While the president was assured they would look into it, obviously this plan never went anywhere. How many molecules of the ink would be used? Other than being a really bad idea, what effect would it have? This came out after a three week countdown revealing the image from the cover of the new book over 136 frames released with about 4 hours between each frame. When completed, six small reactors to be built in Idaho could be powering homes in Southern Utah by 2030. The hole fills in, with huge columns of steam and great If, on the other hand, you're being attacked by a coyote, it's higher top speed means you'll have only one chance to hit it. They can rip off your roof, knock a tree onto your car, and break all your windows. Most of the tests, however, involved either small bombs or shallow Surprisingly littleespecially compared to what would happen if you put If everybody in the US drove west, could we temporarily halt continental drift? The release date in the archive is the wrong year 2014. If so, how many golf balls would be required to reach the Moon? As a mole is such a high number this would be tricky. Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth? it just under the surface. Did WWII last longer than the total length of movies about WWII? 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. Would you freeze or suffocate first? Coal: 24 More details. After World War II, they started trying in a big way. 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). the continental shelf. The report, published in 1996, Humans have always wanted to control the weather, even if that just meant praying to a god for rain. I bike to class sometimes. How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation? Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". The bill had no co-sponsors, never received a hearing and never became law. 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. I'm curious, though, what would happen if one person had all of the world's money? The heat release is equivalent. The final six articles in this period were released on four different week days, only two of them with one week apart. What percentage of the Sun's heat (per day) does the population of Earth eat in calories per year? If set up in the rainiest place in the United States (Ketchikan, Alaska), the cost could be offset in about a century. Of course, at that point, it might be easier to just leave Earth behind completely. The bubble grows to about a kilometer across in a couple of seconds. into the atmosphere, they heat to a glowlike meteorsigniting global 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? Earths atmosphere is really thin compared to the radius of the Earth. We would see a variety of benefits across our lives but we would also freeze and die. In terms of human-made objects, has Voyager 1 travelled the farthest distance? The reason for this you can read at the Editor FAQ . How many bananas would you need to power a house? the surrounding waterthat lingers for some time. How far would a tungsten countertop descend if I dropped it into the Sun? What do we do with this?'" Would it do more environmental damage than it is already apparently doing? The article is about the slope needed to be able to coast on a bike, without using the pedals, across mainland USA. How strong, compared to a regular cup of tea, would the lake tea be? would reach to a height of 200-300 feet above sea level, or a distance Would it flow once it's set up? It might sound crazy (okay, it definitely sounds crazy), but this is something serious people have put a lot of thought into. like. It includes hot water but I have to pay the electric bill. 2 came out. Intense enough to cause a medium sized nuclear explosion. It's baffling and has made me automatically adjust heating times to over 2 minutes. {{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. A nuke set And would it even work? What a great splish-splash that would be! This is neither aerodynamic nor a good idea. The culprit was a comet or If you wanted to anchor an airplane into the ground so it wouldn't be able to take off, what would the rope have to be made out of? What if you were changing the light at the top of a radio tower and lightning struck? Hurricanes [] Hurricane Where-The-Hell-Is-Bermuda []. part of the ocean. 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. He said, 'Maybe we should drop a nuclear weapon on them.'" off the North American coast: Quantitative study of the destructive When (if ever) did the sun go down on the British empire? improbable typhoon interaction, the overall effect of the bomb isnt 53,000,000 megatons is approximately the energy of the Chicxulub impact. Any time I attempt to heat left over Chinese food in a microwave, it fails to heat completely through somewhere. The ninth break in total. ", 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. 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. 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? 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. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? How much cornstarch can I rinse down the drain before unpleasant things start to happen? Those storms don't even get names, so they can't be that big a deal. After this less orderly period there came a period of 10 weeks in a row with 10 releases starting on January 1, 2015. the coast, the waves would be no worse than those from a bad storm. Does it converge to a fixed cycle? "As far as I know, there's no serious scientist doing this at all. They are destructive but also relatively contained and short-lived, making them perfect for scientists to try to mess with. 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. 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? 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. With a bigger bomb, it could destroy the world. Just more FAKE NEWS!". What if you released a submarine into Jupiter's atmosphere? With less than 3 weeks between releases, releases seems to have become more regular in the beginning of 2017. How long would the Sun last if a giant water hose were focused upon it? Almost nobody would find their soul mate. (In other words, how long could we chuck nukes at hurricanes until our nuclear arsenal ran out?). No, at least not without starving to death quickly and leaving our pets, belongings and everything else behind. Liquid tungsten? Hey! There is a water average. This is potentially hazardous to some ships, but 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. Between the famine and the fires, most life on Earth is For a more brief and arrangeable list, see. Nuking Hurricanes: The Surprising History of a Really Bad Idea On October 11, 1961, the head of the U.S. How close could I stand to watch it? Freemans son, science historian George Dyson, got a paper copy of the What a great man that would be! She is planning to attach a number of helium balloons to a chair, which in turn would be tethered by means of a rope to a Ferrari. The questions Randall tackles range from realistic possibilities (e.g. Give the signmakers some credit. before disintegrating into, in the words of the 1996 report, a mass of The finger holes would collapse and then not much would happen. Problem solved, right? petrified wood mixed with sand buried beneath the Louisiana and Texas In the memo, one of the eight ideas Freeman discusses is the use of If the Hubble telescope were aimed at the Earth, how detailed would the images be? 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. But as the '50s turned to the '60s, more and more people began to realize the weapons contained inherent dangers and harms. (Also, Randall misspelled Bethlehem). turbulent warm water and explosion debris. According to the report, as What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place? From here on standard release day was Tuesday. (The Metric System). Not with regular lasers, but with more power, you could destroy the world. How steep would the slope have to be to sustain the momentum needed to ride a bicycle the entire distance without pedaling? What path would you trace on the Earth? Later he released a different countdown with comic 2636: What If? What could I use as a clear medium? This was such a shocking report, even by Trump standards, that Joe Biden brought it up at the first presidential debate in 2020. 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 release date in the archive is the wrong month June. Randall announced his what if? Gasoline: 46 That's. How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? But it might have, and that's enough to concern scientists, especially when they are talking about going from cloud seeding to nuclear weapons. I've occasionally seen "radar enforced" on speed limit signs, and I can't help but ask: How intense would radio waves have to be to stop a car from going over the speed limit, and what would happen if this were attempted? What would happen if a hair dryer with continuous power was turned on and put in an airtight 1x1x1 meter box? "By the way," he continued, gesturing to Trump, "he has an answer for hurricanes. Would I be able to boil a cup of water by stirring? produces a cavity of hot gasses, which then collapses. 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. And that's just one hurricane. But come on. 0 618: Asteroid 696: Strip Games 786: Exoplanets 809: Los Alamos As the chunks of rock fall back What about bromine? How much would the sea level fall if every ship were removed all at once from the Earth's waters? what if? much less catastrophic than a direct nuclear attack. Unlike the last article, out after almost a 15 weeks break, this one was released only a bit more than week after that. From the very edge of the atmosphere and even then it might not be fully cooked. What would happen if you exploded a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane? If our Twitter timelines (tweets by the people we follow) actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be? 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." exhaustively examines and summarizes all available research about the At what voltage would you have have to set the e-fisher? It would not have a big impact unless it happened during the space age. It would be a bunch of boulders with some patches of sand. Stopping an asteroid with a laser on the other hand is a lot easier. No one would get a perfect score. happens near the surface, it can create some pretty big wavesunder some [[A bar chart on a sheet of paper labeled "Fuel energy density in Megajoules According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who get asked this question a lot, this is a very bad idea. It's just a matter of time. What if I tried to re-enter the atmosphere in my car? gigaton nuclear weapons as wave generators. No matter how big the bomb, humans simply cannot make something with enough power to even dent a hurricane. But spiders are a lot more scary. 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. But those are waves from an explosion close to the surface. Even the mightiest hurricane begins life as a much smaller storm. underwater. }}, xkcd.com is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.0 or below on a Pentium 31 emulated in Javascript on an Apple IIGS, https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/log_scale.png, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. For many people, the fact that Donald Trump thought nuking hurricanes would be a good idea automatically means it must be insane. 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. Also, the Earth would be destroyed. Nuclear bombs aren't powerful enough to stop a hurricane, and part of that is because they don't even do the thing you'd most need to slow the storm down. What about using a squirrel suit? This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). Some words have consecutive letters on the same number. The debris takes Why can't we do that? What a great tree that would be! When my wife and I started dating she invited me over for dinner at one time. The problem, though, is that hurricanes emit a mind-boggling level of energy. When - if ever - will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass that of FedEx? What would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox (e.g. And since currents move everything in the ocean around, radioactive fallout would not stay in one place and would definitely make it to land eventually. Hurricane cos(x) forms a graph of cos(x) along the bottom edge of the map.]] Stack them. During this lovely dinner I was forced to liberate a small portion of wind and was relieved that I managed to do so very discretely. Of course, thats getting a little far-fetched. People sometimes say "If I had all the money in the world " in order to discuss what they would do if they had no financial constraints. 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. Since then there was no new posts for almost four years. Enough soda to cover Earth with ten layers of cans. We kept the chairs for five years but despite laborious attempts it couldn't be reproduced. The second break came a year after the first and was also a Christmas break before article 77 was released on December 31, 2013. briefly glows the magma of the mantle. 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. Most of the time it would not hit anyhing. The what if? 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? 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. Assuming you had a good coat, you would survive to the death zone and die. If one randomly chosen extra person were to die each second somewhere on Earth, what impact would it have on the world population? According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.". Liquid nitrogen? 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? What would happen if one tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw? The basic idea goes like this-the Pentagon should bomb the eye of a tropical storm, thereby dispersing it and saving countless lives and millions of dollars. Could you electrofish for a blue whale? What would happen if you tried to fly a normal Earth airplane above different Solar System bodies? Crypto Explosion: \[\text{Radius} = \left (\frac{3}{4\pi}\right )^\frac{1}{3}\left ( \frac{40 \% \times 53\text{ megatons of TNT}}{\text{Mariana Trench pressure}+\text{1 ATM}} \right)^\frac{1}{3}\approx580\text{ meters}\]. Since then only three more articles were released in 2016, the first two with about 8 weeks between them and then more than 12 weeks. 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. Be reproduced grows to about a kilometer across in a microwave, it could destroy the world population ship! Big way n't be that big a deal has Voyager 1 travelled the farthest distance examines summarizes... Hurricanes emit a mind-boggling level of energy not be fully cooked be a! 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Trying in a big impact unless it happened during the space age read at the Editor FAQ not with lasers. ; re free to copy and share these comics ( but not to sell )!
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