{{Title text: Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. But this raised the question: could a bird deliver a standard 20" New York-style cheese pizza in a box? Not with regular lasers, but with more power, you could destroy the world. The book "Caesar's Last Breath" (via Vox) recounts the 1947 cloud seeding experiment on Hurricane King. The bar representing Uranium is so large that it extends onto a stack of paper taller than a human]] waters of the Gulf of Mexicos Loop Current sometimes cause hurricanes If you're thinking about buying it, here are some things you might want to know: Humans can't digest the cellulose in paper, but if we could, eating this book would give you about 2,300 calories (including the cover). 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? 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. How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva? effects has not been made. It's certainly the farthest from Earth we know about. Every now and then, Munroe would get emails asking him to arbitrate a science debate. The basic idea goes like this-the Pentagon should bomb the eye of a tropical storm, thereby dispersing it and saving countless lives and millions of dollars. He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them.'" 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? As gravity slows you and brings you to a halt, you reach the top of the skyscraper, where you reach out and pull yourself to safety. If I shot an infinitely strong laser beam into the sky at a random point, how much damage would it do? what if? Of course, thats getting a little far-fetched. Let's assume there's life on the the nearest habitable exoplanet and that they have technology comparable to ours. 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. Within a dozen or so seconds, the bubble shrinks to a minimum size, then That's more than 666 times bigger than the "Little Boy" bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Trench. Could a person walk the entire city of NY in their lifetime? Sugar: 19 It should be noted that Trump denied the original report (by tweet, calling it "FAKE NEWS") and reiterated his denial when Biden mentioned it. At what speed would you have to drive for rain to shatter your windshield? no wave of any consequence will be generated.. The result would be some kind of nuclear explosion. A hurricane can release the amount of energy in a 10-megaton nuke every 20 minutes, the NOAA article says. Humans have always wanted to control the weather, even if that just meant praying to a god for rain. off the North American coast: Quantitative study of the destructive happens near the surface, it can create some pretty big wavesunder some 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. The only three weeks break, the sixth break in total. How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the Sun? Gasoline: 46 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). My boyfriend recently took a flight on a plane with wifi, and while he was up there, wistfully asked if I could send him a pizza. The most obvious concern when it comes to nuking a hurricane, of course, is nuclear fallout. Hurricanes emit a mind-boggling amount of energy. No underwater test has involved bombs anywhere near that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. The 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. After World War II, they started trying in a big way. What changes could be made to our diets for the amount of calories to equal the energy of the Sun? Even at the time, experts were divided on whether the cloud seeding had caused the hurricane's seemingly impossible redirection. First after 17 more weeks releases began again with article 141 on Tuesday January 16, 2016. If set up in the rainiest place in the United States (Ketchikan, Alaska), the cost could be offset in about a century. I've often joked I'd like to have my remains put into orbit. Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns? Unlike other sites which answer readers' questions, what if? that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. If they are radioactive, then they radiate energy. After two 8 weeks breaks this one waited almost three months. 95 minutes at the right place at the right time. Is there any way to fire a gun so that the bullet flies through the air and can then be safely caught by hand? It would be vapourized before it got close to the Sun. And we could make it not deadly, somehow? And if the great man took the great axe, with 64 GB MicroSD cards all full of legally purchased music)? Liquid tungsten? briefly glows the magma of the mantle. 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? Pin it to the stack. 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? 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? And mess they did. (I don't know why six feetbut that's what he asked.). Or what if you were doing a backflip? Slackers. 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? Fortunately for the coast, these waves are fundamentally different from 70% of the time you would end up in the ocean. What in my pocket actually contains more energy, my Zippo or my smartphone? What if the Earth were made entirely of protons, and the Moon were made entirely of electrons? Surely anything is possible if we put our minds to it, right, scientists? And since currents move everything in the ocean around, radioactive fallout would not stay in one place and would definitely make it to land eventually. This book can't stop most bullets; if you want to use it for armour, you may want a lot more than one copy. Earths crust dozens of miles across, leaving a hole through which dinosaurs. It would warm a small patch of the ocean and not do much. When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx? "By the way," he continued, gesturing to Trump, "he has an answer for hurricanes. water above bulges up, though only slightly, over a large area. Rough estimates indicate that the inundation What percentage of the Sun's heat (per day) does the population of Earth eat in calories per year? How hard would a puck have to be shot to be able to knock the goalie himself backwards into the net? 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. 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. I just moved into a new apartment. 8000+ feet)? Am I right to be afraid of pressure cookers? Here's What Would Happen If You Nuked A Hurricane, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports. Hurricane Illinois-Has-It-Too-Easy comes from somewhere to the northwest, goes through Illinois, and then back to the northwest. After this less orderly period there came a period of 10 weeks in a row with 10 releases starting on January 1, 2015. We could possibly spend a ton of money and resources to get a probe to Voyager. How many model rocket engines would it take to launch a real rocket into space? 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. The tree and splash would be great. Usually the center but not always and usually rice, but often it will be a small section of meat. There is a water average. The area is now marked by a 100-kilometer-wide scar of magma sizzling Around the early 1990s, scientists started discovering jumbled fields of }}, 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. All incomplete explanations are here . Which has a greater gravitational pull on me: the Sun, or spiders? before disintegrating into, in the words of the 1996 report, a mass of 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? Between the famine and the fires, most life on Earth is (including inside apartments). Did WWII last longer than the total length of movies about WWII? 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. What would happen from the impact of the mountain falling 1 inch? But beware of messing with the Texans. What if you exploded a nuclear bomb (say, the Tsar Bomba) at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? What if you released a submarine into Jupiter's atmosphere? You can almost visualize his wide-eyed innocence, wanting to take two deadly forces and use them to destroy each other, to benefit mankind. gigaton nuclear weapons as wave generators. But after defeating the Nazis and inventing the atom bomb, scientists seemed to think anything was possible, including controlling the weather. 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." From here on there seems to no longer be a standard release day for some time. What if everyone who took the SAT guessed on every multiple-choice question? Earth would be unaffected but the human race would be wiped out due to everyone trying to get home at the same time. The question is, how many vehicles would it take to build a car-bridge across the Atlantic? (Also, Randall misspelled Bethlehem). What if there was a robot apocalypse? They can rip off your roof, knock a tree onto your car, and break all your windows. With today's technology, would it be possible to launch an unmanned mission to retrieve Voyager I? Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. underwater. Give the signmakers some credit. The nuclear explosion at the Marshall Islands-which irradiated . How long would the Sun last if a giant water hose were focused upon it? 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. What if people's incomes appeared around them as cash in real time? So scientists are pretty sure that nuking a hurricane would both do nothing to stop it and spread nuclear fallout around the globe. What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? Before these massive storms had names and categories, they were still wreaking havoc. Until then, perhaps the best solution is just learn to co-exist with them.". How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters? Yup, we can thank climate change for deadlier hurricanes. What if you shined a flashlight (or a laser) into a sphere made of one-way mirror glass? Luckily for the coast, later research paints a less dire picture. book on 12 March 2014 in the blag. produces a cavity of hot gasses, which then collapses. What would kill me first? memo from his father, and was kind enough to show it to me. The release date in the archive is the wrong month June. What path would you trace on the Earth? However, Riechelderfer understood the gravity of the idea, saying they'd wait to start nuking storms "until we know what we're doing." What if everyone actually had only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world? Most of the tests, however, involved either small bombs or shallow If all the trees were one tree, His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. As far back as 1984, Trump has talked about the threat and promise of nuclear. Dispatches from a horrifying alternate universe. From my seven-year-old son: How many snowflakes would it take to cover the entire world in six feet of snow? Here's what would happen if you nuked a hurricane. Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. The first couple dozen ideas scientists came up with were totally ineffective, but the next big breakthrough could be right around the corner. eclipse look like? sprawling 400-page report produced for the Department of Defense by In that year (assuming no more comics before February 26 2017), only 8 articles where released including both 147 and this one. Hurricanes are tropical storms, the water they form over needs to be above 26C (79F) for them to work. This is potentially hazardous to some ships, but From here on standard release day was Tuesday. Could this be an effective weapon, or would it be as stupid as it sounds? the probability of achieving a perfect SAT score by guessing) to completely fictional questions (e.g. It's annoying biking in the wintertime, because it's so cold. If our Twitter timelines (tweets by the people we follow) actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be? What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? If the energy released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released in a hurricane, it's still a lot of power, so the hurricane police would need to dim the whole world's lights many times a year. When they do, you have to pause between letters, making those words annoying to type. Randall announced his what if? "Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems," the page states. "He made it up. On Sunday, Axios reported that Donald Trump has a rather extreme idea for hurricane preparedness: nuke the storms before they make landfall. How big a hole do I need to dig before people suffocate? Instead,according to Popular Mechanics, he said he could "imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb on a hurricane far at sea." When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones? All that changes when this cat enters the equation: Lets say that when Im typing the above equation, the cat hops onto my each. What about using a squirrel suit? In the first Superman movie, Superman flies around Earth so fast that it begins turning in the opposite direction. 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). I figured this would be long enough to warm me up but not long enough to harm me. coast. As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur? In Washington City, power director Rick Hansen explained to the council there was an . He liked these questions so much that he started up What If. 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. You can almost visualize his wide-eyed innocence, wanting to take two deadly forces and use them to destroy each other, to benefit mankind. 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? This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). There is an easy way to link to a given what if? It's baffling and has made me automatically adjust heating times to over 2 minutes. I saw a sign at a hot springs tub saying "Caution: Water is hotter than average" with water at about 39C. Intense enough to cause a medium sized nuclear explosion. 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.". Answer: NO!!!!! The reason for this you can read at the Editor FAQ . That turbulent warm water is actually quite substantial. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. Not in a "scatter my ashes" sense, but, like, "throw my naked corpse out the airlock" sense. 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 0 618: Asteroid 696: Strip Games 786: Exoplanets 809: Los Alamos The seminal work in the field of nuclear ocean waves is Water Waves Generated By Underwater Explosions, a ", "I never said that," Trump retorted. If not, then we all die. What would actually happen? guns? On their website,NOAA writes, "Maybe the time will come when men and women can travel at nearly the speed of light to the stars, and we will then have enough energy for brute-force intervention in hurricane dynamics. What could I use as a clear medium? Liquid helium? What's the likelihood this could happen? blog. Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water? Fast enough so you would need a speedometer in scientific notation. 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