5 Scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions in what if by randall munroe
Reading What If? by the creator of the popular comic strip xkcd, Randall Munroe, has been a pleasure. I recommended everyone to read the book. If however, you are like me and likely to forget, then you can benefit from this gist of main ideas therein. The best way to review the list here is to first collapse all the items, read the question, and attempt to answer it yourself. Then look at the answer summary. If you need further details about any of the answers, better refer the wondeful book.
1 Earth stops spinning, but the atmosphere does not
1000 miles per hour winds, and blistering heat resulting from the immense friction on the surfrace. All living beings, except those living on the south pole, die instantly. All man-made structures destroyed. Ocean temperatures rise and oxygen depletion wreaks havoc on marine life. Moon, which has been gradually drifting apart, starts getting pulled back towards the Earth, causes tides, and in turn sets the Earth rotating again.
2 Baseball is pitched at 90 percent the speed of light
The collision of relatively stationary air molecules with a ball travelling at 600 million miles per hour leads to fusion of air molecules, mainly nitrogen and oxygen, with those in the ball, mainly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. This results in gamma ray bursts and fragmentation of the ball into fast moving bits that cause further rounds of fusion. This culminates in a superhot plasma cloud that immediately surrounds the pitcher, hits the batter with massive force, and blows apart the stadium and the neighborhood within a microsecond. A distant spectator will see a massive mushroom cloud with a glow that lasts a few seconds.
3 Swimming in a pool of spent nuclear fuel
Water blocks radiation. The amount of radiation is halved every 7 centimeters in water. A few feet away from the radiation source, you should be safer than you are outside the pool, where you are constanly bombarded with background radiation! Beware of coming in contact with any exposed materials though as that would be instantly fatal.
4 If everyone had one soul mate
If discovering your soul mate required a few seconds of eye contact with someone, it would be nearly impossible to discover one in your lifetime, given the population, demographics, and daily routines. Even if rich people could afford the time and resources to somehow speed up the process of discovering people, it would still leave a vast majority, more than 99.99 percent of people without ever finding a soul mate.
5 Possibility of lighting up the moon from the earth
If each person on Earth pointed a pocket laser (or even an expensive 1-watt laser) to approximately the same region on the Moon's surface, they would not see any effect. NightSuns, those big powerful lights on police helicopters or even IMAX projector arrays would have a negligible effect. If every person on Earth instead each held the most powerful spotlight on Earth, the one of Hotel Luxor in Las Vegas, we would still see just a faint outline. Megawatt lasers, like those deployed on Boeing YAL-1 for destroying incoming missles, 7 billion of those, would finally match the light intensity of the Sun on the Moon, at the expense of exhausting all of Earth's oil reserves within 2 minutes. Unfortunately, this will not end well for the Earth. Atmosphere will be turned to plasma or even push the Moon out of orbit, gradually.
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