Awesome What If

At some point in the distant future, the Sun will exhaust its nuclear energy and gobble up planets as it turns into a red giant. But what might happen if the Sun just flicked off like a switch? xkcd’s What If? shines a light on this frequently-asked question, and offers nine surprising upsides (and one major downside) of living in the darkness on Earth.

A follower of xkcd’s What If? asked the hypothetical question “What would the world be like if the land masses were spread out the same way as now, but rotated by 90 degrees?” Without changing the Earth’s axis relative to the Sun, it would dramatically impact the climate and ecosystems in most places on the planet. Antarctica gets the biggest upgrade.

The idea that anyone could build a tower that’s 10 billion feet tall is preposterous. xkcd’s What If? explores some of the many challenges of building a skyscraper that reached a million miles past the moon. The odds of such a mega-mega-mega skyscraper standing are virtually nil between the cost, physical forces, and collisions with random space junk.

xkcd’s What If? Answers the question of what it might be like if astronauts installed a swimming pool on the Moon. Our first thought was that the low gravity would make the water float away, but it turns out that you could swim in it just like on Earth, but with a few awesome bonus features. Time to get to work on this, SpaceX.

The latest episode of xkcd’s What If starts with the titular question. However, they arrive quickly at the conclusion. So they ask a new question: What if we tried more power? And ask it again. And again. And again. We like to imagine a kid submitted the question and is now watching the video with the weight of 8 billion souls on their tiny back.

We think Earth is just the right size. It’s big enough to hold billions of people and other creatures, and if you’re dedicated enough, you can visit most of it in a lifetime. But what if we lived on a bigger planet? What If created an animated visualization that shows how big other planets are by stuffing them full of Earth-sized planets.

The “glass half-full/half-empty” idiom offers a simplistic way of comparing pessimistic and optimistic thoughts. xkcd’s What If? explores the physics at work if a glass was literally half-empty and that space was filled with a vacuum. The outcome would be quite different depending on which half was liquid and which half was the vacuum.

We all know that the Sun is a terribly hot place. But would you burn to a crisp if you somehow landed on its surface for a nanosecond and then instantly came back to Earth? xkcd’s What If? explores another viewer-submitted hypothetical situation and explains how things would turn out much worse if you transported yourself to the Sun’s core.

We all know that our home planet is shaped like a sphere. What If pokes fun at flat earthers, imagining what Earth would be like if it was not only flat, it was shaped like a slice of pizza. Even if it was physically possible for such a planet to exist, it sounds like a terrible place to live, especially near the crust.

Scientists recently discovered what appears to be water deep in the outer crust of Mars. xkcd’s What If? imagines what might happen if we gave the red planet a leg up in the moisture department and dumped all of Earth’s water on its surface. While most of it would probably freeze, there’s a chance it could cause temperatures to rise and stay liquid.

Wikipedia is the world’s largest repository of human knowledge. For fun, xckd’s What If? calculated how many printers you’d need to keep up with the edits being made every day – just to the English site. This Wikipedia page shows how many books you’d need to hold only English articles without images. Now, multiply by 10 to get the global numbers.

xkcd’s What If? answers another wild hypothetical question – basically, what might happen if you put a portal at the bottom of the deepest point in the ocean and let the water run down the drain? Because of the physics at play, it might take a long time before anyone noticed, but eventually you could ride your bike from the U.S. to New Zealand.

It’s not something anyone wants to think about, but someday humans may go extinct. xkcd’s What If? contemplates how long it would take before the last artificial source of light went out if no humans were around to tend to electrical systems or replace light bulbs. While some power sources would stop quickly, others could keep running for years.

Imagine, if you will, that Mother Nature focused her energy on a single location and hit it with all of her electrical fury. xkcd’s What If? takes on another hypothetical question, exploring what might happen if every lightning bolt struck a single spot on Earth and whether we could harvest the power from the mega-storm.

Randall Munroe and Henry Reich’s What If? attempts to answer the hypothetical question of what might happen if every living human stood close together, jumped off of the ground, and landed at the same exact time. While the answer to that question is less exciting than you might think, there would be plenty of unintended consequences of such an event.

xckd takes on another ridiculous hypothetical question: “What if you swam in a nuclear storage pool?” While it probably won’t kill you the second you dive into a tank filled with spent nuclear fuel rods, it’s not something we would recommend. Also, we can’t believe somebody actually has that as a job.