Dear Hank & John - 341: Juice the Cloud (w/ Randall Munroe!)

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

What would happen if a day was a minute? What if an asteroid hit a volcano that was ready to erupt? Would a rocket and a bullet go through Jupiter's center? How many countries would Earth have if they were all the size of Vatican City? Would you tell anyone if you found oil on Mars? Could a person eat a whole cloud? Hank Green and Randall Munroe have answers!If you're in need of dubious advice, email us at [e-mail] us for monthly livestreams and an exclusive weekly podcast at patreon.com/dearhankandjohn.Follow us on Twitter! twitter.com/dearhankandjohn

Hello and welcome to Dear Hank and John. Or as I like to think of it, Dear Randall and Hank. It's a podcast where two brothers and sometimes a brother and a friend answer your questions, give you debuse advice, and bring you all the weeks news from both Mars and AFC Wimbledon today. Oh, sorry, I have to tell a dad joke. My dad joke is, do you know why physics and biology broke up? No, why? Because there was no chemistry. Though one has to say that there's lots of chemistry and biology, but there isn't really any in physics.

Physical chemistry is just sort of the scariest type of physics. So. Yeah, I took that class. I was just, I was just whining about that class as a 42 year old man 20 years later. I was whining about that class. Anything that exists on the boundary between those, you know, the major branches of science, it's always harder than either one of the things that it shares. It's like nobody knows what to do now.

They're like, there's no one specializing in this. So we haven't figured out how to, but it's all the same thing, Randall, as you, I'm sure no. And that thing is... Science? Yeah, well, I guess it's all particles. Yeah, or waves or some kind of complicated construct that we simplify into one of one of

the other of these models. Right, into the idea of particles in waves. It's all fields doing field stuff to each other and we don't know why. There's gauges in there somewhere. Oh, I didn't know about those. Certainly, yeah, I'm all there's for no in there somewhere. Oh, I didn't know about those. Certainly. Yeah, I have all those for no more about those. There's tensors, I'm sure. You know, probably some tensors.

There's everything around somewhere. Uh-huh. Definitely vectors. Yeah. Oh, for sure. For scalers. Yeah. So Randall, if you don't know, has been making a comic

on the internet called XKCD since 2005? Okay. Wow, look at me. That I was a fan of and have been a fan of for the whole time. I mean, it's legendary as a person who creates on the internet. Generally, it's great to see somebody who's careful and good at being a creator on the internet and as a person who does science communication specifically, it's kind of a bit of an honor to be here with you. I was just talking to Deboki, who is our editorial assistant, and helps with collecting questions

and doing research to figure out if we can try and answer them. And she was in her, we were in the little dock together and she saw your icon and she was like, why is Randall Monroe looking at my terrible research notes? So that's the slot of the world that you exist inside of. You make people nervous when you're inside of their research notes. No, I mean, well, you've shown up in my research notes. I don't think I've mentioned this in the sense that

sometimes I'll get a question and I'll think, oh, you know, this is a weird question, but it's really fun. And I can see a way that I can do a deep dive into this that, you know, will involve so much kind of heavy duty research that I feel like probably no one has devoted that much energy to this question before. But, you know, I'll Google around to see has anyone else ever tackled this. And then occasionally one of your videos will come up, and you're like, you know, 90 seconds or 30 seconds, you'll run through what I know must have been about two, you know, two or three hours of research and, you know, very careful calculation. I'm like, oh man, he's doing the thing I was going to do. Damn. All right. Well, I'm probably only doing the thing you were gonna do because you taught me

how to do it by doing it first. No, and I was honestly kind of appreciated because I'm excited, like, what's fun about these things is getting to the answer. And when I discover someone else has scooped me and found the answer, I'm just excited. And then especially excited when they presented in a fun way like you do.

Well, Randall has a book out. It's called What If, too. It's the sequel, I guess, of a kind, to What If, the First What If, in which a serious scientific answers are given to absurd hypothetical questions. And it's an absolute delight. I learn, it's like the coolest way to learn how the world actually works.

You do, I can see a tremendous amount of work going into not every question, but a huge number of the questions. It's really delightfully put together so that some of the questions really you go deep, some of the questions you go less deep, some of the questions you don't go deep at all. And so for example, Dylan wrote to you, and this can be our first question. We're going to do a mix of questions from the book, from people who send us questions in this episode, but we're going to start with one from Dylan that was written to you. What would happen if the Earth's rotation were sped up until a day only lasted one second?

This is the kind of question that we would get on Dear Hank and John, but you have done a lot of research into what would actually happen, and I couldn't tell you. I couldn't tell you if that's, so my first, like, my headspace goes to, first of all, that's going to be not possible to do, but what's just assumed that it's possible, will I end up still on the planet? You'll be there for at least a few seconds.

Okay, tell me how do I die? Well, so the earth is spinning. And if you may, it's spinning right now, it's spinning at a speed where it does not tear itself apart. Yes. One of my favorite things about this planet, it remains roughly the same shape most of the time. But it is bulging out a little in the middle. Like around the equator, it kind of pancakes out because it's spinning and that centrifugal

force or centripetal acceleration or however, you know, the... If you're a physics pedant, if you're a physics person, yeah. Yeah. It leads to the middle part of the earth being flung outward. And so that's why, for example, you weigh, you know, maybe up to a pound less if you go down to the equator than if you're at the poles. You're actually being pulled away by the speed that you are traveling. Yes, there are the two different effects. Because the earth is spinning, it flings you outward. And so you're being flung away from the earth a little bit, and that cancels at some of your weight.

And because the earth is kind of pancake-shaped, you're farther from the center of the earth. Oh, yeah. This is why the peak of my Everest is not the farthest thing from the center of the earth. Right, right. There are some mountains in the Andes that are the farthest from the earth's axis and from the center. Yeah. But because they're on the bulge. Yeah, and so the problem is, so right now it takes light can circle the equator. If you built a tube around the equator with mirrors, it could circle the equator in about seven times in a second, which means if the earth is spinning fast enough that each day lasts one second.

That's really fast. Yes, it means that the equator would be moving at about a little over 10% of the speed of light. Okay. Yeah, that definitely puts it into some in context. Yeah, so right now, that planet's not going to hold itself together. Yeah, so right now gravity is, if I go and stand on the equator, gravity is maybe a hundred times stronger, you know, or a little more, a hundred times stronger than the force trying to fling me outward. If you speed up the earth from the current,

you know, it's about a thousand miles an hour up to the speed of life, which has a lot more digits in it, gravity is no longer even a factor. You might as well not put it in the equation. Right, exactly. It's one of the things like, oh, the number of digits in the forces from the rotation in the Sturgril Force

have so many more digits than the gravity numbers. You're like, well, I know I can ignore those just from looking at how big the numbers are. And so, yeah, you can work out that like you and everything around you would be flung outward. And because the other stuff around you would be flung outward at the same speed you were. Right. You might actually survive for a few, you know, milliseconds. You'd be, you'd have a bunch of the air would come with you. The ground would come with you.

Yeah, and so the ground, you know, if as the midsection of the earth starts to spread apart, it would have to break apart, which it would end up probably doing unevenly. So you'd have the ground, you know, fragmenting around you. Right, get yourself a really solid piece of ground that maybe can stick, you can stick with, just

hold on to it. And because like you're in this scenario where we're sort of waving a magic wand and speeding up the earth, you are being kind of magically sped up by the hypothetical. We're assuming that that just happens. And then from then on, we're going to let physics take over and see what happens. But then from your point of view, the problem isn't so much that you're spinning because you're not spinning anymore. You're moving in a straight line away from the earth, along the direction that the earth was traveling, that your chunk of the earth was traveling. But I'm not like shooting through anything. No, because all the stuff is shooting with me.

Yeah, so the question is like, So that's not going to kill me. At what point does the stresses being put on the stuff around you by the adjacent parts of the earth that are shooting off in a slightly different direction? At what point does the stresses cause you problems? Well, also the air's going to be a problem. It's going to push on itself.

It's gonna push itself, like air will eventually get low enough pressure that I won't be able to breathe. Yeah, and it'll be there won't be anything holding it there. It'll only take about a second or so for the air around you to have spread out enough, it's spreading out and pan-kicking outward the same way as the earth into this kind of disk. Within about a second or so, the air would be too thin, too thin for you to breathe. That's, and that's what kills me.

Probably not. I think, oh, I think that you would probably not last long enough to s-fixieate. Okay. It does depend a little bit on exactly what happens with what pieces of the cruster around you. You think I'm going to get hit by something. You know, I'm not sure. Anytime you have anything moving at 10% of the speed of light, though, any interaction becomes such a huge problem. So when the earth starts expanding outward, the first thing we encounter that's not part of the earth, you know, not part of our scenario here, is we've got all those satellites around us.

And so the expanding Earth would be nicely lined up. We've got a whole ring of geostationary satellites around us. And it would only take about a second or so for the disc to reach that belt of geostationary satellites. And I'm not going to get hit by a satellite, but probably somebody is, and definitely some thing is. Yeah, and so like once the satellites hit the expanding edge of the atmosphere,

you know, they'll be vaporized. I think about 40 milliseconds into the scenario is about when the ISS will get hit. It'll be one of the first ones. It's quick, pretty low, yeah. Yeah, and then from that, there'll be a blast of gamma rays and it'll be sort of like a nuclear bomb going off.

And so, right, and every single satellite that we hit is another nuclear bomb. Yeah, and so you're surrounded by a lot of exciting physics happening all at once. Yes. And which is never where you want to be. Exactly. You want to, in general, in physics,

you want to try to place yourself when you have a thing that's doing cool physics, you want to be on the other side of the thing where the physics is from where the physics is happening. Yes, you say this in the book. This is one of the main rules of science is be on the side where the interesting physics isn't happening. Yeah, you know, you've got a laser and there's like the hand grip with the battery and then there's the end with the laser and you stay on the hand grip side and let the laser stuff happen out on the other side. Yeah. And that's also what I would want to be in this situation is directly on the North Pole.

I'd still die, but maybe a little less fast. Yeah. Right at the North Pole. I'd have to wait for all those nuclear explosions to get to me. Yeah. And right at the North Pole, you're still part of the scenario. So I guess you are pure wedding once a second. Yes.

But I think pure wedding once a second to survive a little. I could do that. Yeah. Although as I say that, I'm thinking, I haven't actually tried to pure once a second. Maybe that's faster than it sounds. I feel you're right. Anyone who does ballet who's listening to this

is gonna be like, oh boy, after this podcast is over, you're gonna go try that and you're right. Anyone who does ballet who's listening to this is going to be like, oh boy, after this podcast is over, you're going to go try that and you're going to find out. Do my eyes stay in my body or not? Yeah, there's a speed at which you can pirouette and it does become a health problem, especially if you let your arms swing outward and then you got to, you got to, you got to do some of the pretty fingers. Yeah. I wouldn't, and it's like this every question where you think that this isn't going to be that interesting. And then it turns out that it's, it is, in fact, amazingly interesting. We're going to do a question from, from one of our listeners now.

This one is from Shane who sent this back in February, but we searched the inbox for a particular string to see if anybody asked a question that maybe would end in the way that Shane stood. PS, it would be super cool if you teamed it a collaboration with Randle Monroe on a complicated science question submission since he's going to be promoting what if too soon. Is, do you know Shane? No, I don't, but I really appreciate that. See, like he's on your team. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. No, thanks for the, thanks for the plug. Thanks for, I guess, making all of this happen. Yeah. So here's what happens. So we're now we're going to see what happens when we apply these skills to a question. Randall has never heard before.

It is. Dear Hengen Randall has never heard before. It is, dear Hank and Randall, what if there was a super volcano a few months away from eruption and a large asteroid struck that exact spot, Shane? So this is a problem because it's geology, which is neither of our areas of expertise, but in the vein of how I think what if would answer this question?

It probably would be one of the shorter answers and it would probably be nothing good. Yeah, I think that's a safe bet. I don't know, I think that's an interesting one because so people really often, like when you have these big forces interacting with each other, people, it's like, will either want to play them off each other or, you know, like use one of them to stop the other or ask one of them, magnify the other.

And like, it's, sometimes it's not always clear which it's going to be because people, there's actually a page on the National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Administration's website about answering the question like, why don't we new hurricanes? And this is not great that we're here, but we're here. Yeah. And they've had that for a long time, which I know because I've stumbled on that page frequently in the course of trying to answer people's questions.

And the answer is hurricanes are, the first answer is just like, no, that's bad for the reasons you think. Like, yeah, that's not. You're throwing a bunch of radiation into a whirlwind, like, yeah. But it's also bad. Like hurricanes are powered by the heat of the ocean surface, causing air to gain energy and rise, and then it condenses and and that process, like, transports heat energy from the ocean surface into the atmosphere, which creates a hurricane.

And you're like, I think what this problem needs is more heat energy. Just a lot. We need to get the hottest thing we can do as humans. Yeah, and put that in there. Yeah, exactly. And so it's like, no, that would, if anything, probably make it worse. But people will also ask this, like, okay, you have a volcano about to erupt. Can we use a nuclear weapon to seal it off in some way?

And once again, like, we're thinking like, what's the most powerful thing we have? Why don't we throw that at the problem? Yeah. And whether you're trying to trigger the volcano or stop the volcano, it sort of feels like, what are you doing? Stop. Well, I mean, one thing that we are not good at understanding is how powerful the earth is. Yeah. The amount of energy inside of the earth, we're very lucky to have a fairly stable, well, lucky. We wouldn't exist otherwise to have a stable, like plate tectonics, like stable enough

that it is constantly messing with the atmosphere and throwing things into completely like disarray, but not so stable that we have a locked planet that doesn't have any cycling of minerals and stuff because we can do this fun plate tectonics thing. Like none of the minerals on Earth have been around the whole time. Yeah, yeah.

It's, it's a, I like, I like learning about things that Earth has that no one else has. You know, in life is the big one. You know, as far as we know. But I like plate tectonics. That's a, yeah. There's a couple of moons that kind of have plate them. Yeah, if you can't, there are ice. Moving around.

Do you want to have a fight over whether ice is a rock? Because this happened to me recently with geologists. Oh, no, I'm enthusiastic about embracing whatever definition is more funny at the time. I've sort of come into this kind of enlightenment after many years of being kind of pedantic about terminology and thinking that we need to be clear about what we mean and sort of embrace the fact that like, okay, everyone is on different pages about what things mean. And we do our best to like, come up with common definitions, but there's also a certain amount of meeting other people where they are. And so I think you have to embrace ambiguity and some uncertainty. Absolutely. I entirely agree. And also, I don't care how you say gif.

So the ass, I think that a big enough asteroid could maybe make the thing happen a little earlier. But if the earth is gonna do a super volcano, it's gonna happen and it's gonna be bad. Like the amount, the mass of crust that has to be lifted to do a super volcano is probably bigger than the mass of crust that has ever been ejected

by an asteroid. At least since the late heavy bombardment. Yeah, yeah, that would be my guess. Yeah, I know, I think that's right. The reason that I feel pretty confident that the asteroid could trigger a super volcano eruption or, you know, could, could trigger this kind of thing is that often this is what triggers volcanic eruptions, not an asteroid, but it's not, you know, we think of a volcano as like the pressure builds up and up and up and up and up and then it bursts out upward, you know, blowing the lid off as it doesn't work.

But for example, with Mount St. Helens, what happened was, you know, this is a volcano that erupted in the Oregon, Washington border in the 1981, 80, 80, yeah. I think it was 80. Yeah, 1980. And what happened there is they saw the mountain bulging up, clearly there's magma building up under it. They knew that this was, all right, this is okay. No, we got to watch. And then at some point, the bulge went up and out far enough that there was a landslide. So it's like the cap slid off.

And then the eruption was the magma chamber suddenly being exposed at high pressure. Like, you know, the magma tubes, the internal plumbing of the volcano, the cap just kind of got, it slid off by gravity. And then that exposed the pressurized interior that blasted outward and created the giant cloud of ejecta

and the horrors and all the stuff that flow ejecta and the horrors and all the stuff that flowed out of the volcano. But it really was just the lid got removed. And then that's when the eruption happened. And so yeah, if you smack the top of a volcano, you can uncork it, you can release the pressure inside. And then it goes. Yeah, and then the, but you're right about the power, you know,

when we look back, so it was a really big discovery in the in the 80s and up through the present about the asteroid, you know, hitting and causing the dinosaur extinction. Yes, people forget that when we were children, they didn't know about this for sure. There was a lot of arguing. I know. It's fun. The books that I read, the dinosaur books I read, even fairly contemporary ones, would be full of like, here are all the different dinosaurs we know about. Here's their features, how they live. Why did they die?

No one really knows. Could be anything. There's lots of ideas. Yeah, and then the asteroid idea seemed outlandish when it was proposed. Walter Alvarez and the people who kind of pushed that idea and until they found the crater that was sort of the smoking gun and determined it was really linked to the extinction, it seemed like the idea that an asteroid could come along and hit the earth and cause a bunch of disruption

was sort of hypothetical. But the thing about those mass extinctions is that asteroid impact explains one of the kind of five big mass extinctions in the historical record. The other four are all, no one's been able to find asteroids that are really conclusively linked to those other four mass extinctions, but they are all associated with large volcanic outpourings. Yeah. These large igneous provinces, which, which calling them a volcano is sort of, I feel like that doesn't get across what we're talking about.

Yeah. The problem with saying large igneous provinces is that it sounds less scary than a volcano. But the problem with saying volcano is that it also sounds less scary than what actually happened. Yeah. Which is like, you're entire, an entire country became volcano. You know, it's like, it just stopped being land there. It's like, it wasn't like there was an eruption outward from a point.

It's just like lava just kind of started blurping out across the whole landscape. And you'll find these mild deep, mild deep layers of just lava that was all released at once. The palisades in New York, if you're driving across the Hudson on the bridge there, what you're seeing there is I think it's the triassic, the end triassic, blood magmatic outpouring, large igneous province. And it makes these cool columns as the lava piles up. And so these eruptions are just like the worst thing that can happen to life because they're associated with, obviously you don't want to be covered in lava, so it's very bad for you if you're just, you're just, you're not going to be able to live. But then, you know, you get all kinds of poison gases pouring out into the landscape,

over the landscape. Giant pulses of carbon released into the atmosphere, which causes, as we have recently sort of really figured out, rapid warming. And so all of those really big extinctions, those other four, all really seem, there seems to be the smoking gun of these large volcanic events. And the most interesting twist, the dinosaur extinction, also has one of those. It's in what's now India, the Deccan traps, and it happened at just about the same time as the asteroid, you know, and it happened at just about the same time

as the asteroid, the meteor impact. I mean, it was a big meteor impact. My brain says those things could be connected to each other. Yeah, my first thought when I learned about this was, hey, did India happen to be right on the other side of the earth? Was it like some kind of a resonating thing? Cool, that's there.

And unfortunately, I dug up some old maps and it's like, nope, it wasn't. Okay, so much for that theory. But the the there are a couple of this is still, you know, being in the last five years or so, it's been there's been a lot of new research on it. But there's there is some some decent suggestions as they try to get the timeline exactly right that maybe the deck and traps were getting going But then when the asteroid hit in Mexico, you know, and what's now the Yucatan Peninsula that seems to have been associated with the The magmatic outpouring suddenly kicking way up a notch and

It's hard not to think maybe there's a causal effect there. Yeah. So, whoa, I didn't know about that. Second, I assume that something in the last 60 of a million years, and I'm only assuming this for my own mental health, has changed on the earth so that these large, magmatic outpourings, I think is what you were saying, aren't possible anymore and we shouldn't have to worry about it. Don't answer the question, we're just going to move on. I will not answer the question as you request.

We all have a little bit of research to do. Volcanoes are bad, but they're not as bad as whatever this other kind of thing is. I'm going to do another question from your book. This is from, there's a little short, short answers sections, which I love, break it up a little bit, keep it, keep it spicy. It's from James Wilson, who asks, if I shot a rocket and a bullet through Jupiter's center, would they come out the other side? No. Definitely not. It says, there's an illustration that, science fact, Jupiter is bulletproof.

It is. You know, you think gas giant, maybe it's just like a big blob of atmosphere, but the gas only goes down a little ways and then it just gets denser and denser. And the middle of Jupiter is quite solid and possibly a crystal and metallic hydrogen or something like that. Yes. When you think solid, don't think that there's a rocky planet down there. Think that the density of the gas just gets so dense that it eventually solidifies. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, in some extent, we don't know exactly what's going on down there. Never been there.

I have no one has visited the core of Jupiter and returns to know what ever we're at. We also, we haven't even got close to visiting the core of our planet. You know, we're like right here. One of my, I think one of my favorite science facts, just to derail briefly, is that the Earth is slowing down because of the Moon's gravity and because of title friction. And so throughout all of our history, it's been slowing down. Use to be a little faster.

Yeah, yeah, the days used to be shorter. But since a little before I was born, it's been speeding up. Yeah, the Twitter is upset about this right now. I've been several people have tagged me they They've been like, I'm terrified. Should I be worried about this? And I'm like, no, and they're like, why? And we're like, well, so what I really like about it is, you know, there were a few years ago, I stumbled on a geophysicist talking about this about how like we sort of know the

reason. And it's something going on with the turbulent currents in the outer core of the Earth most likely. There's stuff flowing around, and that's what redistribute the magnetic field. The redistribution of mass. Yeah, and it's chaotic, so it's going to do these random fluctuations up and down. But it's also, it's just so hard to see the interior of the earth because there's all this rock in the way. That they're like, these currents are, you know, the patterns that are causing this are unknown and possibly unknowable. And I just like that there's something that's right there.

The core of the earth, it's directly below both of us right now. But it's just doing its own thing and we are not, it's like beyond our understanding. Yeah. And for the last four billion years, we just been like one system of weird chemistry that's talking to itself now, just on in a little, in a very thin, little film on the surface of this ball that's doing its own thing. We're all just leaching its heat like this leftover heat from the earth's formation and we're just sort of huddled around it. And luckily, it's pretty well insulated.

Yeah. It's going to keep doing its thing. Hopefully not too much though. I'm still worried about this volcanic situation. I mean, I'm worried about it is, it is not only well insulated, but increasingly well insulated in recent years. Right. Now we're not even letting the,

he'd get off the surface. Mm-hmm. That's, yes. We're working on that. Yeah. Maybe by the time this podcast comes out, we'll have some legislation that's gonna be on the books.

Yeah, yeah, excited. Yeah, no, that's it. I'm glad we're moving on this. I'm glad we're moving on this eventually, finally. We've only known about it for, you know, 130, 140 years now. Yeah. Well, look, I've enjoyed my refrigerator and car,

so there's that. Yeah. You know, what is the price that we will pay? Who knows? Speaking of which, this podcast is brought to you by the price that we will pay. It's big, but it could be smaller if we'd all work together.

And this podcast is also sponsored by physics pedants who would like to clarify there merely precise about terminology, not actually patents, which if you look at the dictionary is defined in some other specific way. This podcast is brought to you by the side where the interesting physics is the side where the interesting physics is, the side where the interesting physics is, stay away from there, you've got a body. This podcast is also brought to you by being obliterated by the International Space Station.

Just remember when you are obliterated by the International Space Station, you are also obliterating the International Space Station. Wow, that's great. The next best thing to being an astronaut. We got a project for awesome message. This is from Tiffany to Katrina. You'd probably hit me if I said any of this myself.

So now that Hank is saying these nice things, you have to listen to them. Otherwise, it would be rude. Ha, ha, suck it. You are my favorite crossword partner, my bestest friend, and I hope you know how much I look up to you symbolically, because I'm still taller than you, ha ha suck it again. Of all the things that I am,

my favorite thing is to be your older sister. Love you muchly, that's adorable. Oh, that's very sweet. That's very sweet. I like that so much. I like siblings. Yeah. It's a good vibe.

All right, here's another question from one of our listeners. It's from Alec who asks, dear Hank and Randall, the Vatican city is really, really small. And there are 195 countries on earth. But how many countries would there be if all of them were the size of Vatican city? So this is an easy one. You figure out how big the Vatican is. You figure out how big the

land is and then you divide them. And Deboki did that in my little notes here. Do you want to Yeah, how much? It's going to be 301,836,735.69 Vatican cities. So not everyone on earth can have one. No, but not even every American country. Yeah, yeah, we're at what, 332,000,000 or so. Yeah, 330. That's where my brain is. Yeah, I think I upgrade the number of everyone's in a while, but I recently went to 330, is...

I think we just hit the point pretty recently where it really makes sense to say the world has 8 billion people instead of 7 billion. Oh, yeah, that's gonna take a second for my... It's been slowly, and I think we're now... I think we're still under 8 billion, but we're close enough now that any reasonable rounding gets you to $8,000. Right.

And so it doesn't get, well, it definitely doesn't get you to $7,000. So you can start to say, well, maybe it's time to start saying $7.5,000, which it was a while ago. Yeah. Or you can say $7.7. Yeah. And so, but yeah, the US is $3.32, so we could have all but about 10%. You know, 90% of us could, of the Americans could have their own Vatican-sized country. Yeah, but you have to choose now,

which 10% doesn't get one. Yeah. Well, we'll vote. We'll do a vote. We'll be like, all right, we're gonna have to have 10% of you need to move somewhat. The problem is that a lot of these Vatican are going to be in Alaska. And that's going to be tricky for you. I mean, there are large chunks of the earth that if you get a swatch of half a square kilometer, if your swatch of half a square kilometer, like, you know, includes a cool beach resort and some farms, like cool, you've got a good country going. And if, you know, your swatch of land is 100 miles away

from the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica, you're gonna need to develop some interesting trade policies, I guess, figure out what you have a comparative advantage. Yeah, mostly in keeping people away from me. I think that's the main thing you can do with a country there and at that size. You could try to advertise cool penguin tourism or something, but you'd be competing with what, you know, probably a couple tens of millions of other people who's only industry as penguin tourism.

Yeah. Now, I definitely rather have to say like a little bit of not a country right here than a whole Vatican-sized country, some at some random point. Yeah. I think that's safe. I've got, this was one of my very favorite questions from your book. Could a person eat a whole cloud? This question surprised me a bunch of different times.

As I know, if something's about clouds, they can be very big, but they don't have to be. It's on page 195, if you're looking. Mm-hmm. And so, Randall, can I eat a cloud? No. Mm-hmm. Can I drink?

Can I drink a cloud? So this is the question. I was like, okay, clouds are made of water. So do you drink them or do you eat them? Well, you breathe them, honestly. You don't do either of those things. Yeah, because like water is water is edible Is it? But then I'm like, okay, well, or is it you know, it's potable? Which then led me to like, you know, what exactly? how do you, you know, if you're talking about eating a vapor, you know, like breathing is bringing it into your lungs, but eating is bringing it into your stomach.

And so you can swallow a gas. You can, you know, you can, you can swallow air and then a little bit later you burp it up. But the, so you've got the spectrum of things you eat, which are edible and things you drink, which are potable. And I was trying to figure out what the exact midpoint is. I feel like it, I feel like it's soup. Like, slurpees, I think you drink, but like, shave ice or, you know, like those ice cones.

I think they have different regional names. Crunch, crunch. Yeah, but it's like, it's sort of like a milkshakey texture, sort of like ice cream. And I feel like you need that. Because the teeth are getting involved a little bit. Yeah, boba, I don't know how to classify. That's a great point.

I think that boba, in the same vein as a thin soup with noodles in it, you both eat and drink it. Yeah, you ingest, Boba. And I do. And I do. No, so yeah, so if you try to eat a cloud, you can swallow a chunk of moisture. You know, you could, you could take some of the moisture from a cloud, you could float up there in a balloon or something and take somebody to your mouth and swallow.

And then you'd have air in your stomach with the moisture in it. And the cloud would be in there. Yeah. And the cloud would be in there. Yeah, and the cloud would be in there. And you could then keep doing that. And there are some very small clouds. Yeah, yeah, there's, you know, because there's the big ones that you see, and you're like, oh, who?

I'm not gonna talk about that. I'm not gonna talk about that. But then there's the little ones that just kind of very briefly block the sun as they go over you. Yes. Those little whips. The ones that are only out on the hottest of days,

where you're like, could you please be a little bit? Yeah. A little wisps. The ones that are only out on the hottest of days where you're like, could you please be a little bit bigger? Yeah, and I think those... I've looked at clouds from both sides now. Yeah, from... I mean, I've looked from up from down... When and lose from strange from charm. No, the... Wow. If you do try to eat a cloud though,

like you can take it into your stomach, but anyone who has swallowed air, like anyone is a kid who discovered they could swallow air, discovers like your stomach is like, hey, there's air in here. Yeah. I need to do something about this and then you burp it back out.

You don't have to though. It is possible for the air to pass through the whole digestive system. That's true. There's a couple of ways to increase the probability of this happening. The main one is to try and create a foam inside of your stomach, which is then harder to burp out. And your body is more likely to pass those,

those, that cloud through your whole digestive system, at which point you fart, and at that point, you did fully eat the cloud. Yeah, yeah, and I think, I mean, so we can, we can be more vague and say, you can swallow the air and then it will. Yeah. You will have eaten it for a little bit. Which I suppose is true of anything. But yeah, if you just start trying to swallow a cloud,

and you're swallowing more and more and more air, what's interesting though when you burp it out is that it, the air that you burp out, you're like, well, I swallowed the moisture. I don't want to keep the air. So like when you're eating potato chips, they've got a lot of air in them. Yeah. And they've got a lot of, you know, potato chip. They've got a lot of potato, a lot of oil.

And so when you crunch them up in your mouth, the air escapes from your mouth and the potato part goes down your throat. And so with the cloud, you can't chew them. What part of a cloud is cloud? Yeah, exactly. The cloud is like the water suspended in the air.

Is it or is the cloud the air and the water together? Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean, this is another of those kind of definition questions. I think that the funnier answer is that it's the water. That's easier to sort of get. That feels like what I'm eating. Yeah, well, like the same way when you eat, you know, like Pringles has the ad

that's like, see, our chips have less air in the container You're not buying air, you know like it was so with the cloud What you're doing is you're trying to get the water from the cloud and get it into your digestive system But if you're swallowing the air and then burping it out The air that you burp out is going to be moistened by all the moisture in your body that you burp out is going to be moistened by all the moisture in your body. So if you eat a chunk of cloud and then you burp the air out, the air wetting your body is going to be saturated with moisture. So you're going to end up burping out more cloud.

Yeah, because your body is really moister than the environment. Because a cloud is not nearly as much stuff as you think. Like you look at it, it feels like that's a lot of stuff, but in fact, it is not a lot of stuff. So if I could condense all the water out of the cloud, what are we talking about? And can I, could I even, if it was just the water, could I consume that? Yeah, so one of those clouds that's sort of like house size,

the ones that'll block the cloud. So a cute little cloud. Yeah, that'll like, when they go over, you're like, oh, it gets dark for a second, then it gets light again. And you're like, oh, it's nighttime. Oh no, it's daytime again, you know? Yeah, one of those, it might just be like a couple glasses

of water. This is what shocked me so much. I don't know why I assumed this, but I figured that that was gonna be way more, I thought it was gonna be like a half a year for me to drink that cloud. Yeah, no, you could once sitting, you could slam it back. You could just chug.

I mean, you need to get it out of the air into a glass. But once it's there, that's a problem. That's the trick. Yeah, that's the trick. You got to put, you got to just wrap that cloud up in some kind of plastic thing. My new start-down. Builds it as a device that you can, if you get the cloud in there, it'll use us

or have it to squeezing mechanism to juice the cloud. Man, somebody would, somebody would fail a lot of money for cloud juice. Also, that is a fantastic name brand for a bottled water. Cloud juice, I like it. Put that on the label. All right, no way to steal that from me. I like it.

All right, let's do one more question from the dear Henga John box. It's from Huey who asks, dear Henga Randall, if you were leading the Perseverance Rover team and you discovered oil on Mars, would you tell the world about it? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. Very big news. That's, that's exciting. Biggest Yeah. Absolutely.

Very big news. That's exciting. Biggest news so far. Yeah. I mean, when you think, oh, we struck oil, you know, what you sort of immediately think of is, oh, this is now an economic thing that people will want to extract. Mm-hmm. But what's so much more exciting about that problem?

Yeah. First of all, you can't get, it's not getting here. It's yeah, and so like we it's we're right now putting like decades of effort and a huge amount of engineering and work by smart people to try to get a bunch of little test tubes full of rock back from Mars. Yeah, it's like it's gonna cost many billions of dollars. You're gonna get enough oil for your zip-o lighter back here and it's gonna take two decades and it's gonna cost you, you know, $30 billion. Yeah. And then you're gonna be able to get the answer. So that's not the concern. Yes. But this is the biggest news so far. Yes, because oil is dead critters. It's biotic. Yes. Yeah, it's all that oil under the that we find under the earth is from various living organisms that died and were compressed and so right now they are on Mars.

Everyone's looking for you know not always not always saying they're specifically looking for it, but everyone is certainly keeping an eye out for signs of past life on Mars. And that would be a good big clue. That would be finding the actual. Some of that Texas T. That's the equivalent of like, of like, you know, driving around a big rock and behind it, finding some skeletons. You're like, okay, I don't need, I don't need a fancy spectrometry, you know, I don't need to return a sample for analysis.

And you're like, oh, yeah, there's, there's some bones. That things. Look, it's got blades on its arms. You know, like one of the questions in your book in what of two is something like, how much of my oil is dinosaur? Like, what is the percentage that is actually interesting megafauna rather than just boring stuff? Yeah. And it's, there's a percentage. In general, oil, crude oil, oil comes from organisms

that died in the ocean. It's mostly like marine sediments. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but that is what mostly ends up producing those. Whereas coal is the remnants of organism, terrestrial organisms. And these are just because of differences in the in the deposition environment. But then at the same time, like things different forms of these coal oil, natural gas can be sort of converted into each other depending on what combinations of pressures and times and temperatures they're at. So your plastic dinosaur, it still may contain some dinosaur. You know, there were some aquatic dinosaurs, and there are some land environments that did end up contributing to oil deposits. But there's also just the reality that most of the CO2 that has been converted by life into complex carbon chains that would eventually get turned into

fossil fuels. Most of that's done is done not by big interesting animals. It's done by bacteria, it's done by plants, or most of the biomass of the earth is not in lions and bison. Yeah. It's and trees. Of course. And trees really are big contributors. I think it's interesting. I might be getting this wrong.

I think on land, like the pyramid of how much mass is in primary producers versus secondary producers is inverted. Is it, it's on land, trees are most of the mass. Yeah. Whereas in the ocean, it's like the secondary and tertiary at the other end of the food chain that makes up most of the actual mass. There doesn't matter, okay. But, and I'm not sure why.

I guess that's just how it shakes out. But, the, but yeah, so those big trees, trees I think are big and cool and charismatic. And they, there's this period that might, I think my favorite geologic period is the carboniferous, which is named because it's, we find all these carbon deposits. It's very carbonate.

Yeah, and it's when we got we got these huge forests of these big like fern-like kind of tree-like things. And this was kind of the first part of Earth's history where when I look at reconstructions of it, it feels like a recognizable environment to me. And I you, and I encourage people to just Google, like Google image search, like carboniferous, you know, paleo art landscape, it, it looks like, the, you know, it's, we had what looks like a forest, you know, it wouldn't have looked right, it looks like that's a weird forest with ferns and giant bugs and the trees don't look right when you really look

at them. You're like, oh, these are strange, not normal trees, but you're still like first gut instinct seeing it. It's like, oh, yeah, forests. I know what those are. It's like a swamp. It's a forest. And so that's like the first time that earth feels like home to me is the carboniferous. And yeah, and that's where most of our cold deposits come from is the carboniferous. So I guess, yeah, straight hitting oil on Mars immediately tells us there is a period in the past when this was laid down, when the earth looked something more like when Mars looked something more like what earth looks like now. Yeah. Skeletons behind a rock. Yes, I mean, that would be the easiest. Everyone, I mean, everyone, you get all these internet people looking at pictures with Mars. I mean, like, I think I see a face, I think, you know, I see a scale. It's like all the NASA people are, or if there's a skull,

they're they're going to go look at it. But there's, you know, excited. But there's also a lot of rocks that look like faces from certain areas. We're good at identifying things that look like faces specifically and like things that we want them to look like in general. Yeah. Well, in it in Mars news this week Curiosity has officially been on this I cannot believe this has been on the surface of Mars for 10 years So we've just hit a decade of curiosity doing science on Mars on August 5th That's when it landed and since then it's been very busy. It's climbed about 2,000 feet It's driven almost 18 miles. It's studied 41 different rocks and soil samples with its

bevy of scientific instruments, which have also taken pictures of clouds and of moons and of the landscape and measured the amount of radiation that future astronauts will have to contend with when they are scoping out Mars and the rover found that Gail crater had a lake once, which meant that at least tens of millions of years ago there was liquid water in that crater. So curiosity has had its mission extended now for another three years, even though it's looking pretty beat up. I like, you know, people are, you know, not happy that curiosity's wheels have taken such a beating in doing its mission.

But it does look like it's been on Mars for 10 years. Yeah. That's kind of cool. Yeah. I mean, and I'm so impressed that it, I'm impressed that all of these, every time they're going to, they're going to land a new one, I'm just like, this is, this can't work. I've, I've not got to work. I've done engine over before.

That's how I felt. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you never have this many things work on the first try. Yeah, yeah. You're doing this once? Yeah, exactly. And like, you can't fly out there and tweak something if there's something wrong.

And it's just such an incredible achievement. I'm so impressed. Yeah. Like, yeah, the wheels got a little beat up, but like, it's really incredible that that's the biggest problem that they've had. You know, it's, you know, it's, um, and I mean, it's, you know, maybe it's now that perseverance has landed. Suddenly curiosity is like, it's like, oh, the new cool person came into town and now I'm self-conscious about my wheels. But like, no, you don't need to do that.

They did build perseverance as wheels different. Yeah, they learned some lessons there. They did build perseverance. This wheel's different. Yeah, they learned some lessons there. Do you know what? I was fascinated to find out what the problem was with the wheels, which is that the way that erosion works on Mars is all wind blown erosion. And so it looks like there's a bunch of rocks on the surface of Mars and a lot of the

mar rocks, but a lot of them are just the bedrock that has been eroded. And what happens is the like hard, like slightly harder rock in the bedrock will get eroded by wind. And the stuff that's been exposed for a longer, it's been eroded for a longer period of time. And so it's thinner. And then as it goes down, as like time passes, you know, geologically, the stuff that has been eroded has been exposed more recently is thicker. And so basically the way that erosion works on Mars, it creates spikes, just sharp rock spikes that are not things you can push over. They are just spikes that shoot up into the air and drive a big, heavy rover around on those. It's a problem. It's always weird when nature, like through some very simple laws of physics or, you know, geology does something weird like creating spikes.

There's a theory where I think hoping to confirm this potentially with some of the orbiters were sending to Jupiter. But the theory is that some of those icy planets that are, you know, like the icy moons, the moons of Jupiter, like Europa, and then Pluto, and, you know, the further out Quiper Bell objects, the theory is that those are maybe covered in spikes because the way the ice melts when it's heated by the sun, you get this weird, there's this weird effect that happens sometimes where the little random dips

that get created because of the sun geometry end up melting faster. And so you have these hollows, like the low areas get lower and the higher is they high and you end up with spikes. They're called a penitentites, I think. So, which doesn't sound nice. No, and so, and this happens in some earth,

ice fields with the right combination of snow and sun and moisture. And so it's possible that if you tried to land on the ice surface of, you know, of Europa or Pluto, as you approach, you'd find, oh, the whole landscape is just 10-foot spikes. Hopefully, we'll send something that's not a person first to check that out. Yeah, and, but I'll still feel bad if we build a rover and spend, you know, 30 years, like, developing the wheels and developing everything.

Sorry, we've learned how to deal with the Mars surface. We made the wheels extra tough and then we lower it and it like it slums down for a landing on Europa and it's just like wedged between two giant spikes and it's sitting there with the wheels spinning in the air. And we're like, all right, we. This was a concern with the moon. We weren't sure if it was just going to be like, you know, and I don like, all right, we... This was a concern with the moon. We weren't sure if it was just gonna be like, you know, and I don't see why it couldn't be.

Just, you know, 10 feet deep dust. Yeah, yeah, I think there was an orthodoxy clerk story from before we landed about a spacecraft landing on the moon and just sinking in hundreds of feet deep. Why wouldn't it? I was like, oh, well, this is a problem. We're in that like it. There's the erosion works differently.

There's no atmosphere. Who knows how this stuff works? And so like that first step, you know, the Neil Armstrong stepping off of the thing, like, we had they had something of an idea just because the lander had not sunk in. Yeah. And they'd sent a they'd sent a thing before that landed on the surface. But that's why, but like where they maybe where they landed was a big move. A dusty plane, you know, so like they couldn't be that precise about it. So like when he when he was stepping off of the ladder, he was putting his foot down

and he's like, is it gonna support? I think you know, like, and that's why the, you know, the first, first, one of the first things he says is like, you're saying, okay, my feet are sinking in about this far. Right. You know, and it's one of the first things he says is like you're saying, okay, my feet are sinking in about this far. Right. You know, and it's because like they were really concerned. They worked. Yeah. Yeah, it turns out it's just the right amount of dust for a really great footprints.

So it's very photogenic. I'm sure you can add this into your conspiracy theory about it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Why would it be that way? Well, I think that NASA secretly went ahead of time to set up the lighting and the It's like they really did land on the moon, but the conspiracy was they also sent Stanley Kubrick to the moon Yeah, to make it look good

Gonna dust that the dust just perfect around the landing site. Yeah Well in A.O. Summall the news. I don't really know What's going on, but I do know that since the last time we recorded they had a draw. That's all I know. They've got a win and a draw. Great. Right.

So on average, they're winning. A win and a draw. Yeah. Well, yes, that's on average. That's winning for sure. Yeah, okay. You can round them up to winning. Yeah.

Yeah. If they get one, now if they lose one, they've had a win a tie and a draw, a win a draw and a loss. So do you round up or down? I think that point is they're in the middle. They're a draw. Yeah. And like in rounding, you round 3.5 to 4 in math, right? Well, actually in soccer, and for some reason, I think that a winning is 3 points, a draw is 1 and a loss is 0. So just to make the math not make any sense at all. No, but that gives you an unambiguous answer is a draw, is a loss. More a loss than a win.

More a loss than a win. Yeah. Oh, well, that's a shame. Randall, your book is an absolute delight. So is the first one. I can't get enough of it. And it's such a, it's a pleasure to pick it up. It's so much better than anything that I see when I open my phone. So that, that's an unambiguous win for everybody. Oh, thank you. It is called what if two additional serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. And I mean, if you want to see more of what Randall does, it's xkcd.com. And you can join regions of fans who have been following Randall

for over a decade now doing really wonderful things there. So you're gonna hit 20 years soon, man. Yeah, yeah, it's exciting. It's a lot of fun. I'm excited that turns out there's just still a lot more stuff to learn about. I was like, oh, I'm probably run out. But I'm also at the point in my science communication career where I realize that the things we know now are more

than they were before. Yeah, there's more. So there's always new stuff to talk about. Yeah, there's more science. There's a question where you're like, oh, this is an interesting question. And then you, and you're like, yeah, I guess that's, it might be this or that.

Maybe the dinosaurs died from this, maybe from that. And then you come back to it. It's like, oh, we solved that. Yeah. Nice. Ho's, it might be this or that. Maybe the dinosaurs died from this, maybe from that. And then you come back to it. It's like, oh, we solved that. Yeah. Nice. Hozier, you know. Somebody figured that out. People are always trying to figure things out.

What a delight. Yeah, yeah. The book is What If, Too? Edition No Serious Scientific Answers to Observe Hyposetical Questions. It's available September 13th. Everywhere, it's also available for preorder right now. You can preorder wherever there are books. And you probably should, because it's also available for pre-order right now. You can pre-order wherever there are books and you probably should because it's very,

very good. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode, special episode of The Deer Hake John. This podcast is edited by Joseph Tune of Medicines. It's produced by Rosie on All Huls' Role Haas. Our communications coordinator is Brooke Shotwell. Our editorial assistant is Debuketroch Riverarti. The music you're hearing now at the beginning of the podcast is by the great Gunnarola. And as they say in our hometown,

don't forget to be awesome.