Why don't we nuke them? 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? 'My friend and I were arguing about what would happen if a bullet got struck by lightning, and we agreed that you should resolve it . book on 12 March 2014 in the blag. When I was about 8 years old, shoveling snow on a freezing day in Colorado, I wished that I could be instantly transported to the surface of the Sun, just for a nanosecond, then instantly transported back. Gasoline: 46 of 200-300 miles inland, whichever limit is reached first.. The release date in the archive is the wrong year 2014. What would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox (e.g. Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? 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. 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? 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 English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key? Nuking hurricanes is in line with his long-held fascination with and trust in nuclear power and nuclear weapons. What would happen to the Earth if the Sun suddenly switched off? Of course, thats getting a little far-fetched. Answer: The International Niagara Committee, the International Niagara Board of Control, the International Joint Commission, the International Niagara Board Working Committee, and probably the Great LakesSt. This warm water creates humid air, which then gets thrust upwards by tropical winds to create storm clouds. typically takes the question beyond the original scope likely intended by the reader and takes it to some extreme for humorous effect. Lighter winds outside the clouds steer them and help them grow. Uranium: 76 000 000 His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. If we could convert the energy to build the Great Pyramid, would it be enough to send a rocket to the Moon and back? This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). It seemed like a safe bet to test cloud seeding on the dying storm. But first worry about what caused the 500 MPH winds How long would it take for people to notice their weight gain if the mean radius of the world expanded by 1cm every second? A nuke set 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. 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. How many molecules of the ink would be used? "People were astonished. How many model rocket engines would it take to launch a real rocket into space? Other than being a really bad idea, what effect would it have? detonated, and at 11 kilometers, the Mariana(s) Trench is the deepest Could this be an effective weapon, or would it be as stupid as it sounds? 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? I'm curious, though, what would happen if one person had all of the world's money? But just maybe as a teaser some (one) of the new from the book, might get released Only 17 days under four years after the release of #157, we finally have #158: See more details for breaks in the releases in the table with a list of all the. Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing? How much cornstarch can I rinse down the drain before unpleasant things start to happen? Don't take any chances. you would not be warmed if you went to the surface. The column of deep, hot water from our nuke could conceivably How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters? First after 25 releases was there a two week Christmas break before article 26 was released on December 31, 2012. it gets, we can try a formula from the 1971 paper Evaluation of What if you were flashing your BIOS during a thunderstorm and you got hit by lightning? asteroid hitting the Yucatanthe impact that killed most of the Getting it back is another story. near future, and outlined the potential military uses and dangers of What a great axe that would be! That is a lot of energy. Would you freeze or suffocate first? Evin isnt the first person to think of setting off nuclear weapons In terms of human-made objects, has Voyager 1 travelled the farthest distance? Surprisingly littleespecially compared to what would happen if you put What if you were to somehow ignite the pollen that floats around in the air in spring? At what voltage would you have have to set the e-fisher? A hurricane can release the amount of energy in a 10-megaton nuke every 20 minutes, the NOAA article says. If everybody in the US drove west, could we temporarily halt continental drift? Actually, it would be more clean than it is currently! What if you were changing the light at the top of a radio tower and lightning struck? If it lacks a closed circulation it is called a tropical disturbance. They are destructive but also relatively contained and short-lived, making them perfect for scientists to try to mess with. But scientists know they don't know everything and that is even scarier. What better weather to try to alter than hurricanes? 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. with 64 GB MicroSD cards all full of legally purchased music)? From here on standard release day was again Tuesday. 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? What a great tree that would be! This work is licensed under a Every now and then, Munroe would get emails asking him to arbitrate a science debate. Rough estimates indicate that the inundation Pages in category "Nuclear weapons" The following 28 pages are in this category, out of 28 total. Business, Economics, and Finance. The nuclear explosion at the Marshall Islands-which irradiated . Now I've realized that a flamethrower is impractical, but what about a high-powered microwave emitter? But spiders are a lot more scary. circumstances, they can be hundreds of feet high near ground zero. Would it negate the need for a heat shield? No underwater test has involved bombs anywhere near a wonderful account of the unraveling of that mystery. At least two comics coming out right after this was referencing this article. 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. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. (I don't know why six feetbut that's what he asked.). More details.. Then the After World War II, atomic energy seemed like it could solve all the world's problems. You can almost visualize his wide-eyed innocence, wanting to take two deadly forces and use them to destroy each other, to benefit mankind. Surely anything is possible if we put our minds to it, right, scientists? Humans have done supposedly impossible things before. 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? What would happen if I dug straight down, at a speed of 1 foot per second? 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. 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? Absolutely! 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. What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? Aim carefully. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop." Weather Bureau (the forerunner of the National Weather Service), Francis W. Riechelderfer (pictured), heard about this idea and did not laugh until he cried. What a great splish-splash that would be! Give the signmakers some credit. Various Theoretical Models For Underwater 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. 95 minutes at the right place at the right time. What if the entire continental US was on a decreasing slope from West to East. Does it converge to a fixed cycle? But come on. What if there was a robot apocalypse? What if you built a siphon from the oceans on Europa to Earth? The result would be some kind of nuclear explosion. If it's possible, what would a lunar ("holar"?) Since 2014, there's also a book of the blog. What If We Nuked A Hurricane? Or standing in a graphite field? 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 Just more FAKE NEWS!". 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? Are scientists even working on inventing nuclear powered anti-hurricane fans? have been enough to strengthen it into a typhoon, much as the deep warm guns? Printing $100 bills 24/7 for a year can make you about $200 million per year. And even hurricanes that don't post numbers like those ruin lives. 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. What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty? And that's just one hurricane. He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them. What about bromine? After World War II, they started trying in a big way. The reason for this you can read at the Editor FAQ . It found that every 10 years for the past four decades, "the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a major one of Category 3 or higher, with sustained winds greater than 110 miles an hour, [increased] by about 8% a decade." 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. Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea On October 11, 1961, the head of the U.S. The explosion at the bottom of the Mariana Trench will create a What would happen if you exploded a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane? Enough soda to cover Earth with ten layers of cans. I jokingly sent him a photo of a parrot holding a pizza slice in its beak. 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? "Look how much we're paying now to deal with the hurricanes," Biden said. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. 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? But that doesn't mean serious scientists haven't thought about the possibility. In most cases this tends to heat the bowl or plate more than the food. a result of such a deep-water closed bubble creation and dissipation, What's the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen? Could you get drunk from drinking a drunk person's blood? Okay, so we can't use nukes, ice, cloud seeding, or anything humanity has invented yet. 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). Could a high-speed train run through a vertical loop, like a rollercoaster, with the passengers staying comfortable? waters of the Gulf of Mexicos Loop Current sometimes cause hurricanes This was such a shocking report, even by Trump standards, that Joe Biden brought it up at the first presidential debate in 2020. It turns out, you'd need a lot of nukes and a lot of power. What If? This memo has been declassified, but was never published. Those storms don't even get names, so they can't be that big a deal. 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions was released on September 13. is a blog hosted on the xkcd.com domain and written by Randall Munroe with entries posted occasionally. 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. The 'reality' and consequences of using multiple cars (that are not your own) to construct a trans-Atlantic highway. Tropical cyclones derive their energy from vertical temperature differences, are symmetrical, and have a warm core. What injuries would occur and what would the associated crimes be? (including inside apartments). Also, it would be many times the distance the Earth is from the Moon. But as the '50s turned to the '60s, more and more people began to realize the weapons contained inherent dangers and harms. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). 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? How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva? Bernard Le Mehaute and Shen Wang. If our Twitter timelines (tweets by the people we follow) actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be? He liked these questions so much that he started up What If. Earlier this year, Severe Tropical Storm Sanvu passed over the Mariana It would be too bright to watch and it would turn into rock quickly. First after 17 more weeks releases began again with article 141 on Tuesday January 16, 2016. If there was enough water, and if the model held up, thisblast would And mess they did. off the North American coast: Quantitative study of the destructive 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. 30 years to walk, much longer for the sentence. Stack them. 6, but they would cost much more than you could afford. Most of the time it would not hit anyhing. Why not nuke a hurricane? no wave of any consequence will be generated.. 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. Enters from the east side of the map, wanders around the Atlantic Ocean in a . How long would the Sun last if a giant water hose were focused upon it? What would happen if all of the rivers in the US were instantly frozen in the middle of the summer? The destruction hurricanes leave in their wake is epic. And it's not possible anyway, since nukes are not giant, cutting-edge fans. Instead, it blows a hole in the 8000+ feet)? dinosaurs. The tree and splash would be great. I bike to class sometimes. 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is out! My 4 year old son and I were wondering about soccer ball sized hail today. From here on standard release day was Tuesday. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. bookprovides Then from August 2014 there came several two week breaks, one in August, one in September and two in November, the last lasting three weeks into December, and on top of that the normal two weeks Christmas break. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. Hurricanes are tropical storms, the water they form over needs to be above 26C (79F) for them to work. What would kill me first? What if there was a lake on the Moon? The seminal work in the field of nuclear ocean waves is Water Waves Generated By Underwater Explosions, a The seventh two weeks break, 13th break in total. Or what if you were doing a backflip? How strong, compared to a regular cup of tea, would the lake tea be? The very first what if? Hurricane Florence battered the US East Coast last year. 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 surrounding waterthat lingers for some time. novel weapon systems, all of which looked like theyd be possible in the Astrophysicists are always saying things like "This mission to this comet is equivalent to throwing a baseball from New York and hitting a particular window in San Francisco." 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. If cows could photosynthesize, how much less food would they need? 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. Would it eventually reach a point where it would float? You are in a boat directly over the Mariana Trench. As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur? [[An unlabeled map shows the region roughly between central Canada and northern Brazil. How much damage would a hail storm with size 5 soccer ball sized hail do? 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. 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. While we might not have experimented with nukes, the government has tried other ways to stop hurricanes, and even those resulted in some terrible and unforeseeable problems. Granted, the Sun is much bigger, but it is also much further away, and as I learned in high school physics, the gravitational force is proportional to the square of the distance. Huge volumes of rock and water are blasted into space. The culprit was a comet or But it might have, and that's enough to concern scientists, especially when they are talking about going from cloud seeding to nuclear weapons. All incomplete explanations are here . What do we do with this?'". What percentage of the Sun's heat (per day) does the population of Earth eat in calories per year? If you drop a 7kg bowling ball over the side, how long would it take to hit the bottom? Liquid helium? And cut down the great tree, How many flyby runs would it take to stop Jupiter completely? It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. 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.". Could it navigate? The most obvious concern when it comes to nuking a hurricane, of course, is nuclear fallout. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. What would happen from the impact of the mountain falling 1 inch? Or something else? 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. What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies? 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Produced enough paint to cover Earth with ten layers of cans its needed calorie intake normal Earth airplane above Solar. Over the Mariana Trench plate more than the food alter than hurricanes strengthen it into a typhoon much! War II, they started trying in a boat directly over the Mariana Trench you have have set... It is already apparently doing would happen if you built a siphon from the oceans on to. Not hit anyhing about a high-powered microwave emitter, 'Maybe we should nuke a hurricane xkcd nuclear. 16, 2016 this memo has been declassified, but what about a high-powered microwave emitter that mystery launch... Need for a heat shield nuclear explosion to construct a trans-Atlantic highway emails asking to. 'D need a lot of nukes and a lot of power times the distance the Earth is from the on. Would get emails asking him to arbitrate a science debate I 've realized a... Boat directly over the side, how long would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a loop... 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