What If? 2 summary

If every country’s territory extended infinitely upward, then Australia would be known not just as the land of kangaroos and the Hemsworth brothers but as the controller of the galaxy. How does this work?

Well, the Earth rotates, meaning that galactic airspace would actually change hands from country to country over the course of every 24 hours. But countries in the Southern Hemisphere, like Australia, have an unfair advantage here. The North Pole points away from the center of the Milky Way, leaving the southern hemisphere advantageously angled toward the galaxy’s core. The galaxy’s core – which by the way is a supermassive black hole – would rotate through the airspace of Australia, South Africa, Lesotho, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. When the galaxy’s core was centered in Australian airspace, it would be able to lay claim to more galactic territory than any other country.

First things first – we all know how the expression goes. Rome was categorically not built in a day. But could it have been?

Well, the question assumes that simply putting more people on the job would speed up its completion. That’s almost definitely not the case as anyone who’s ever tried to plan a get-together of three-plus people can tell you; more people can mean more problems. And in the case of building Rome in one day, those problems include but aren’t limited to training and organizing a massive number of people to do specialized construction work all while avoiding bottlenecks as enormous crowds of laborers move around the relatively small city and coordinating supply chains to deliver huge loads of building materials when and where they’re needed.

The answer to that question depends on whether or not you brought a nice thick sweater and a torch with long-life batteries down to the bottom of the ocean with you. If your totally indestructible glass tube stretched from above the surface of the sea right down to the deepest depths of the Mariana trench, you’d be three times deeper below sea level than the world’s deepest mines. In a mine, the deeper you go, the hotter you become. That’s because mines are drilled into rocks, which grow hotter the closer they get to Earth’s core. But the temperature at the bottom of the ocean is only slightly above freezing. So, you’re going to be cold. On the plus side, you’ll be able to see one of the least-visited sites on the planet, the floor of the Mariana Trench.

Just kidding. You won’t be able to see much at all, unless the sun passes directly over the mouth of your glass tube, which it will do exactly twice a year, around April 20 and August 23. After that, it’s another six months of total darkness. Unless that appeals, you should probably get in your elevator and come out.

Clouds are made of air and water. And water’s edible, right? Or potable, at least? So in theory, there should be nothing to stop a person from eating a cloud – apart from, you know, common sense, having better things to do with one’s time and the challenges of getting a cumulonimbus to sit still on your plate.

But here’s the problem. Unless you could come up with some way to squeeze the air out of the cloud before you started chewing it, it’s going to be impossible to ingest.

Snowballs only grow in size when they’re rolled through wet, sticky snow which adheres to their surface. Mt. Everest is covered in dry, fluffy snow. So, even if you did manage to roll a snowball from the top to the bottom of Mt. Everest, your snowball would stay about the same size it was when you first rolled it.

Hypothetically, if Mt. Everest were covered in wet, sticky snow, how big would your snowball grow? Well, the bigger a snowball gets, the more snow it picks up. So it stands to reason that the more time a snowball spends rolling, picking up more and more snow, the faster it will grow. After all, we wouldn’t use the word snowballed to refer to exponential growth if it weren’t 100 percent accurate … would we?

Science doesn’t have to be serious, and math needn’t be monotonous! Stretching your brain by trying to find the answers to silly questions is a great way to train your analytical mind, while still having some fun.