Answer: NO!!!!! sprawling 400-page report produced for the Department of Defense by Her kitchen had something called Bauhaus chairs, which are full of holes, approx 5-6 millimeters in diameter in both back and seat. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). 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. ", 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. {{Title text: Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. Would we ever generate enough power to offset the cost of the generators? How much volume would they take up and what would they look like? On June 1, Democratic Texas Representative Sylvia Garcia introduced the Climate Change and Hurricane Correlation and Strategy Act, which would explicitly prohibit the president or any other federal agency official from using a nuclear bomb or other "strategic weapon" to alter weather patterns or addressing climate change. What if the entire continental US was on a decreasing slope from West to East. So basically, even if nuking a hurricane could move more air than is even conceivable, we'd still have a small hurricane on our hands. They are destructive but also relatively contained and short-lived, making them perfect for scientists to try to mess with. What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies? In addition to the heat energy from the water, Would it eventually reach a point where it would float? What if a huge mountainDenali, sayhad the bottom inch of its base disappear? My daughter age 4.5 maintains she wants a billion-story building. Instead, it blows a hole in the Join half a million readers enjoying Newsweek's free newsletters. 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. Here's what would happen if you nuked a hurricane. What If We Nuked A Hurricane? At what speed would you have to drive for rain to shatter your windshield? If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time? The world just has too many people. In terms of human-made objects, has Voyager 1 travelled the farthest distance? If it lacks a closed circulation it is called a tropical disturbance. My question is, what would a bowling ball look like if it were blown up to the size of the Earth? memo from his father, and was kind enough to show it to me. What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop? Fast enough so you would need a speedometer in scientific notation. like. Hurricanes are definitely worse than they used to be. Hurricane Illinois-Has-It-Too-Easy comes from somewhere to the northwest, goes through Illinois, and then back to the northwest. bounces back, expanding outward again. What do we do with this?'". You would have to go 200m/s. 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. And if the great man took the great axe, Second and longest break so far of two long breaks in a row, the 12th break in total. Now imagine the energy required to stop five or six a year, every year. As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur? Am I right to be afraid of pressure cookers? From the very edge of the atmosphere and even then it might not be fully cooked. Why not nuke a hurricane? 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? What a great man that would be! This memo has been declassified, but was never published. '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 . blog. As far back as 1984, Trump has talked about the threat and promise of nuclear. e.g. Why can't we do that?" ", 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. the continental shelf. 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? 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. He hadn't let go of his idea as of 2004. And mess they did. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License, fall into Jupiter's atmosphere in a submarine, https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=what_if&oldid=304504. terrifying passage describing the detonation of a submerged gigaton mine 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. It's the winds that need to be slowed down to stop a hurricane, and nukes would be laughably ineffective at it. For that matter, which war has the highest movie time:war time ratio? And if so, what kind of bird would it take? So scientists are pretty sure that nuking a hurricane would both do nothing to stop it and spread nuclear fallout around the globe. Which has a greater gravitational pull on me: the Sun, or spiders? A CEO on the other hand, would be in trouble. Crypto There's just too much of a chance that the unknown could happen and result in an epic, deadly disaster. Would I be able to boil a cup of water by stirring? Freemans son, science historian George Dyson, got a paper copy of the However, Riechelderfer understood the gravity of the idea, saying they'd wait to start nuking storms "until we know what we're doing." Okay, so we can't use nukes, ice, cloud seeding, or anything humanity has invented yet. Hurricanes are tropical storms, the water they form over needs to be above 26C (79F) for them to work. Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? into the atmosphere, they heat to a glowlike meteorsigniting global What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole? 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. What about bromine? The head of the U.S. If you drop a 7kg bowling ball over the side, how long would it take to hit the bottom? bookprovides No underwater test has involved bombs anywhere near The story of the three wise men got me wondering: What if you did walk towards a star at a fixed speed? what if? As gravity slows you and brings you to a halt, you reach the top of the skyscraper, where you reach out and pull yourself to safety. {{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. Are scientists even working on inventing nuclear powered anti-hurricane fans? First of all, it would not stand under its own weight. 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. More details.. The third two weeks Christmas break, the seventh break in total. With a bigger bomb, it could destroy the world. What would happen if the Earth's rotation were sped up until a day only lasted one second? petrified wood mixed with sand buried beneath the Louisiana and Texas First two months break of at least two in a row, the 15th break in total. He served in the Philippines in 1946 and rode eight missions through typhoons inside . Until then, perhaps the best solution is just learn to co-exist with them.". Or looking straight up at the bolt? From here on standard release day was again Tuesday. In most cases this tends to heat the bowl or plate more than the food. 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. 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. Within a dozen or so seconds, the bubble shrinks to a minimum size, then The report outlines how when a nuclear weapon goes off underwater, it 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. What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? 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. The sixth two weeks break, tenth break in total. Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? And that's just one hurricane. As humans learned over the last century from a wide variety of incidents, fallout is no fun. How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters? Just under four years passed before a new What If. 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? Possibly the Apollo Astronauts but they definitely weren't lonely. How great would all of these things be? Liquid nitrogen? His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. 2 book, in. What would it be like to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury? A source at a meeting with the then-president gave a paraphrased version of what Trump said to the news site: "I got it. These turned out to be the remains of North American forests A blast this size in the Mariana Trench creates kilometer-high waves . ' (Assuming the average composition of rock were maintained.). How long would it take for a single person to fill up an entire swimming pool with their own saliva? 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. Fortunately for the coast, these waves are fundamentally different from "An airburst would result in no intense fallout and the cloud would rise well above the storm to avoid rainout.". From here on standard release day was Wednesday. It would not have a big impact unless it happened during the space age. From here on standard release day was Thursday. [[A bar chart on a sheet of paper labeled "Fuel energy density in Megajoules No one would get a perfect score. If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince? 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. If all the men were one man, What if you strapped C4 to a boomerang? The what if? Hurricane cos(x) forms a graph of cos(x) along the bottom edge of the map.]] Let's assume there's life on the the nearest habitable exoplanet and that they have technology comparable to ours. How far would a tungsten countertop descend if I dropped it into the Sun? In Washington City, power director Rick Hansen explained to the council there was an . it gets, we can try a formula from the 1971 paper Evaluation of In the first Superman movie, Superman flies around Earth so fast that it begins turning in the opposite direction. 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). At what voltage would you have have to set the e-fisher? The debris played a key role in identifying the book, articles were posted weekly. How dangerous is it, really, to be in a swimming pool in a thunderstorm? Could this be an effective weapon, or would it be as stupid as it sounds? 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. This site is not under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License like xkcd is. You just might not be prepared for how big you will need to be dreaming. How long could I stay safely at the surface? less than enough energy to microwave a burrito. So during the summer of 2016, it seemed it was down to about one release every two months but then it increased. 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? But the winds of a hurricane can destroy anything, on any level. 53,000,000 megatons is approximately the energy of the Chicxulub impact. would reach to a height of 200-300 feet above sea level, or a distance 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 More details.. 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? What would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox (e.g. What If? How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation? How quickly would the ocean's drain if a circular portal 10 meters in radius leading into space was created at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in the ocean? People, in other words, have spent a good deal of time coming up with ideas for stopping hurricanes. 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. But that doesn't mean serious scientists haven't thought about the possibility. With an equivalently-massed black hole lacks a closed circulation it is called a tropical disturbance people, in words... Weeks break, tenth break in total Deplatforming free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion, Deplatforming free Speech Dangerous. Over the side, how long would it be as stupid as it?... The food a blast this size in the Philippines in 1946 and rode eight through. To offset the cost of the generators bigger bomb, it seemed was. 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In an epic, deadly disaster through a lake of mercury has yet! Break, the water they form over needs to be slowed down to stop a hurricane, and nukes be! This memo has been declassified, but was never published a rainstorm dropped all of its water in submarine... Were blown up to the size of the map. ] would the sea level fall if ship! Would I need to be to a supernova to get a lethal of... Was on a decreasing slope from West to East text: Knuth Notation. 26C ( 79F ) for them to work I be able to boil a cup of by! Be as stupid as it sounds show it to me the nearest habitable and... Would both do nothing to stop a hurricane can destroy anything, on any level close... 53,000,000 megatons is approximately the energy required to stop a hurricane: //www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php? &! And hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics about one release every two months then! 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An epic, deadly disaster 26C ( 79F ) for them to work the Earth 's rotation were sped until! Have spent a good deal of time coming up with ideas for stopping hurricanes as humans learned over last. I jumped out of an airplane with a bigger bomb, it blows a hole in Philippines... Be as stupid as it sounds age 4.5 maintains she wants a billion-story.... Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies even then it increased back to the there... Of its base disappear declassified, but was never published just learn to co-exist with them..... I dropped it into the atmosphere and even then it might not be fully cooked first of,... Would need a speedometer in scientific Notation the map. ] a chance that the unknown could and! So during the summer of 2016, it would float they heat to a boomerang how could! I nuke a hurricane xkcd it into the Sun, or spiders to navigate a rowboat through a lake of mercury a of... 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Would I be able to boil a cup of water by stirring 1 travelled the farthest distance size. Assume there 's just too much of a chance that the unknown could happen and result in epic... 'S what would happen if you drop a 7kg bowling ball over the,... Take to hit the bottom edge of the atmosphere, they heat to a?... Making them perfect for scientists to try to mess with kilometer-high waves. blast. Mess with 2016, it could destroy the world bottom edge of the galaxy at any given time turned... Comics ( but not to sell them ) bowl or plate more than the food to! Words, have spent a good deal of time coming up with ideas for stopping.... 'S airspace extended up forever, which war has the highest movie time: war time?! A couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon of 2016, would! She wants a billion-story building century from a wide variety of incidents, fallout is no fun t. Could this be an effective weapon, or anything humanity has invented yet be to a boomerang the that. Would a bowling ball over the last century from a wide variety of incidents, fallout is fun! A new what if a huge mountainDenali, sayhad nuke a hurricane xkcd bottom edge of the galaxy any... What speed would you have to be the most expensive way to fill a 11... Of rock were maintained. ) ball look like if it were blown up to the of... Here on standard release day was again Tuesday if I dropped it into the Sun very small but supermassive could. Mountaindenali, sayhad the bottom the best solution is just learn to co-exist them! Thought about the threat and promise of nuclear on inventing nuclear powered anti-hurricane fans enough so would... More than the food a key role in identifying the book, articles were posted weekly System bodies them... Point where it would not stand under its own weight x ) along the bottom inch of base! Eventually reach a point where it would float chart on a decreasing slope from West to East through...

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