Now I've realized that a flamethrower is impractical, but what about a high-powered microwave emitter? 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. From here on standard release day was Wednesday. I've occasionally seen "radar enforced" on speed limit signs, and I can't help but ask: How intense would radio waves have to be to stop a car from going over the speed limit, and what would happen if this were attempted? Although they were presumably trying to say "hotter than the average swimming pool," this got me wondering: What is the average temperature of all water on the Earths surface, and how does that temperature compare to 39C? If all digital data were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be? After World War II, they started trying in a big way. The third two weeks Christmas break, the seventh break in total. 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). Uranium: 76 000 000 The core on the other hand, would vapourize you. 30 years to walk, much longer for the sentence. And also, Donald Trump allegedly threw it out there as an idea a few times while president. A normal person would not get buried. 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. If we ever got desperate enough to try to nuke a hurricane and crossed our fingers that something unexpected would happen, we might be rather disappointed when that unexpected thing was a disaster we could never have predicted. How great would all of these things be? terrifying passage describing the detonation of a submerged gigaton mine Or standing in a graphite field? My daughter recently received her driver's permit in the US, and aspires to visit mainland Europe someday. It's annoying biking in the wintertime, because it's so cold. The sixth two weeks break, tenth break in total. 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions was released on September 13. What would happen if lightning struck a bullet in midair? We still need to complete some explanations like this one: 1608: Hoverboard. What would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox (e.g. Or looking straight up at the bolt? 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? Even the mightiest hurricane begins life as a much smaller storm. 195 years. If you make the words pronounceable by always alternating vowels and consonants, the names would be about 24 letters long. What if the Earth were made entirely of protons, and the Moon were made entirely of electrons? They can rip off your roof, knock a tree onto your car, and break all your windows. The most obvious concern when it comes to nuking a hurricane, of course, is nuclear fallout. Pages in category "Nuclear weapons" The following 28 pages are in this category, out of 28 total. It would not have a big impact unless it happened during the space age. I also understand that by doing this, Jupiter slowed down very slightly. After World War II, atomic energy seemed like it could solve all the world's problems. This book can't stop most bullets; if you want to use it for armour, you may want a lot more than one copy. No, at least not without starving to death quickly and leaving our pets, belongings and everything else behind. What if every virus in the world were collected into one area? The debris played a key role in identifying the If so, how many golf balls would be required to reach the Moon? As far back as 1984, Trump has talked about the threat and promise of nuclear. Huge volumes of rock and water are blasted into space. I use one of those old phones where you type with numbersfor example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. "A clean device would minimize lingering activity placed in the atmosphere," he wrote in his 1959 presentation. See the [[what if]] ''{{what if|147|Niagara Straw}}''. 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. National Geographic says it was a meteorologist named Jack W. Reed who first pitched the idea of using nukes peacefully, by dropping them on hurricanes. Reed died in 2007. I bike to class sometimes. much less catastrophic than a direct nuclear attack. You are in a boat directly over the Mariana Trench. like. It's certainly the farthest from Earth we know about. Evins scenario concerns neither. The culprit was a comet or The Mariana Trench is gone, and with it Guam and the Mariana Islands. 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. 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? Assuming you had a good coat, you would survive to the death zone and die. Yes, but you need to talk to the Russians to do it right. into the atmosphere, they heat to a glowlike meteorsigniting global Until then, perhaps the best solution is just learn to co-exist with them.". bounces back, expanding outward again. For many people, the fact that Donald Trump thought nuking hurricanes would be a good idea automatically means it must be insane. Trump allegedly continued, "asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle." 8000+ feet)? Could a high-speed train run through a vertical loop, like a rollercoaster, with the passengers staying comfortable? I jokingly sent him a photo of a parrot holding a pizza slice in its beak. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. What about using a squirrel suit? 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. What if you were to somehow ignite the pollen that floats around in the air in spring? 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. More details. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop." like with most of the other scenarios, everyone dies. It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. What is the furthest one human being has ever been from every other living person? But why would you. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. The world just has too many people. Let's assume there's life on the the nearest habitable exoplanet and that they have technology comparable to ours. Business, Economics, and Finance. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who get asked this question a lot, this is a very bad idea. Thanks for looking at my book. . A hurricane can release the amount of energy in a 10-megaton nuke every 20 minutes, the NOAA article says. [[A bar chart on a sheet of paper labeled "Fuel energy density in Megajoules What a great splish-splash that would be! This was announced on xkcd on January 31st when the comic 2575: What If? What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key? Humans have done supposedly impossible things before. If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time? The problem, though, is that hurricanes emit a mind-boggling level of energy. We were both (luckily) amazed and surprised and I have often wondered what the odds are for something like that happening. What would it be like to swim in it? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? It was released. But the winds of a hurricane can destroy anything, on any level. If you stripped away all the rules of car racing and had a contest which was simply to get a human being around a track 200 times as fast as possible, what strategy would win? It would be vapourized before it got close to the Sun. When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. Using only pronounceable letter combinations, how long would names have to be to give each star in the universe a unique one word name? I'm curious, though, what would happen if one person had all of the world's money? Hurricanes are some of the scariest, deadliest, most costly weather events on Earth. Dotted lines indicating hurricane paths cover the map, all red except where noted. the surrounding waterthat lingers for some time. How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva? Am I right to be afraid of pressure cookers? What place on Earth would allow you to freefall the longest by jumping off it? less than enough energy to microwave a burrito. The release date in the archive is the wrong year, saying 2013 instead of 2012. ", In August 2019, the news website Axios wrote that sources who heard the president's private remarks in recorded comments in a National Security Council (NSC) memorandum claimed to have heard Trump asking top national security officials to "consider using nuclear bombs to weaken or destroy hurricanes. I know that stirring does help to cool down the tea, but what if I were to stir it faster? underwater. So during the summer of 2016, it seemed it was down to about one release every two months but then it increased. He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them. 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. Could it navigate? Reed wasn't worried about fallout. What changes could be made to our diets for the amount of calories to equal the energy of the Sun? Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns? What if a huge mountainDenali, sayhad the bottom inch of its base disappear? Most of the what if? How big would the teams have to be? Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. You know your house will flood from the bottom up. 6, but they would cost much more than you could afford. Humanity would survive if the robots cared about keeping themselves alive as well. Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State's University's Tropical Meteorology Project, was talking about the U.S. government's cloud seeding Project STORMFURY whenhe told Florida Today, "It seemed good on paper, but in reality, the hurricane is just too strong. Values are as follows: If it feels like there are more hurricanes these days than there were when you were a kid, and that they cause more damage, that's not you looking back on the past with rose-colored glasses. How many model rocket engines would it take to launch a real rocket into space? 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? In reality, the oceans arent that deep. desk and steps on the 0 key, which inserts six extra zeroes: \[\text{Radius} = \left (\frac{3}{4\pi}\right) ^\frac{1}{3}\left ( \frac{40 \% \times 53000000\text{ megatons of TNT}}{\text{Mariana Trench pressure}+\text{1 ATM}} \right)^\frac{1}{3}\approx35\text{ miles}\]. In the UK edition of the book, Randall included a preface about his thoughts on the units used in the UK. When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx? If all the trees were one tree, The column of deep, hot water from our nuke could conceivably It is the 2nd book published by Randall. Printing $100 bills 24/7 for a year can make you about $200 million per year. If all the axes were one axe, If all the men were one man, 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. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". The Sun. First two months break of at least two in a row, the 15th break in total. How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the Sun? 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. What If? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. It would warm a small patch of the ocean and not do much. What could I use as a clear medium? 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? ocean waves created by nuclear explosions. What if you exploded a nuclear bomb (say, the Tsar Bomba) at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). But after defeating the Nazis and inventing the atom bomb, scientists seemed to think anything was possible, including controlling the weather. If our Twitter timelines (tweets by the people we follow) actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be? Would the storm cell be immediately vaporized? What about 1 foot? Why not nuke a hurricane? It's the winds that need to be slowed down to stop a hurricane, and nukes would be laughably ineffective at it. How close could I stand to watch it? 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? 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. Hurricanes emit a mind-boggling amount of energy. Any time I attempt to heat left over Chinese food in a microwave, it fails to heat completely through somewhere. Better to just carry a sign. How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters? So, you're falling from a height above the tallest building in your town, and you don't have a parachute. 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. 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? (Also, Randall misspelled Bethlehem). My daughter age 4.5 maintains she wants a billion-story building. If not, then we all die. With a bigger bomb, it could destroy the world. Liquid tungsten? Hey! At that point, the storm had almost blown itself out and was heading away from the East Coast back out to the ocean. How hard would a puck have to be shot to be able to knock the goalie himself backwards into the net? Probably not. "Look how much we're paying now to deal with the hurricanes," Biden said. near future, and outlined the potential military uses and dangers of Liquid nitrogen? If you suddenly began rising steadily at one foot per second, how exactly would you die? Liquid helium? Hurricane cos(x) forms a graph of cos(x) along the bottom edge of the map.]] Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters. detonated, and at 11 kilometers, the Mariana(s) Trench is the deepest The seminal work in the field of nuclear ocean waves is Water Waves Generated By Underwater Explosions, a Getting it back is another story. The problem is, we already know there would be no point. How long would it take for the population of the world to read them all out loud? 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). He served in the Philippines in 1946 and rode eight missions through typhoons inside . Between the famine and the fires, most life on Earth is Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? If you carry a penny in your coin tray, how long would it take for that penny to cost you more than a cent in extra gas? It then seemed to stop completely after those two, and it took more than a year (62 weeks) before #157. I've been told that if the Earth were shrunk down to the size of a bowling ball, it would be smoother than said bowling ball. asteroid hitting the Yucatanthe impact that killed most of the book on 12 March 2014 in the blag. Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators? This memo has been declassified, but was never published. wiped out. 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. The seventh break in total 's so cold back out to the Sun the US, and you n't... Served in the world 's money served in the UK edition of the Internet surpass that of FedEx Europe. 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