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Zusammenfassung von What If?

Name: What If?
Rating: 3.6 (86 reviews)
Author: Randall Munroe

Randall Munroe

Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

3.6 (86 Bewertungen)

18 Min.

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What If?
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What’s in it for me? Get well-researched answers to some of the most far out “What if” scenarios.

What-iffing is something we usually link to curious children or anxious worriers, but suppose it could also reveal a world of deeply researched insights?

These blinks present a series of absurd and hypothetical questions, and delve into the relevant theories that answer them in accurate and highly entertaining ways. Popular answers from author Randall Munroe’s famous What If? blog are presented, but most of the questions are new and answered for the first time.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

that you’d be able to run off your little, massive planet, if you were The Little Prince;
that live-updating the English Wikipedia in a paper version would cost four to five thousand dollars on ink cartridges per day; and
that even if the entire world’s population started doing calculations right now, a mid-range mobile phone would still be 70 times faster.

If the Sun went out, we would see a variety of benefits in many areas of life.

What would happen to Earth if the Sun suddenly went dark? It’s a haunting thought but, surprisingly, many good things would come from it. Let’s look at a few examples.

One positive consequence would be a reduced risk of solar flares – those abrupt, massive releases of energy on the Sun’s surface. Solar flares pose a high risk for us as they’re often succeeded by geomagnetic storms, which are temporary disruptions of Earth’s magnetic field.

We experienced this in 1859, when a massive solar flare and geomagnetic storm hit Earth. The storm produced powerful currents in telegraph wires, setting fire to them and wiping out communications.

Since 1859, though, we have built countless more wires. If a storm were to strike us today, researchers estimate that the economic damage to the US alone would amount to trillions of dollars.

But, of course, we needn’t fret about this if the sun went out!

A second advantage would be that infrastructure costs would be reduced. Think of bridges – we build them in order to cross water. But if the Sun went out, we could simply drive across the ice. Add to this the estimated $20 billion we spend on repairing US bridges annually and we’d also save on infrastructure!

Third, trade would be cheaper.

If the Sun were no more, darkness would reign, and a land of eternal night has no use for time zones. Time zones make it more complicated to do business when international office hours don’t match up. But without the Sun, we could all exist in one time zone, which would speed up communication, allowing a healthy boost to the global economy.

But what about the downside? Well, with no Sun, we would all freeze and die. Perhaps we should keep our Sun after all.

The little planet from The Little Prince would have some remarkable gravitational properties.

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.

Six printers is enough to live-update a paper version of the whole English Wikipedia – but it would be costly.

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.

The common cold could be wiped out if everyone stayed away from each other for a few weeks – but it’s probably not worth it.

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.

If everyone had only one random soulmate, our world would be a lonely one.

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.

A normal cell phone surpasses the processing power of humanity – but humans are superior in other ways.

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.

Correctly guessing every multiple-choice question in the SAT is virtually impossible.

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.

Either in the 2060s or in the 2130s Facebook will contain more profiles of dead people than of living people.

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.

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Worum geht es in What If??

In What If? (2014), Randall Munroe presents earnest, thoroughly researched answers to absurd, hypothetical questions in a highly entertaining and digestible format. Munroe serves up the most popular answers from queries he received through his What If? blog, along with a host of new, delightful, mind-bending questions and answers.

Bestes Zitat aus What If?

As a rule of thumb, if you cant dunk a basketball, you wouldnt be able to escape this asteroid by jumping.

—Randall Munroe

Wer What If? lesen sollte

Anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical
Anyone interested the oddities of math, science, and technology
Any fan of Randall Munroe’s webcomic, xkcd

Über den Autor

Randall Munroe is a former NASA roboticist and the creator of the hugely popular xkcd webcomic. In 2013, at the request of a number of xkcd enthusiasts, the asteroid 4942 Munroe was named after him by the International Astronomical Union.

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