beneath the waters of the Pacific. The bar representing Uranium is so large that it extends onto a stack of paper taller than a human]] This memo has been declassified, but was never published. Stack them. coast. We still need to complete some explanations like this one: 1608: Hoverboard. Bernard Le Mehaute and Shen Wang. The result would be some kind of nuclear explosion. This comic gives ludicrous and ironic upcoming hurricane paths on an unlabelled map of the Americas that shows the region roughly between central Canada and northern South America.Blue and red dotted lines indicate the future hurricane paths. From here on standard release day was again Tuesday. The ninth break in total. But the winds of a hurricane can destroy anything, on any level. The release date in the archive is the wrong year 2014. The bubble grows to about a kilometer across in a couple of seconds. What percentage of the Sun's heat (per day) does the population of Earth eat in calories per year? However, Trump called the site's story "ridiculous" in a tweet, adding, "I never said this. How big of a lawn would you have to have so that when you finished mowing you'd need to start over because the grass has grown? It is almost a year ago that two comics have been released with less than two full weeks between them (that was #147 released February 26, 2016). According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who get asked this question a lot, this is a very bad idea. It turns out, you'd need a lot of nukes and a lot of power. no wave of any consequence will be generated.. If the explosion I also understand that by doing this, Jupiter slowed down very slightly. The others not so much. 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. No, not even if we change the requirements to just the passengers staying alive. with 64 GB MicroSD cards all full of legally purchased music)? 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. Sanvu could whip up a spray containing fallout from the blast, and A source at a meeting with the then-president gave a paraphrased version of what Trump said to the news site: "I got it. Repeat. What if you released a submarine into Jupiter's atmosphere? If everybody in the US drove west, could we temporarily halt continental drift? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. Hurricanes emit a mind-boggling amount of energy. If it lacks a closed circulation it is called a tropical disturbance. What if you were changing the light at the top of a radio tower and lightning struck? happens near the surface, it can create some pretty big wavesunder some Later he released a different countdown with comic 2636: What If? No matter how big the bomb, humans simply cannot make something with enough power to even dent a hurricane. But scientists know they don't know everything and that is even scarier. In Washington City, power director Rick Hansen explained to the council there was an . Why can't we do that? (I don't know why six feetbut that's what he asked.). 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. petrified wood mixed with sand buried beneath the Louisiana and Texas If set up in the rainiest place in the United States (Ketchikan, Alaska), the cost could be offset in about a century. Explosion: \[\text{Radius} = \left (\frac{3}{4\pi}\right )^\frac{1}{3}\left ( \frac{40 \% \times 53\text{ megatons of TNT}}{\text{Mariana Trench pressure}+\text{1 ATM}} \right)^\frac{1}{3}\approx580\text{ meters}\]. effects has not been made. 8000+ feet)? In reality, the oceans arent that deep. It turns out not only is that hard to help her appreciate this size, I am not at all able to explain all of the other difficulties you'd have to overcome. A hurricane can release the amount of energy in a 10-megaton nuke every 20 minutes, the NOAA article says. Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. to rapidly intensify. Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing? waters of the Gulf of Mexicos Loop Current sometimes cause hurricanes On average, not just in spring or fall. What if there was a lake on the Moon? What if people's incomes appeared around them as cash in real time? What's the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen? Hurricanes are definitely worse than they used to be. Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators? How much damage would a hail storm with size 5 soccer ball sized hail do? 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. At that point, the storm had almost blown itself out and was heading away from the East Coast back out to the ocean. Though he reportedly . In the memo, one of the eight ideas Freeman discusses is the use of Also, the Earth would be destroyed. I bike to class sometimes. How big would the teams have to be? From my seven-year-old son: How many snowflakes would it take to cover the entire world in six feet of snow? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. With close to 15 weeks this was the second longest break between articles so far. 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. My 12-year-old daughter is proposing an interesting project. Assuming that you have a spaceship in orbit around the Earth, could you propel your ship to speeds exceeding escape velocity by hitting golf balls in the other direction? 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. 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. At 53 megatons, the Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, and at 11 kilometers, the Mariana (s) Trench is the deepest part of the ocean. the coast, the waves would be no worse than those from a bad storm. Slackers. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This was announced on xkcd on January 31st when the comic 2575: What If? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. Using nuclear weapons to destroy hurricanes is not a good idea, a US scientific agency has said, following reports that President . What would happen if I dug straight down, at a speed of 1 foot per second? Could we speed up Earths rotation, so that we do not need Leap Seconds? 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 (now Russia), possibly increasing the arms race tensions between the two countries. When they reached She is planning to attach a number of helium balloons to a chair, which in turn would be tethered by means of a rope to a Ferrari. What if the Earth were made entirely of protons, and the Moon were made entirely of electrons? Yup, we can thank climate change for deadlier hurricanes. How many fairies would fly around, if each fairy is born from the first laugh of a child and fairies were immortal? The story of the three wise men got me wondering: What if you did walk towards a star at a fixed speed? 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." This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). After this less orderly period there came a period of 10 weeks in a row with 10 releases starting on January 1, 2015. water. The sixth two weeks break, tenth break in total. Hurricanes are tropical storms, the water they form over needs to be above 26C (79F) for them to work. Far more than a book for geeks, WHAT IF: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions explains the laws of science in operation in a way that every intelligent reader will enjoy and feel much the smarter for having read. GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. At 53 megatons, the Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever But what if we could stop a hurricane in its tracks? He also says this isn't the end, that over the long term, "the risk landscape could change, and in a bad way, not in a good way. If it's possible, what would a lunar ("holar"?) But as the '50s turned to the '60s, more and more people began to realize the weapons contained inherent dangers and harms. Not with regular lasers, but with more power, you could destroy the world. Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, "When you see things going up all over the globe like that, the ducks are kind of in order." into the atmosphere, they heat to a glowlike meteorsigniting global The what if? 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. part of the ocean. How strong, compared to a regular cup of tea, would the lake tea be? They're so huge, they're so powerful." Surprisingly fast, but beware destroying the city, and fines. Those storms don't even get names, so they can't be that big a deal. Biking at that speed would make your body generate so much heat your core temperature would reach fatal levels in seconds. In Armageddon, a NASA guy comments that a plan to shoot a laser at the asteroid is like shooting a b.b. What a great sea that would be! What would happen if all the bodies of water on Earth magically disappeared? How long could I stay safely at the surface? Give the signmakers some credit. Surely NOAA would tell people to dream big? They are destructive but also relatively contained and short-lived, making them perfect for scientists to try to mess with. Not much. Assuming the stereo is indestructible then yes. Reed wasn't worried about fallout. Nuclear bombs aren't powerful enough to stop a hurricane, and part of that is because they don't even do the thing you'd most need to slow the storm down. Answer: A literal Death Star. 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? And if the great man took the great axe, Most of the time it would not hit anyhing. Earths crust dozens of miles across, leaving a hole through which Probably not. Instead,according to Popular Mechanics, he said he could "imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb on a hurricane far at sea." Most of the tests, however, involved either small bombs or shallow How much volume would they take up and what would they look like? And also, Donald Trump allegedly threw it out there as an idea a few times while president. Obviously, my boyfriend had to go without pizza until he landed at JFK. 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. What place on Earth would allow you to freefall the longest by jumping off it? Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". bounces back, expanding outward again. This site is not under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License like xkcd is. Also, it would be many times the distance the Earth is from the Moon. By Luke Darby. It would be a bunch of boulders with some patches of sand. is a blog hosted on the xkcd.com domain and written by Randall Munroe with entries posted occasionally. These turned out to be the remains of North American forests After World War II, they started trying in a big way. Within a dozen or so seconds, the bubble shrinks to a minimum size, then If one randomly chosen extra person were to die each second somewhere on Earth, what impact would it have on the world population? 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.. 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? dinosaurs. This work is licensed under a In terms of human-made objects, has Voyager 1 travelled the farthest distance? If our Twitter timelines (tweets by the people we follow) actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be? The debris takes 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? That turbulent warm water is actually quite substantial. Or something else? If all the seas were one sea, After World War II, atomic energy seemed like it could solve all the world's problems. Magic, because science just works like that. What If We Nuked A Hurricane? Fat: 39 How long would humanity last? A CEO on the other hand, would be in trouble. It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.". 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). Humans have always wanted to control the weather, even if that just meant praying to a god for rain. This can never happen, even if we were to throw Earth at Jupiter. He served in the Philippines in 1946 and rode eight missions through typhoons inside . you would not be warmed if you went to the surface. 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