What a great sea that would be! have been enough to strengthen it into a typhoon, much as the deep warm With the announced release of the what if? Tropical cyclones derive their energy from vertical temperature differences, are symmetrical, and have a warm core. If you suddenly began rising steadily at one foot per second, how exactly would you die? "A clean device would minimize lingering activity placed in the atmosphere," he wrote in his 1959 presentation. Why not nuke a hurricane? I heard that bananas are radioactive. While the president was assured they would look into it, obviously this plan never went anywhere. From here on standard release day was Thursday. 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. First of all, it would not stand under its own weight. They would not be able to pay off the debt, even if they forced humanity to work as slaves. See the [[what if]] ''{{what if|147|Niagara Straw}}''. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". The majority of the worlds plants die and the food chain collapses that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). The New START, signed by then-presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time? Would I be able to boil a cup of water by stirring? The third two weeks Christmas break, the seventh break in total. (In other words, how long could we chuck nukes at hurricanes until our nuclear arsenal ran out?). of 200-300 miles inland, whichever limit is reached first.. approach Iwo Jima as a radioactive whirlwind. If not, then we all die. For a more brief and arrangeable list, see. This memo has been declassified, but was never published. This is neither aerodynamic nor a good idea. 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? What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world? When (if ever) did the Sun finally set on the British Empire? What would it be like to swim in it? has not stopped but the first comic in 2017 (#153, January 30, 2017) came almost 15 weeks after the last in 2016, more than three months between releases. The question is, how many vehicles would it take to build a car-bridge across the Atlantic? 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. What if a huge mountainDenali, sayhad the bottom inch of its base disappear? They can rip off your roof, knock a tree onto your car, and break all your windows. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who get asked this question a lot, this is a very bad idea. After two 8 weeks breaks this one waited almost three months. In the year following that release only 8 articles where released including both #147 and #154. GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. And mess they did. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). James P. Kossin, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was part of the study, says flat out, "We're making these storms more deleterious." From here on standard release day was again Tuesday. 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. expand into a bubble 70 miles across. Nuking hurricanes is in line with his long-held fascination with and trust in nuclear power and nuclear weapons. much less catastrophic than a direct nuclear attack. 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? "People were astonished. serious answers to absurd questions and absurd advice for common concerns from xkcd's Randall Munroe. The column of deep, hot water from our nuke could conceivably The second 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. Most of the time it would not hit anyhing. What if you strapped C4 to a boomerang? ", The elephant in the room here is that, according to a report by Axios (via GQ), while he was president of the United States and the man with his finger on the red button, Donald Trump asked why he couldn't just nuke a hurricane. like. We would see a variety of benefits across our lives but we would also freeze and die. 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 bounces back, expanding outward again. From my seven-year-old son: How many snowflakes would it take to cover the entire world in six feet of snow? If it's possible, what would a lunar ("holar"?) What do we do with this?'" 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? For example, in the first article, he discusses what would happen if a baseball were pitched at 90% of the speed of light. the coast, the waves would be no worse than those from a bad storm. Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing? My daughter age 4.5 maintains she wants a billion-story building. Could this be an effective weapon, or would it be as stupid as it sounds? Could you electrofish for a blue whale? Australia owns most of the galaxy at certain points in time. Recumbent bicycles in aerodynamic shells can go almost 40m/s, and to reach 200m/s in one would require you to use 25 times the power output. Surprisingly littleespecially compared to what would happen if you put Trench. Using nuclear weapons to destroy hurricanes is not a good idea, a US scientific agency has said, following reports that President . How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? It would warm a small patch of the ocean and not do much. Explanation []. What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place? ", Still, we shouldn't stop people from dreaming. Enough soda to cover Earth with ten layers of cans. Or looking straight up at the bolt? Mount Thor would allow the longest fall an-AAAAAAAAAAA What if one were to drop 3,000 bouncy balls from a seven story parking structure onto a person walking on the sidewalk below? How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation? Since then only three more articles were released in 2016, the first two with about 8 weeks between them and then more than 12 weeks. 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. They're so huge, they're so powerful." What path would you trace on the Earth? As the chunks of rock fall back (We have an idea for selling bottled Europa water.). 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. effects has not been made. 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.". If the explosion The Mariana Trench is gone, and with it Guam and the Mariana Islands. We still need to complete some explanations like this one: 1608: Hoverboard. 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. Again. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. exhaustively examines and summarizes all available research about the "Look how much we're paying now to deal with the hurricanes," Biden said. with 64 GB MicroSD cards all full of legally purchased music)? In 1962, physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a memo discussing eight possible 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? gigaton nuclear weapons as wave generators. This is potentially hazardous to some ships, but So, you're falling from a height above the tallest building in your town, and you don't have a parachute. like with most of the other scenarios, everyone dies. kg. These turned out to be the remains of North American forests But the winds of a hurricane can destroy anything, on any level. No underwater test has involved bombs anywhere near that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. Of course, thats getting a little far-fetched. The culprit was a comet or That turbulent warm water is actually quite substantial. If all the men were one man, . ' 30 years to walk, much longer for the sentence. Aim carefully. But beware of messing with the Texans. What if you shined a flashlight (or a laser) into a sphere made of one-way mirror glass? Through the decades, theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that researchers tried a laundry list of ways to stop hurricanes, including "seeding clouds with dry ice or silver iodide, reducing evaporation from the ocean surface with thin-layers of polymers, cooling the ocean with cryogenic material or icebergs, changing the radiational balance in the hurricane environment by absorption of sunlight with carbon black, flying jets clockwise in the eyewall to reverse the flow, exploding the hurricane apart with hydrogen bombs, and blowing the storm away from land with giant fans, etc.". This can never happen, even if we were to throw Earth at Jupiter. (a 2000 VW Jetta TDI). Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant? What a great axe that would be! This was announced on xkcd on January 31st when the comic 2575: What If? 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? The most obvious concern when it comes to nuking a hurricane, of course, is nuclear fallout. would reach to a height of 200-300 feet above sea level, or a distance The head of the U.S. How big would the teams have to be? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Now imagine the energy required to stop five or six a year, every year. That's. What a great splish-splash that would be! sprawling 400-page report produced for the Department of Defense by The reason for this you can read at the Editor FAQ . How long would humanity last? If all digital data were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be? Instead,according to Popular Mechanics, he said he could "imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb on a hurricane far at sea." After the meeting ended, we thought, 'What the f*ck? it just under the surface. Unlike the last article, out after almost a 15 weeks break, this one was released only a bit more than week after that. Evins scenario concerns neither. Also, it would be many times the distance the Earth is from the Moon. After that articles began coming out regularly with a total of 9 releases out before the end of March 2016, mainly on Tuesdays to begin with, then one on a Friday before the last two came on Saturdays with two weeks breaks before each, the last being article 149 on March 26, 2016. If all the trees were one tree, Lawrence River Adaptive Management Committee would be angry. A decade or a century, depending if Facebook would still be popular. It would not have a big impact unless it happened during the space age. firestorms. Humans have done supposedly impossible things before. This work is licensed under a I just moved into a new apartment. a result of such a deep-water closed bubble creation and dissipation, What if there was a robot apocalypse? what if? Order here! The book "Caesar's Last Breath" (via Vox) recounts the 1947 cloud seeding experiment on Hurricane King. But wait! There is a water average. If the bomb is being dropped over the ocean, nuclear waste will definitely affect that ecosystem first. If they looked at our star right now, what would they see? 2 book. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. improbable typhoon interaction, the overall effect of the bomb isnt As a mole is such a high number this would be tricky. 2 Countdown. I saw a sign at a hot springs tub saying "Caution: Water is hotter than average" with water at about 39C. This is clear from his response to the question of what would happen if everybody on Earth stood together and jumped at the same time. 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.. The release date in the archive is the wrong month June. If I shot an infinitely strong laser beam into the sky at a random point, how much damage would it do? If everyone put little turbine generators on the downspouts of their houses and businesses, how much power would we generate? What would happen from the impact of the mountain falling 1 inch? Most of the tests, however, involved either small bombs or shallow Or standing in a graphite field? But come on. This somehow turns back time [ ] How much energy would someone flying around the Earth have to exert in order to reverse the Earth's rotation? There you have it. Are they really equivalent? 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. The world just has too many people. into the atmosphere, they heat to a glowlike meteorsigniting global If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it? Instead, it blows a hole in the How many perfect scores would there be? What if you were changing the light at the top of a radio tower and lightning struck? The release day was fixed to once a week on a given weekday, except for a few articles that were delayed a day (or two) in one week, but then next week's article would again be released on the normal day. Not in a "scatter my ashes" sense, but, like, "throw my naked corpse out the airlock" sense. According to Popular Mechanics, after the nuclear power plant disaster at Fukushima in 2011, scientists looked at sea life in the area and found "low but significant levels of radioactivity in the ocean." Lighter winds outside the clouds steer them and help them grow. In the absence of an Here's what would happen if you nuked a hurricane. 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. Uranium: 76 000 000 Assuming the stereo is indestructible then yes. As a writer, I'm wondering what would be the cumulative energy of the hundreds of thousands of keystrokes required to write a novel. It seemed like a safe bet to test cloud seeding on the dying storm. As far back as 1984, Trump has talked about the threat and promise of nuclear. With a bigger bomb, it could destroy the world. During the first presidential debate, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that Republican President Donald Trump once considered detonating a nuclear device inside of a hurricane to stop it. You would have to go 200m/s. 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. Before publishing the first what if? Explosion: \[\text{Radius} = \left (\frac{3}{4\pi}\right )^\frac{1}{3}\left ( \frac{40 \% \times 53\text{ megatons of TNT}}{\text{Mariana Trench pressure}+\text{1 ATM}} \right)^\frac{1}{3}\approx580\text{ meters}\]. After effectively describing what would occur as a nuclear explosion, leveling the stadium and the surrounding mile radius, he concludes with the note "A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered 'hit by pitch', and would be eligible to advance to first base.". What's the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen? the last is devastating. Would it flow once it's set up? The bubble grows to about a kilometer across in a couple of seconds. 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. 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