How To summary

Having successfully crash-landed an airplane, you’ll probably want to celebrate and relax. What better way to do that than a pool party? But first, you need a pool. 

Fortunately, building an in-ground pool is pretty simple. Just dig a big hole in the ground and line it with plastic to make sure your pool doesn’t turn into a muddy pond. Then, all you have to do is fill it with water. If you want it to be big enough to accommodate a diving board, you’ll need about 20,000 gallons of water.

Now that you know how to fill your in-ground swimming pool with 150,000 bottles of Fiji water, all you need to do is start digging a hole. That brings us to our next question. How do you dig a big enough hole? 

Well, the simplest way is with a shovel. Depending on the type of ground you’re trying to excavate, you’ll be able to remove about 0.3 to 1 cubic meters of dirt per hour with this classic digging implement. After 12 hours of backbreaking labor, you’ll probably have dug a hole that’s deep enough for you to stand up to shoulder height, and wide enough for you to lie down in. 

With all of your newfound pirate treasure, you’ll probably want to upgrade your lifestyle. But that’s going to make your home a target for burglars. Just to be safe, you might want to dig a moat. Better yet, how about a lava moat?

You already know how to dig, so let’s focus on making lava. All you need are some rocks and heat. Depending on the rocks you use, you’ll need to warm them up to at least 800 degrees celsius to get them to melt. And if you want your lava to glow bright orange during the daytime, you’ll have to crank up the temperature to 1,000 degrees. Let’s split the difference and aim for a modest 900 degrees. 

Sure, you could just sit back and relax in your Fiji water-filled swimming pool, enjoying a lavish, pirate treasure-funded lifestyle in the safety of your lava moat. But if you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably an adventurous type who wants to see new places and do new things.

That brings us to our next task – living off the grid on Mars. 

At this point, you might be feeling ready for a real adventure – so why not aim for the stars? To reach them in a reasonable amount of time, you’ll want to travel faster than the speed of light. Now, strictly speaking, that’s impossible, but there’s a clever little hack by which you can achieve a similar effect. 

To begin with, you need to build a spaceship that can continually accelerate at 1g. That means it gains speed at the same rate as objects are accelerated downward by Earth’s gravity – approximately 9.8 meters per second. Real-life rockets and roller coasters can accelerate this quickly, so it’s definitely doable. Faster accelerations are possible, but they’re very uncomfortable because the human body can’t handle them. So, for practical purposes, 1g is the limit at which we can accelerate for prolonged periods.

After traveling 10 trillion years into the future in just 30 years of subjective time, you might be wondering, “How old does that make me?” That brings us to our next, more down to earth question. How can you find out someone’s age? 

Yes, you could just ask them, but there are other, more creative methods you can use. As history unfolds, the world around us is constantly changing. Some of those changes leave lasting marks on our bodies. If you know what to look for, you can use those marks to determine when people were born. 

Having done everything from crash-landing an airplane to (sort of) breaking the speed of light barrier, you’re probably pretty famous by now. Perhaps it's time to consider a career in politics. That brings us to our final question. How do you win an election? 

You could do it the way you’re “supposed” to, by persuading voters to support you as a candidate. But that usually requires having a likable personality, a compelling vision of the future, a sharp set of political skills and a willingness to do the hard work of campaigning.