What If? summary

The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is an engaging children’s story about a prince from a far away asteroid. But could anyone actually live on a very small but very heavy asteroid? Absolutely not! However, it’s still fun to imagine what kind of gravitational oddities we would experience if we could.

For a start, on our tiny planet, our feet would feel heavier than our head.

Want a printed version of the entire English Wikipedia? Surely the amount of printers you would need in order to keep up with the constant edits would be huge, right? Well, actually, it’s far fewer than you’d think.

Wikipedia receives about 125,000 to 150,000 edits per day, and yet you’d need only six printers to stay up to date.

If all of us on the planet avoided each other for a couple of weeks, wouldn’t the common cold be eradicated? Indeed, it probably would. If rhinoviruses don’t have enough people to travel between, they simply die out.

The common cold is caused by different viruses, but rhinoviruses are the most common villains. Usually within about ten days, rhinoviruses are completely eliminated from the body by the immune system. We also don’t seem to transmit these viruses to or from animals, which means there are no other species that could store these viruses for us.  

What if we all in fact had a single soulmate? Would we find the one and only? Well, the chances of bumping into our soulmate would be rather slim.

First of all, why should our soulmate live at the same time in history as we do? Perhaps they died long ago or maybe they haven’t yet been born.

If the entire world’s population started working out calculations right this minute, how powerful would our computing power be? Would it surpass or would it dwarf a single modern-day computer or smartphone?

Actually, a mid-range mobile phone would eclipse the combined processing power of all humanity.

The SAT is a standardized test given to American high school students. A large part of this test consists of multiple-choice questions, and sometimes guessing an answer you’re not sure about can be a good strategy. But what if all SAT test takers guessed every multiple-choice question? How many perfect scores would there be?

Well, we shouldn’t expect a single perfect score, if everyone guessed. Let’s see why.

Facebook is largely a young person’s hangout. Though the average age has risen over the last few years, young people tend to use Facebook more frequently than old people. But will there ever come a time when Facebook contains more profiles of dead people than of living ones? There are a couple of scenarios to consider:

Facebook could have more profiles of dead than of living people as early as the 2060s.