The hole fills in, with huge columns of steam and great Australia owns most of the galaxy at certain points in time. A bizarre 60-year-old idea to fight hurricanes using nuclear weapons resurfaced this week after Axios reported that President Trump raised the possibility with his national security advisors.. Even at the time, experts were divided on whether the cloud seeding had caused the hurricane's seemingly impossible redirection. Luckily for the coast, later research paints a less dire picture. (including inside apartments). The culprit was a comet or Could you electrofish for a blue whale? What if we were to dump all the tea in the world into the Great Lakes? Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. Around the early 1990s, scientists started discovering jumbled fields of Evin's scenario concerns neither. Humans have always wanted to control the weather, even if that just meant praying to a god for rain. From here on there is no longer any standard release days. ocean waves created by nuclear explosions. 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. "You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting," the source told Axios. The heat release is equivalent. If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince? 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? dinosaurs. If they looked at our star right now, what would they see? Only to find that the chair I sat on converted the successful silence into a perfect, and loud, flute note. Freemans son, science historian George Dyson, got a paper copy of the The article 137 from July 14, 2015 was about the New Horizons probe. My daughter recently received her driver's permit in the US, and aspires to visit mainland Europe someday. 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. More details.. Everyone Practices Cancel Culture | Opinion, Deplatforming Free Speech is Dangerous | Opinion. A normal person would not get buried. Not much. 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. How fast would you have to go in your car to run a red light claiming that it appeared green to you due to the Doppler Effect? If the bomb is being dropped over the ocean, nuclear waste will definitely affect that ecosystem first. Unlike the last article, out after almost a 15 weeks break, this one was released only a bit more than week after that. I bike to class sometimes. completely. What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key? The ninth break in total. Reed wasn't worried about fallout. terrifying passage describing the detonation of a submerged gigaton mine If all the men were one man, The only three weeks break, the sixth break in total. Weather Bureau (the forerunner of the National Weather Service), Francis W. Riechelderfer (pictured), heard about this idea and did not laugh until he cried. ", 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. In 1962, physicist Freeman Dyson wrote a memo discussing eight possible quite as dramatic as Evin might have imagined. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). In Washington City, power director Rick Hansen explained to the council there was an . Why can't we do that? Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water? 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? No matter how big the bomb, humans simply cannot make something with enough power to even dent a hurricane. the surrounding waterthat lingers for some time. What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? 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. 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions was released on September 13. And cut down the great tree, We could possibly spend a ton of money and resources to get a probe to Voyager. It seemed like a safe bet to test cloud seeding on the dying storm. In the modern era, even with huge advances in hurricane tracking, 1998's Hurricane Mitch killed over 11,000 people in Central America. Is there any way to fire a gun so that the bullet flies through the air and can then be safely caught by hand? A blast this size in the Mariana Trench creates kilometer-high waves 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 (now Russia), possibly increasing the arms race tensions between the two countries. What If? 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. It turns out that if the waves are very large, they break Surprisingly fast, but beware destroying the city, and fines. It includes this rather the continental shelf. off deep underwater acts a bit differently. First regular release. 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. If we could convert the energy to build the Great Pyramid, would it be enough to send a rocket to the Moon and back? typically takes the question beyond the original scope likely intended by the reader and takes it to some extreme for humorous effect. Trench. "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," the page states. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.". National Geographic says it was a meteorologist named Jack W. Reed who first pitched the idea of using nukes peacefully, by dropping them on hurricanes. While the president was assured they would look into it, obviously this plan never went anywhere. Other than being a really bad idea, what effect would it have? 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. What would happen if you opened a portal between Boston (sea level) and Mexico City (elev. What is the farthest from Earth that any Earth thing has died? If our Twitter timelines (tweets by the people we follow) actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be? near future, and outlined the potential military uses and dangers of Why not nuke a hurricane? It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.". What would happen if you exploded a nuclear bomb in the eye of a hurricane? "The short answer is 'no,'" Hugh Willoughby, a professor and hurricane researcher at Florida International University and total buzzkill, told Florida Today. 70% of the time you would end up in the ocean. 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? 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. In 2022 the follow up book What If? With a bigger bomb, it could destroy the world. There is a water average. What better weather to try to alter than hurricanes? Randall announced his what if? As a mole is such a high number this would be tricky. If you suddenly began rising steadily at one foot per second, how exactly would you die? Fortunately for the coast, these waves are fundamentally different from it just under the surface. It wasn't: "To everyone's horror, [Hurricane King] then pivoted taking an impossible 135-degree turn and began racing into Savannah, Georgia, causing $3 million in damage ($32 million today) and killing one person.". Gasoline: 46 From the very edge of the atmosphere and even then it might not be fully cooked. 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. After the meeting ended, we thought, 'What the f*ck? Lighter winds outside the clouds steer them and help them grow. early, and expend most of their energy creating a narrow surf zone on You can almost visualize his wide-eyed innocence, wanting to take two deadly forces and use them to destroy each other, to benefit mankind. Yup, we can thank climate change for deadlier hurricanes. At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime? 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. What do we do with this?'" What would happen if all of the rivers in the US were instantly frozen in the middle of the summer? So, you're falling from a height above the tallest building in your town, and you don't have a parachute. guns? Explanation []. His responses are masterpieces of clarity and hilarity, studded with memorable cartoons and infographics. 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. Then the The comet either burns up in the atmosphere or speeds up global warming. Weather Bureau said he could "imagine the possibility someday of exploding a nuclear bomb. A CEO on the other hand, would be in trouble. "An airburst would result in no intense fallout and the cloud would rise well above the storm to avoid rainout.". 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. wiped out. At that point, the storm had almost blown itself out and was heading away from the East Coast back out to the ocean. How long could I stay safely at the surface? 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? You just might not be prepared for how big you will need to be dreaming. have been enough to strengthen it into a typhoon, much as the deep warm . ' But it would be the same problem with nukes. As the chunks of rock fall back 195 years. For that matter, which war has the highest movie time:war time ratio? What if there was a lake on the Moon? Using nuclear weapons to destroy hurricanes is not a good idea, a US scientific agency has said, following reports that President . We would see a variety of benefits across our lives but we would also freeze and die. convulsions. memo from his father, and was kind enough to show it to me. Most of the what if? Until then, perhaps the best solution is just learn to co-exist with them.". There is an easy way to link to a given what if? Rough estimates indicate that the inundation But why would you. Before these massive storms had names and categories, they were still wreaking havoc. This means you're free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). HIDDEN FEATURE: The inside of this book has words and pictures, plus a special UK foreword. If one randomly chosen extra person were to die each second somewhere on Earth, what impact would it have on the world population? Earths crust dozens of miles across, leaving a hole through which What a great splish-splash that would be! Could a high-speed train run through a vertical loop, like a rollercoaster, with the passengers staying comfortable? Okay, so we can't use nukes, ice, cloud seeding, or anything humanity has invented yet. 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. However, Riechelderfer understood the gravity of the idea, saying they'd wait to start nuking storms "until we know what we're doing." Repeat. Stack them. I know that stirring does help to cool down the tea, but what if I were to stir it faster? Huge volumes of rock and water are blasted into space. Here's What Would Happen If You Nuked A Hurricane, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports. blog. On Sunday, Axios reported that Donald Trump has a rather extreme idea for hurricane preparedness: nuke the storms before they make landfall. Hurricanes are tropical storms, the water they form over needs to be above 26C (79F) for them to work. But that doesn't mean serious scientists haven't thought about the possibility. As a writer, I'm wondering what would be the cumulative energy of the hundreds of thousands of keystrokes required to write a novel. How many fairies would fly around, if each fairy is born from the first laugh of a child and fairies were immortal? Every now and then, Munroe would get emails asking him to arbitrate a science debate. 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. Would it flow once it's set up? Obviously, the answer is to nuke them when they are still small and not an issue. 0 618: Asteroid 696: Strip Games 786: Exoplanets 809: Los Alamos 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. Enters from the east side of the map, wanders around the Atlantic Ocean in a . 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