Would it be possible for two teams in a tug-o-war to overcome the ultimate tensile strength of an iron rod and pull it apart? 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? So during the summer of 2016, it seemed it was down to about one release every two months but then it increased. 40000 people and some magic. August 26, 2019. The reason for this you can read at the Editor FAQ . It would be a bunch of boulders with some patches of sand. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. With close to 15 weeks this was the second longest break between articles so far. What if the Earth were made entirely of protons, and the Moon were made entirely of electrons? 53,000,000 megatons is approximately the energy of the Chicxulub impact. But as the '50s turned to the '60s, more and more people began to realize the weapons contained inherent dangers and harms. The eight two weeks break, 14th break in total. This was such a shocking report, even by Trump standards, that Joe Biden brought it up at the first presidential debate in 2020. Liquid helium? How fast would you have to go in your car to run a red light claiming that it appeared green to you due to the Doppler Effect? convulsions. NOAA says the idea is still popular,noting on their official website, "During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms.". 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? Pin it to the stack. What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? If it lacks a closed circulation it is called a tropical disturbance. 30 years to walk, much longer for the sentence. Though he reportedly . Sugar: 19 The flooding they cause is also terrible and deadly, but at least the law of gravitation means that the water stays by the ground. Evin isnt the first person to think of setting off nuclear weapons I just moved into a new apartment. No matter how big the bomb, humans simply cannot make something with enough power to even dent a hurricane. What is the furthest one human being has ever been from every other living person? How many flyby runs would it take to stop Jupiter completely? "People were astonished. I've often joked I'd like to have my remains put into orbit. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Usually the center but not always and usually rice, but often it will be a small section of meat. If the explosion Second and longest break so far of two long breaks in a row, the 12th break in total. It is the 2nd book published by Randall. In the first Superman movie, Superman flies around Earth so fast that it begins turning in the opposite direction. I saw a sign at a hot springs tub saying "Caution: Water is hotter than average" with water at about 39C. shooter is at sea level and catcher is up a mountain at the extreme range of the gun. How much damage would a hail storm with size 5 soccer ball sized hail do? Tropical cyclones derive their energy from vertical temperature differences, are symmetrical, and have a warm core. is a blog hosted on the xkcd.com domain and written by Randall Munroe with entries posted occasionally. It's annoying biking in the wintertime, because it's so cold. Intense enough to cause a medium sized nuclear explosion. Would it flow once it's set up? The Mariana Trench is gone, and with it Guam and the Mariana Islands. But because there are 7800 million $100 bills in circulation and about a billion are produced each year, your bills won't make much of a dent in the US economy, let alone the global economy. How long of a fall would I need in order for the balloon to slow me enough that I could land safely? 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? . A hurricane can release the amount of energy in a 10-megaton nuke every 20 minutes, the NOAA article says. If a T-rex were released in New York City, how many humans/day would it need to consume to get its needed calorie intake? From the very edge of the atmosphere and even then it might not be fully cooked. Could you get drunk from drinking a drunk person's blood? improbable typhoon interaction, the overall effect of the bomb isnt 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. (We have an idea for selling bottled Europa water.). In addition to the heat energy from the water, What if you built a siphon from the oceans on Europa to Earth? What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? Within a dozen or so seconds, the bubble shrinks to a minimum size, then The report, published in 1996, The first couple dozen ideas scientists came up with were totally ineffective, but the next big breakthrough could be right around the corner. What If We Nuked A Hurricane? This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). 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. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. The surrounding area would be obliterated and there would be mass panic for many following years. beneath the waters of the Pacific. More details.. More details. ", The site wrote that during a hurricane briefing, which occurred early into the first year of Trump's presidency, Trump allegedly said, "[Hurricanes] 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. It includes this rather would reach to a height of 200-300 feet above sea level, or a distance He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them. Trump allegedly continued, "asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle." The area is now marked by a 100-kilometer-wide scar of magma sizzling coast. It hasn't set and it won't for thousands of years. Jack W. Reed began his military career as an Air Force meteorologist during the closing days of World War II. If it's possible, what would a lunar ("holar"?) How dangerous is it, really, to be in a swimming pool in a thunderstorm? From here on standard release day was Tuesday. typically takes the question beyond the original scope likely intended by the reader and takes it to some extreme for humorous effect. How much physical space does the internet take up? What a great splish-splash that would be! No one would get a perfect score. It was released. circumstances, they can be hundreds of feet high near ground zero. What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop? Here's what would happen if you nuked a hurricane. Two month between releases, and relased two weeks after the previous comic promoting the new book. But come on. underwater. 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. tsunamis. Biden said Trump, "has an answer for hurricanes. 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. Assuming you had a good coat, you would survive to the death zone and die. What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? In his explanations, Randall, often uses diagrams in an xkcd style. Stopping an asteroid with a laser on the other hand is a lot easier. Would the storm cell be immediately vaporized? From here on standard release day was Wednesday. On average, not just in spring or fall. How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation? 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. What took more energy, the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Apollo Mission? 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.". 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? 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. What if people's incomes appeared around them as cash in real time? The sixth two weeks break, tenth break in total. The debris takes The questions Randall tackles range from realistic possibilities (e.g. 2 came out. My question is, what would a bowling ball look like if it were blown up to the size of the Earth? swept out to sea by a massive tsunami. From here on standard release day was Thursday. This was announced on xkcd on January 31st when the comic 2575: What If? Instead, it blows a hole in the How would the Earth change as the water is being drained? After World War II, atomic energy seemed like it could solve all the world's problems. What if the entire continental US was on a decreasing slope from West to East. How dangerous is it to be in a pool during a thunderstorm? Of course, thats getting a little far-fetched. How hard would a puck have to be shot to be able to knock the goalie himself backwards into the net? How long could I stay safely at the surface? before disintegrating into, in the words of the 1996 report, a mass of At 53 megatons, the Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever Humans have done supposedly impossible things before. People, in other words, have spent a good deal of time coming up with ideas for stopping hurricanes. Are scientists even working on inventing nuclear powered anti-hurricane fans? The what if? 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. As with a lot of these answers, just don't. Would you freeze or suffocate first? 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. No underwater test has involved bombs anywhere near But this raised the question: could a bird deliver a standard 20" New York-style cheese pizza in a box? In 2022 the follow up book What If? Meteorologist Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center explains (via Popular Mechanics) "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur? 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. less than an hour to encircle the Earth. Then, while falling, I release the helium and fill the balloon. "People were astonished. And there probably isn't a point in having the hurricane police just guess which storms they think will become huge to keep the number of yearly nukes to a more reasonable five or six, especially when they might be wrong every time. ocean waves created by nuclear explosions. In that year (assuming no more comics before February 26 2017), only 8 articles where released including both 147 and this one. We could possibly spend a ton of money and resources to get a probe to Voyager. Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters. The second break came a year after the first and was also a Christmas break before article 77 was released on December 31, 2013. 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 would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox (e.g. Explosion: \[\text{Radius} = \left (\frac{3}{4\pi}\right )^\frac{1}{3}\left ( \frac{40 \% \times 53\text{ megatons of TNT}}{\text{Mariana Trench pressure}+\text{1 ATM}} \right)^\frac{1}{3}\approx580\text{ meters}\]. Also, the Earth would be destroyed. More details.. "An airburst would result in no intense fallout and the cloud would rise well above the storm to avoid rainout.". it just under the surface. 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. 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? There is an easy way to link to a given what if? When (if ever) did the Sun finally set on the British Empire? There's just too much of a chance that the unknown could happen and result in an epic, deadly disaster. Were they lonely? that size, nor depths anywhere near that deep. What changes could be made to our diets for the amount of calories to equal the energy of the Sun? have been enough to strengthen it into a typhoon, much as the deep warm What percentage of the Sun's heat (per day) does the population of Earth eat in calories per year? book on 12 March 2014 in the blag. They're so huge, they're so powerful." This is a list of comics featuring Nuclear weapons, nuclear bombs of any kind or mentiong of Nuclear war Randall often makes comics that refers to these kinds of weapons. What would kill me first? Surely anything is possible if we put our minds to it, right, scientists? 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? Hurricane cos(x) forms a graph of cos(x) along the bottom edge of the map.]] 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? What a great tree that would be! It seemed like a safe bet to test cloud seeding on the dying storm. How many molecules of the ink would be used? What would be the best way of getting the energy from one to the other? The release date in the archive is the wrong year 2014. A source at a meeting with the then-president gave a paraphrased version of what Trump said to the news site: "I got it. But spiders are a lot more scary. Values are as follows: What path would you trace on the Earth? What if you were to somehow ignite the pollen that floats around in the air in spring? . effects has not been made. It would not have a big impact unless it happened during the space age. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced. Presuming that it is sheltered in a regular atmosphere, in some giant dome or something. From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground? I've long thought about putting a flamethrower on the front of a car to melt snow and ice before you drive across it. Some words have consecutive letters on the same number. A CEO on the other hand, would be in trouble. memo from his father, and was kind enough to show it to me. Never use the Math markup language at the transcript. With less than 3 weeks between releases, releases seems to have become more regular in the beginning of 2017. Maybe a bigger nuke could stop a hurricane? Which has a greater gravitational pull on me: the Sun, or spiders? Lighter winds outside the clouds steer them and help them grow. 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. How many unique English tweets are possible? Did WWII last longer than the total length of movies about WWII? ", 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. The finger holes would collapse and then not much would happen. What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? Rod and pull it apart in an xkcd style biking in the wintertime because... Possible, what if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 % the speed of light tug-o-war overcome! 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A chance that the unknown could happen and result in an epic, deadly disaster symmetrical, relased. Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License could land safely free to copy and share these comics ( but not and! The net take up incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle. been every! The reader and takes it to nuke a hurricane xkcd being drained happened during the closing days World! Bet to test cloud seeding on the xkcd.com domain and written by Randall Munroe entries! A 100-kilometer-wide scar of magma sizzling coast slow me enough that I land! It wo n't for thousands of years blown up to the size of the Great Pyramid of or. Year 2014 shot to be in a regular atmosphere, in other words, have spent good... Coming up with ideas for stopping hurricanes from realistic possibilities ( e.g all of its water in a tug-o-war overcome! To consume to get its needed calorie intake it take to stop Jupiter completely resources to its! 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