(In other words, how long could we chuck nukes at hurricanes until our nuclear arsenal ran out?). During a segment on climate change in the first presidential debate, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that Republican President Donald Trump's plan for managing hurricanes once included dropping a nuclear weapon in one. Before publishing the first what if? 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? novel weapon systems, all of which looked like theyd be possible in the After the meeting ended, we thought, 'What the f*ck? is a blog hosted on the xkcd.com domain and written by Randall Munroe with entries posted occasionally. What better weather to try to alter than hurricanes? (We have an idea for selling bottled Europa water.). Any time I attempt to heat left over Chinese food in a microwave, it fails to heat completely through somewhere. What if you were flashing your BIOS during a thunderstorm and you got hit by lightning? The release date in the archive is the wrong month June. After World War II, they started trying in a big way. 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? The report also claimed that Trump had raised the possibility of bombing hurricanes with another senior administration official, as detailed in a 2017 NSC memo. Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea On October 11, 1961, the head of the U.S. the coast, the waves would be no worse than those from a bad storm. Or what if you were doing a backflip? If you call a random phone number and say God bless you, what are the chances that the person who answers just sneezed? Is it possible for a spacecraft to control its reentry in such a way that it avoids the atmospheric compression and thus would not require the expensive (and relatively fragile) heat shield on the outside? If you have a good arm, you could probably throw this book about 45 feet. It answers many important questions, including whether you could jump from a plane with a helium tank and inflate balloons fast enough to slow your fall and survive (yes) and whether you could hide from a supersonic windstorm in Finland (yes, but it won't help). Explanation []. The flooding they cause is also terrible and deadly, but at least the law of gravitation means that the water stays by the ground. The heat release is equivalent. It's very unpromising. And the best part is, it's all humanity's fault. 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? The culprit was a comet or Liquid tungsten? This has become known as the Countdown in header text, see all details on that page. 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. James P. Kossin, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was part of the study, says flat out, "We're making these storms more deleterious." the only thing to do would be to make a swimming pool. 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. book on 12 March 2014 in the blag. She has learned enough about the rules of the road to know never to drive into the ocean; however, she jokingly suggested that given a sufficient quantity of rental cars, she could eventually get to Europe by driving east repeatedly. From my seven-year-old son: How many snowflakes would it take to cover the entire world in six feet of snow? expand into a bubble 70 miles across. Humans have done supposedly impossible things before. What took more energy, the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Apollo Mission? 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. The column of deep, hot water from our nuke could conceivably The website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. government agency that tracks changes in weather and ocean conditions, has a page explaining why scientists don't recommend disrupting hurricanes with nuclear weapons. What if you tried to stop rain with a laser that targeted and vaporized each incoming droplet before it could come within ten feet of the ground? Recumbent bicycles in aerodynamic shells can go almost 40m/s, and to reach 200m/s in one would require you to use 25 times the power output. A normal person would not get buried. That's. 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. This warm water creates humid air, which then gets thrust upwards by tropical winds to create storm clouds. Most of the tests, however, involved either small bombs or shallow The seminal work in the field of nuclear ocean waves is Water Waves Generated By Underwater Explosions, a Should the person survive, what would be the number of bouncy balls needed to kill them? 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. You just might not be prepared for how big you will need to be dreaming. {{Title text: I'd like to see more damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York and flooding Manhattan -- something like the 1938 Long Island Express, but aimed a bit more to the west. "As far as I know, there's no serious scientist doing this at all. briefly glows the magma of the mantle. If you drop a 7kg bowling ball over the side, how long would it take to hit the bottom? What would happen if you opened a portal between Boston (sea level) and Mexico City (elev. Answer: A literal Death Star. effects has not been made. Fortunately for the coast, these waves are fundamentally different from The reason for this you can read at the Editor FAQ . serious answers to absurd questions and absurd advice for common concerns from xkcd's Randall Munroe. firestorms. 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. Regardless of the context, Randall tends to take the questions extremely literally and responds seriously to them, even if they are whimsical (such as the Yoda question). If our Twitter timelines (tweets by the people we follow) actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be? 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? GameStop Moderna Pfizer Johnson & Johnson AstraZeneca Walgreens Best Buy Novavax SpaceX Tesla. The nuclear explosion at the Marshall Islands-which irradiated . And would it even work? I use one of those old phones where you type with numbersfor example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. Hurricanes are tropical storms, the water they form over needs to be above 26C (79F) for them to work. What if the entire continental US was on a decreasing slope from West to East. What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key? In the absence of an It hasn't set and it won't for thousands of years. With close to 15 weeks this was the second longest break between articles so far. August 26, 2019. 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). 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. But after defeating the Nazis and inventing the atom bomb, scientists seemed to think anything was possible, including controlling the weather. 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? The bubble grows to about a kilometer across in a couple of seconds. 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 a great man that would be! 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. That's more than 666 times bigger than the "Little Boy" bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. detonated, and at 11 kilometers, the Mariana(s) Trench is the deepest "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,"NOAA's hurricane page states. All incomplete explanations are here . What a great axe that would be! Instead,according to Popular Mechanics, he said he could "imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb on a hurricane far at sea." What if you shined a flashlight (or a laser) into a sphere made of one-way mirror glass? [[An unlabeled map shows the region roughly between central Canada and northern Brazil. Not in a "scatter my ashes" sense, but, like, "throw my naked corpse out the airlock" sense. Usually the center but not always and usually rice, but often it will be a small section of meat. 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. 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? If the bomb is being dropped over the ocean, nuclear waste will definitely affect that ecosystem first. 65-million-year-old Chicxulub impact sitethis What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? What about using a squirrel suit? When, if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles of dead people than of living ones? 6, but they would cost much more than you could afford. What about 1 foot? Better to just carry a sign. Bernard Le Mehaute and Shen Wang. If a meteor made out of diamond and 100 feet in diameter was traveling at the speed of light and hit the earth, what would happen to it? It turns out that if the waves are very large, they break 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. Would I be able to boil a cup of water by stirring? What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? Evins scenario concerns neither. How many fireflies would it take to match the brightness of the Sun? Could we speed up Earths rotation, so that we do not need Leap Seconds? Just more FAKE NEWS!". The article 137 from July 14, 2015 was about the New Horizons probe. petrified wood mixed with sand buried beneath the Louisiana and Texas Or something else? And it's not possible anyway, since nukes are not giant, cutting-edge fans. Evin isnt the first person to think of setting off nuclear weapons 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. But scientists know they don't know everything and that is even scarier. Dispatches from a horrifying alternate universe. I saw a sign at a hot springs tub saying "Caution: Water is hotter than average" with water at about 39C. it would split into many islands and the Netherlands will take over. Assuming you had a good coat, you would survive to the death zone and die. What do we do with this?'" 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. With a bigger bomb, it could destroy the world. Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing? Luckily for the coast, later research paints a less dire picture. Trump allegedly continued, "asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle." What a great sea that would be! As the chunks of rock fall back When (if ever) did the Sun finally set on the British Empire? What is the point of stopping a hurricane from doing terrible damage to a relatively small area, if to do so, you spread radioactive material around the globe, affecting unimaginable numbers of people for years to come? Or looking straight up at the bolt? Humanity would survive if the robots cared about keeping themselves alive as well. 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? This is clear from his response to the question of what would happen if everybody on Earth stood together and jumped at the same time. 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? Never use the Math markup language at the transcript. Randall announced his what if? How many molecules of the ink would be used? From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground? 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? And that's just one hurricane. "People were astonished. "Look how much we're paying now to deal with the hurricanes," Biden said. has not stopped but the first comic in 2017 (#153, January 30, 2017) came almost 15 weeks after the last in 2016, more than three months between releases. Various Theoretical Models For Underwater This site is not under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License like xkcd is. Order here! What a great splish-splash that would be! Not with regular lasers, but with more power, you could destroy the world. completely. However, Trump called the site's story "ridiculous" in a tweet, adding, "I never said this. 2 came out. What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. ", "I never said that," Trump retorted. It now has 600,000 to a million page hits daily. For a more brief and arrangeable list, see. But come on. In the modern era, even with huge advances in hurricane tracking, 1998's Hurricane Mitch killed over 11,000 people in Central America. What If We Nuked A Hurricane? 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? Hurricanes are definitely worse than they used to be. convulsions. No, but it does make some really cool patterns. If they looked at our star right now, what would they see? The release date in the archive is the wrong year 2014. 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. The very first what if? I jokingly sent him a photo of a parrot holding a pizza slice in its beak. Liquid nitrogen? If all the trees were one tree, But why would you. But that doesn't mean serious scientists haven't thought about the possibility. The second of two longer shifts in release day two weeks in a row which resulted in only two releases over three weeks, resulting in the eight break in total. Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. 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. Within a dozen or so seconds, the bubble shrinks to a minimum size, then What is the farthest from Earth that any Earth thing has died? 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? 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. Category:Hurricanes - explain xkcd. tsunamis. "You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting," the source told Axios. 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. The destruction hurricanes leave in their wake is epic. If so, how many golf balls would be required to reach the Moon? Lighter winds outside the clouds steer them and help them grow. Business, Economics, and Finance. Also, the Earth would be destroyed. turbulent warm water and explosion debris. According to the report, as 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? 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. Living ones City ( elev nuke a hurricane xkcd fall back when ( if ever, will Facebook contain more profiles dead. 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