waited almost three months. Evin's scenario concerns neither. Earth would be unaffected but the human race would be wiped out due to everyone trying to get home at the same time. Okay, so it would be complicated, but surely if legitimate scientists have thought about nuking a hurricane, it must be worth it to at least try? This site is not under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License like xkcd is. Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea On October 11, 1961, the head of the U.S. More details. 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. Crypto 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. What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? I know that stirring does help to cool down the tea, but what if I were to stir it faster? How much damage would a hail storm with size 5 soccer ball sized hail do? bounces back, expanding outward again. First regular release. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop." 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. Am I right to be afraid of pressure cookers? A normal person would not get buried. Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? 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. In terms of human-made objects, has Voyager 1 travelled the farthest distance? However, Trump called the site's story "ridiculous" in a tweet, adding, "I never said this. It is the 2nd book published by Randall. But what if we could stop a hurricane in its tracks? He served in the Philippines in 1946 and rode eight missions through typhoons inside . 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. Bernard Le Mehaute and Shen Wang. It is just like 'xkcd:volume 0' a compilation of some questions from the website, but half of them are new. We could possibly spend a ton of money and resources to get a probe to Voyager. 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. Slackers. It was almost a year ago that two comics had been released with less than two full weeks between them (that was #147 released February 26, 2016). No one would get a perfect score. Probably not. At what speed would you have to drive for rain to shatter your windshield? What if people's incomes appeared around them as cash in real time? We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced. By Luke Darby. If the Hubble telescope were aimed at the Earth, how detailed would the images be? NOAA, who are so obviously at the end of their rope on this subject, explained how radioactive fallout making it to land after we nuke a hurricane is less than ideal. I've long thought about putting a flamethrower on the front of a car to melt snow and ice before you drive across it. It was published on September 2, 2014, and the UK edition of the book was published on September 4, 2014. And, for reasons we'll get into, it would be. If you made an elevator that would go to space (like the one you mentioned in the billion-story building) and built a staircase up (assuming regulated air pressure) about how long would it take to climb to the top? Using only pronounceable letter combinations, how long would names have to be to give each star in the universe a unique one word name? A hurricane would shrug off a nuclear bomb the way an elephant does a gnat. 2 book. 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? Hurricanes are definitely worse than they used to be. So being a person on a budget what's the best way to use my free faucet to generate electricity? Fortunately for the coast, these waves are fundamentally different from that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center wrote (via Live Science), "About 80 of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. 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. He hadn't let go of his idea as of 2004. Two month between releases, and relased two weeks after the previous comic promoting the new book. There is an easy way to link to a given what if? My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth? 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? Stack them. In Armageddon, a NASA guy comments that a plan to shoot a laser at the asteroid is like shooting a b.b. If it's possible, what would a lunar ("holar"?) The majority of the worlds plants die and the food chain collapses It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. Surprisingly fast, but beware destroying the city, and fines. And that's just one hurricane. Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators? Evin isnt the first person to think of setting off nuclear weapons Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water? Since then there was no new posts for almost four years. Surely anything is possible if we put our minds to it, right, scientists? terrifying passage describing the detonation of a submerged gigaton mine This book can't stop most bullets; if you want to use it for armour, you may want a lot more than one copy. While the president was assured they would look into it, obviously this plan never went anywhere. What if you were changing the light at the top of a radio tower and lightning struck? the only thing to do would be to make a swimming pool. Second time with less than two weeks between release in 2017. 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. There's a lot of numbers involved, so let's have the experts at NOAA explain it: "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 201013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. Explosion. 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. As humans learned over the last century from a wide variety of incidents, fallout is no fun. Is there any way to fire a gun so that the bullet flies through the air and can then be safely caught by hand? When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. water above bulges up, though only slightly, over a large area. What would happen if the Earth's rotation were sped up until a day only lasted one second? Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. water. What if you released a submarine into Jupiter's atmosphere? Ever since J. Robert Oppenheimer headed the discovery of the atomic devices on July 16th 1945--on both sides of the planet, governments the world over have raced to stockpile the most efficient of. "Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". People, in other words, have spent a good deal of time coming up with ideas for stopping hurricanes. Australia owns most of the galaxy at certain points in time. 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. If they are radioactive, then they radiate energy. He liked these questions so much that he started up What If. Every now and then, Munroe would get emails asking him to arbitrate a science debate. Hurricane Screw-It-Let's-Just-Trash-Florida-Again comes from the east, starts to curve to the north, and then turns sharply to head straight for Florida and zigzag through it. The third two weeks Christmas break, the seventh break in total. I use one of those old phones where you type with numbersfor example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. It turns out, you'd need a lot of nukes and a lot of power. How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters? before disintegrating into, in the words of the 1996 report, a mass of happens near the surface, it can create some pretty big wavesunder some 6, but they would cost much more than you could afford. What if you shined a flashlight (or a laser) into a sphere made of one-way mirror glass? 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. 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). a result of such a deep-water closed bubble creation and dissipation, When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Within a dozen or so seconds, the bubble shrinks to a minimum size, then The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.". How long would the Sun last if a giant water hose were focused upon it? What a great sea that would be! My question is, what would a bowling ball look like if it were blown up to the size of the Earth? till late teens/early twenties) at the same pace as we do during our first month? We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. They would not be able to pay off the debt, even if they forced humanity to work as slaves. Order here! I jokingly sent him a photo of a parrot holding a pizza slice in its beak. And if the great man took the great axe, Evins scenario concerns neither. What is the farthest from Earth that any Earth thing has died? How steep would the slope have to be to sustain the momentum needed to ride a bicycle the entire distance without pedaling? In the absence of an 0 618: Asteroid 696: Strip Games 786: Exoplanets 809: Los Alamos In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pores over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators. Off the debt, even if we put our minds to it,,. Paved roads axe, Evins scenario concerns neither, Trump called the site 's story `` ridiculous '' a! 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