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Tickets go on sale to the general public June 30th at somethingworthknowing.com. So come build a better world with us on September 16th and experience something worth knowing you can get your ticket at Complexly.info slash something. So 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 tons of other unafends answer your questions, give you peace 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 is plot, there's lots of chemistry and biology, but there isn't really any in physics. You know, physical chemistry is just sort of the scariest type of physics. So 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, but there's no one specializing in this.
So we haven't figured out how to do it, but it's all the same thing, Randall, as you, I'm sure know. And that thing is science. Yeah, well, I guess it's all I guess it's all particles. Yeah, or, or, you know, waves or some kind of complicated construct that we simplify into one or one of the other of these models.
Right, into the idea of particle science. 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 know more about those. There's tensors. I'm sure, you know, probably some tensors tripping around somewhere.
Definitely factors. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah.
So Randall, if you don't know, has been making a comic on the internet called XKCD since 2005. Five? Five? Okay.
Wow, look at me. But I was a fan of and have been a fan of for the whole time. I mean, it's 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 it's kind of a bit of a honor to be here with you. I was just talking to Daboki, who was our editorial assistant and helps with, you know, 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 doc together and she saw your icon and she was like, why is Randall Monroe? And am I looking at my terrible research notes?
So that's the that's the, 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 know, you've shown up in my research notes. I don't think I 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 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 in 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 with Dan.
Oh, right. Well, I probably only doing the thing you were going to do because you taught me how to do it by doing it first. No, 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's has, has, you know, scoothed me and found the answer, I'm just excited.
And then especially when they presented in a fun way like you do. Well, Randall has a book out. It's called What If To. It's the sequel, I guess, of a kind to what if the first what if in which 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 could 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 sent us questions in this episode. 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 the 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 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 make it spin right now, it's spinning at a speed where it does not tear itself apart. That's one of my favorite things about this planet. It remains in 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 pan takes out because it's spinning and that centrifugal force or centripetal acceleration or however, if you're a spheric person.
Yeah, it leads to the middle part of the Earth being flung outward. And so that's why, for example, you weigh 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 were traveling. Yes, there are the two different effects.
There's 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 it some of your weight. And because the Earth is kind of pancake shape, you're farther from the center of the Earth. Oh, yeah.
This is why Mount Everest is not the farthest thing from the center of the Earth. Right. Right. There are some mountains in the Andes that are farthest from the Earth's axis and from the center.
Yeah. But they're on the bulge. Yeah. And so the problem is if 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 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 that puts it into some context. Yeah.
So right now that planet's not going to hold itself together. Yeah. So right now, gravity is if you're 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 light, which has a lot more digits in it.
Gravity is no longer even a factor. You might as well not put in the equation. Right. Exactly.
It's like, oh, the number of digits in the forces from the rotation in the spherical 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 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 right, you know, fragmenting around you. Right.
Get yourself a really solid piece of ground that maybe can stick. You could stick with it. Yeah. 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 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, you know, along the direction that the Earth was traveling, that your chunk of the Earth was traveling. So but I'm not like shooting through anything. No, because all this stuff is shooting with me. 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 is going to be a problem. It's going to push on itself.
It's going to push it so like it's going to air will eventually get low enough pressure. They won't be able to breathe. Yeah. And it won't be anything holding it there.
It'll only take about a second or so for the air, you know, around you to have spread out enough, you know, as it's spreading out and pan kicking outward the same way as the Earth into this kind of disc within about a second or so, the air would be too thin to thin for you to breathe. That's and that's what kills probably not. I think I think that you would probably not last long enough to 68. Okay.
It does depend a little bit on exactly what happens with what pieces of the crust are around you. You think I'm going to get hit by something? You know, I'm not sure. Any time 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 geosationary satellites around us. And it would only take about a second or so for the disc to reach that belt of geosationary satellites.
And I'm not going to get hit by a satellite, but probably somebody is and definitely something is. Yeah. And so like once the satellites hit the expanding edge of the atmosphere, you know, they'll be 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. Quick. Yeah. And then from that, there'll be a blast of, you know, 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 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 say on the hand grip side and let the laser stuff happen out on the other side. Yeah. And that's also what you so 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 have to wait for all those nuclear explosions to get to me. Yeah.
And right at the North Pole, you know, you're still part of this area. So I guess you are purer wedding once a second. Yes. But I think purer wedding once a second to survive.
I can do that. Yeah. Although I, as I say that, I'm thinking, I haven't actually tried to purer once a second. Maybe that's faster than it sounds.
It's, right. Anyone who does ballet who's listening to this is going to be like, Oh boy, you're after this podcast is over. You're going to go try that and you're going to find out. Yeah.
Do my eyes stay in my body or not? Yeah. There's a speed at which you can purer at it and it does become a health problem, especially if you let your arms swing outward. Oh, yeah.
You got to get into the 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 is in fact amazingly interesting. We're going to do a question 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 changed it. P.S.
It would be super cool if you're team to collaboration with Randall Monroe on a complicated science question submission, since he's going to be promoting what if too soon. Do you know Shane? No, I don't. But I really appreciate that.
He's on your team. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. No, thanks for the plug.
Thanks for I guess making all of this happen. Yeah. So here's what happens. So we're now going to see what happens when we apply these skills to a question 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, we'll either want to play them off each other or you know, 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 Atmospheric Administration's website about answering the question like, I don't we knew hurricanes.
This is not great that we're here, but we're here. Yeah, and you know, 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, let'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 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 means 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 yeah, 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 isn't constantly messing with the atmosphere and throwing things into completely 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, where none of the minerals on Earth have been around the whole time. Yeah, it's like, I like learning about things that Earth has that no one else has. You know, life is the big one as far as we know. But I like plate tectonics.
There's a couple of moons that kind of have plate tectonics, but they're 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 we need to be clear about what we mean and sort of embrace the fact that, okay, everyone is on different pages about what things mean, and we do our best to 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 Jeff.
So the ask, I think that a big enough asteroid could maybe make the thing happen a little earlier. But if the Earth is going to do a super volcano, it's going to happen and it's going to 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 could trigger the same 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 then it bursts 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 near the Oregon, Washington border in the 1980s. Yeah, 1980. And what happened there is they saw the mountain bulging up, you know, clearly there's magma building up under it. They knew that this was, you know, all right, this is a volcano, 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, 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, you know, blasted outward and created the giant cloud of ejecta and the the horrors and all the stuff that flowed out of the volcano.
But it really was just the the lid got removed. And then right, that's when the eruption happened. And so yeah, if you 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 function. 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, you know, even fairly contemporary ones, we had people of like, here are all the different dinosaurs we know about, here's, you know, their their features, how they lived, why did they die? No one really knows. Could be anything, you know, lots of ideas.
Yeah. And then and then and the asteroid idea seemed outlandish when it was proposed, you know, Walter Alvarez and the people who kind of pushed that idea and until they found the crater that was sort of a smoking gun and determined it was really linked to the extinction, you know, we 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 but the thing about those mass extinctions is that asteroid impact explains one of the kind of five big mass extinctions in 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 it doesn't get across what we're talking about. The problem with saying large igneous provinces is that it sounds less scary than a volcano, but the problem is saying volcano is that it also sounds less scary than what actually happened. Yeah, which is like your entire the 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 blorping out across the whole landscape. And you'll find these mild deep miles deep layers of just lava that was all released at once. The 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, or magnetic outpouring, large igneous province.
And it's it makes these cool columns as the lava piles up. And so these 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 to have any problems. 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.
Yeah. 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, okay, 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, the meteor impact.
I mean, it was a big meteor impact. Like 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? Like some kind of a resonating thing.
And unfortunately, like I dug up some old maps and I was like, no, but it wasn't. Okay, so much for that theory. But 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 is, there is some, some decent suggestions as they try to get the timeline exactly right that maybe the Deccan traps were getting going.
But then when the asteroid hit in Mexico, you know, 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, well, I didn't know about that.
Second, I assume that something in the last six or a million years, and I only assume 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 gonna 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. It says science fact, Jupiter is bulletproof. It is. 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 crystal in 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 to some extent, we don't know exactly what 's going on down there. Never been there. Yeah. No one's visited the core of Jupiter and return to know one hour.
We haven't even got close to visiting the core of our planet. Yeah. We're like right here. 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 tidal friction.
And so throughout all of our history, it's been slowing down. Yeah, the day's used to be shorter. But since a little before I was born, it's been speeding up. Yeah, Twitter is upset about this right now.
I've been several people have attacked me. Okay. I'm terrified. Should I be worried about this?
And I'm like, no, and they're like, well, well, well, so what I really like about it is, you know, a few years ago, I stumbled on a geophysist talking about this about how like, we sort of know the reason and it's something going on with turbulent currents in the in the outer core of the Earth, most likely. You know, there's there's stuff flowing around and that's what redistributes the redistribution of mass. Yeah. And it's like chaotic.
So it's yeah, 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 these currents are, you know, the patterns that are causing this are unknown and possibly unknowable. Yep. 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 not only well insulated but increasingly well insulated in recent years. Right.
Now the now we're not even letting the heat get off the surface. That's, yes, we're working on that. Maybe by the time this podcast comes out, we'll have some legislation that's going to be on the books. Yeah.
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. 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 all work together. And this podcast is also sponsored by a physics pedant who I would like to clarify. They are merely precise about terminology, not actually penance, which if you would be a 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, 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. That's very sweet. Sorry sweet.
I like that so much. I like siblings. Yeah, it's a good vibe. This episode of your Hank Adonis Branti by Shompify.
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With new subscription only, wild supplies last until September 27th, 2026. See website for more details. All right, here's another question from one of our listeners. It's from Alec who asks Deerhank 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. Do you figure out how big the Vatican is? You figure out how big the land is and then you divide them and the book you did that in my little notes here.
Do you want to know the answer? Sure. 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. Yeah, we're at what?
332 million or so? Yeah, that's one. My brain. Yeah.
I'll create the number every once in a while. But I recently went to 330. 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 going to take a second for mine. 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 round and gets you to 8. Right.
And so it doesn't get well, it definitely doesn't get you to 7. So you can start to say, well, maybe it's time to start saying 7 and a half, which it was a while ago, or you can say 7.7. Yeah. And so, but yeah, the US is 332.
So we could have all but about 10 percent, you know, 90% of us could 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 do a vote.
We'll be like, all right, we have 10% of you need to move somewhere. The problem is that a lot of these Vatican's are going to be in Alaska. And that's going to be tricky for me. I mean, there are large chunks of the earth that if you're if you get a swatch of half a square kilometer, yeah, you know, if you're 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 in.
If you know, your swatch of land is 100 miles away from the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica, you're going to 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 the 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 of millions of millions of other people who's only industry as penguin tourism.
Yeah. Now, I definitely rather have just like a little bit of not a country right here, then a whole 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 from your book.
Could a person eat a whole cloud? This question surprised me a bunch of different times, because I know if something's about clouds, they could be very big, but they don't have to be it's on page 195 if you look at them. And so so, Randall, can I eat a cloud? No, no, not 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 go out of those things.
Yeah, because like water is water is edible. 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 doing 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 this 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 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 a regional name. Crunch crunch. Yeah, but it's like, it's sort of like a you know, milkshakey texture, sort of like ice cream.
I feel like you need that. Because the teeth are getting involved a little bit. Yeah, Boba, I don't know how to, I don't know how to classify. That's that's a great point.
I think that Boba, you in the same vein as like a thin soup with noodles in it, you both eat and drink it. Yeah, you ingest Boba. So if you had a and I do know, 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 moist air 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 and you could do that. And there are some very small clouds. Yeah, yeah, there's, you know, there's there's the big ones that you see and you're like, Oh, I'm not going to eat that one.
But then there's the little ones that just kind of very briefly block the sun as they go over you. Yes. Those little wisps, the ones that are only out on the hottest of days where you're like, could you please be a little bit a little bit bigger? And yeah, and I think I looked at clouds from both sides now.
Yeah, from, I mean, I've looked from up from down, when I lose, from strange from charm. No, that, wow, if you do try to eat a cloud though, like you can, 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.
Mainly 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 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, you know, I suppose is true of anything.
But yeah, if you, if you just start trying to swallow a cloud and you're, you know, 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. And they've got a lot of potato chip, they've got a lot of oil. And so when you like crunch it up in your mouth, the air escapes from your mouth.
And the potato part goes down your throat. And so with the cloud, that 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 this is another of those kind of definition questions.
I think that the funnier answer is that it's the water. That's easy to sort of get. That's feels like what I'm eating. Yeah.
Well, like the same way when you eat Pringle, 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, 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.
And so if you eat a chunk of cloud and then you burp the air out, the air wetter in your body is going to, yeah, it's going to be saturated with moisture. So you're going to be ripping out and you're making more cloud. Yeah, because your body is really is like moisture than the environment. Because the cloud is not nearly as much stuff as you think.
Yeah. Like you look at it, it feels like it'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 will block the sound for it. Yeah, they'll like, when they go over, you're like, oh, it gets dark for 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 going to be way more. I thought it was going to be like a half a year for me to drink that cloud. Yeah, no, you could one 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.
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 store down, build it has a device that you can get the cloud in there. It'll use a pattern squeezing mechanism to juice the man's somebody would somebody would pay a lot of money for cloud juice. Also, that's a fantastic name brand for a wild water.
Cloud juice. I like that on put that on a label. All right, no, we still left for me. I like it.
All right, let's do one more question from the deer hank of John box. It's from Huey who asks, Dear Hank and 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 news so far. Yeah. 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 want to extract.
But what's so much more? It doesn't have that problem. Yeah, first of all, you can't get it's not getting here. That'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 can get enough oil for your Zippo lighter back here and it's gonna take two decades and it's gonna cost you, you know, 30 billion dollars. Yeah.
And then you're gonna get. 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 yes signs of past life on Mars. And that would be a good would be a big clue.
That would be a big clue. That's the actual that Texas tea. That's the equivalent of like, you know, driving around a big rock and behind it finding some skeletons. You're like, okay, I don't need a fancy spectrometry.
You know, I don't need to to return a sample for analysis. And they'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 I have to is something like how much of my oil is dinosaur. Like, what is what is the percentage that is actually interesting megafauna rather than just boring stuff?
Yeah, and it's it's it's there's a percentage in general oil, you know, crude oil that oil comes from organisms that died in the ocean. It's mostly like, 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 organisms, terrestrial organisms.
Okay. 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 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 your your plastic dinosaur, it still may contain some dinosaur, you know, there were 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 so like 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 that's done is done not by big interesting animals. It's done by bacteria, it's done by plants, just that's most of the biomass of the earth is not in, you know, lions and bison. Yeah, yeah, it's and trees really are big contributors.
Yeah. I think it's interesting. Now 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's on land trees are most of the mass.
Yeah. Whereas in the ocean, it's like the secondary and tertiary, the other end of the food chain that makes up most of the actual mass. Okay. But 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. Like if you and I encourage people to just Google like Google search, like carboniferous, you know, paleo art landscape, 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 sort of giant bugs and the trees don't look right when you really look at them. You're like, Oh, these are these are strange, not normal trees, but you're still like first gut instinct seeing it as like, Oh yeah, forests.
I know what those are. It's like a small, you know, 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 coal deposits come from is 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 like 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 of Mars. I mean, like, I think I see a face. I think, you know, I see a skill.
It's like all the NASA people are if there's a skull there, they're going to go look at it. But there's, you know, but there's also a lot of rocks that look like faces from certain. 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 2000 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 the Yell 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. People are not happy that Curiosity's wheels have taken such a beating and it's 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 with all of these. Every time they're going to land a new one, I'm just like, this can't work. I've not got to work.
That's how I felt. Yeah. Yeah. You never have this many things work on the first try.
Yeah. Yeah. You're doing this once? Yeah, exactly.
And 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. Yeah.
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, it's, and I mean, it's, you know, maybe it's now that 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, they did build Perseverance's wheels different.
Yeah, they learned some lessons there. Do you know, 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 them are 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 longer has 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 you got to 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 geology does something weird like creating spikes. There's a theory where I think hoping to confirm this potentially with some of the orbiters we're sending to Jupiter. But the theory is that some of those icy planets that are like the icy moons, the moons of Jupiter, like Europa, and then Pluto, and the further out quite well 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 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 high areas say 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, you know, 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 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, you know, the Mars surface, we made the wheel extra tough, and then we lower it and it like comes 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't see why it couldn't be just, you know, 10 feet deep dust. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's, there's an Earth and Sea clark story from before we landed about a space, a spacecraft landing on the moon and just sinking in hundreds of feet deep.
Why? Why wouldn't I was like, oh, well, this is a problem where 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 dusty plane, you know, so like, like they couldn't be that precise about it.
So like when he was stepping off of the ladder, he was putting his foot down and he's like, is it going to support us? And that's why the 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, it's because like, they were really concerned.
Yeah. Yeah. It turns out it's just the right amount of dust for really great footprints. Yeah.
It's very photogenic. I'm sure you can add this into your conspiracy theory. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Why would it be that way? Well, I think NASA secretly went ahead of time to set up the lighting and the, it's like, it really did land on the moon. But the conspiracy was they also sent Stanley Kubrick to the moon.
That's to make it look good. Yeah. It does that. The dust is perfect around the landing site.
Yeah. Well, and they have to go over 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 to win in a draw.
Great. So on average, they're winning a win in a draw? Yeah. Well, yes.
That's on average. That's winning for sure. It's 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 in a draw, a win a draw and a loss. So do you round up or down?
I think I think that at that point is they're in the middle. They're a draw. Yeah. And like in rounding, you round a, you round 3.5 to 4 in math, right?
Well, actually in soccer, and for some reason, I think that winning is three points, a draw is one and a loss is zero. So just to make the math not make any sense at all. No, but that gives you an ambiguous answer is a draw is a loss. It's more a loss than a win.