What if xkcd baseball

Take remote surgery. If a surgeon in New York uses a remote surgery robot in San Francisco to do eye surgery, and the robot aims for the patient's eye with the precision of Rosetta's approach, it will point its laser somewhere around here:. However this isn't a fair comparison either. Both Rosetta and our laser surgeon [4] I really hope that's what this job is called will refine their movements as they make their final approaches, achieving very high precision.

When it comes down to it, the two tasks—remote surgery and remote probe-landing—are probably about equally precise, in a distance sense. Which brings me to something a little different with which I'd like to end this article: A question for you to try to answer. Namely: Would you rather bet a million dollars on a spacecraft landing engineer's ability to successfully perform eye surgery, or an eye surgeon's ability to land a probe on a comet?

I haven't been able to decide. Prev Next Hitting a comet Astrophysicists are always saying things like "This mission to this comet is equivalent to throwing a baseball from New York and hitting a particular window in San Francisco. Throwing is hard. In order to deliver a baseball to a batter, a pitcher has to release the ball at exactly the right point in the throw. A timing error of half a millisecond in either direction is enough to cause the ball to miss the strike zone.

To put that in perspective, it takes about five milliseconds for the fastest nerve impulse to travel the length of the arm. In terms of timing, this is like a drummer dropping a drumstick from the 10th story and hitting a drum on the ground on the correct beat. We seem to be much better at throwing things forward than throwing them upward.

But we could also sidestep the whole problem by using a device like this one:. It could be a springboard, a greased chute, or even a dangling sling—anything that redirects the object upward without adding to—or subtracting from—its speed. Of course, we could also try this:. On average, not just in spring or fall. Restraining an Airplane. If you wanted to anchor an airplane into the ground so it wouldn't be able to take off, what would the rope have to be made out of?

Dropping a Mountain. What if a huge mountain—Denali, say—had the bottom inch of its base disappear? What would happen from the impact of the mountain falling 1 inch? What about 1 foot? What if the mountain's base were raised to the present height of the summit, and then the whole thing were allowed to drop to the earth? What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane?

Would it negate the need for a heat shield? Is it possible for a spacecraft to control its reentry in such a way that it avoids the atmospheric compression and thus would not require the expensive and relatively fragile heat shield on the outside?

Could a small rocket with payload be lifted to a high point in the atmosphere where it would only need a small rocket to get to escape velocity? Updating a Printed Wikipedia. If you had a printed version of the whole of say, the English Wikipedia, how many printers would you need in order to keep up with the changes made to the live version? If you could teleport to a random place of the surface of the Earth, what are the odds that you'll see signs of intelligent life?

Falling With Helium. What if I jumped out of an airplane with a couple of tanks of helium and one huge, un-inflated balloon? Then, while falling, I release the helium and fill the balloon. How long of a fall would I need in order for the balloon to slow me enough that I could land safely? Google's Datacenters on Punch Cards. If you suddenly began rising steadily at one foot per second, how exactly would you die?

Would you freeze or suffocate first? Or something else? Twitter Timeline Height. If our Twitter timelines tweets by the people we follow actually extended off the screen in both directions, how tall would they be? How long would it take for people to notice their weight gain if the mean radius of the world expanded by 1cm every second?

Assuming the average composition of rock were maintained. If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince? Facebook of the Dead. The Constant Groundskeeper. How big of a lawn would you have to have so that when you finished mowing you'd need to start over because the grass has grown? I was absentmindedly stirring a cup of hot tea, when I got to thinking, "aren't I actually adding kinetic energy into this cup? Would I be able to boil a cup of water by stirring?

What is the furthest one human being has ever been from every other living person? Were they lonely? Lethal Neutrinos. How much of the Earth's currently-existing water has ever been turned into a soft drink at some point in its history? I use one of those old phones where you type with numbers—for example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. Some words have consecutive letters on the same number. When they do, you have to pause between letters, making those words annoying to type.

What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key? Reading Every Book. At what point in human history were there too many English books to be able to read them all in one lifetime? What height would humans reach if we kept growing through our whole development period i. What if we were to dump all the tea in the world into the Great Lakes?

How strong, compared to a regular cup of tea, would the lake tea be? What if every virus in the world were collected into one area? How much volume would they take up and what would they look like?

Is there any way to fire a gun so that the bullet flies through the air and can then be safely caught by hand? Astrophysicists are always saying things like "This mission to this comet is equivalent to throwing a baseball from New York and hitting a particular window in San Francisco.

If you made a beach using grains the proportionate size of the stars in the Milky Way, what would that beach look like? Assuming that you have a spaceship in orbit around the Earth, could you propel your ship to speeds exceeding escape velocity by hitting golf balls in the other direction? If so, how many golf balls would be required to reach the Moon? Far-Traveling Objects. In terms of human-made objects, has Voyager 1 travelled the farthest distance?

It's certainly the farthest from Earth we know about. But what about the edge of ultracentrifuges, or generator turbines that have been running for years, for example? Enforced by Radar. I've occasionally seen "radar enforced" on speed limit signs, and I can't help but ask: How intense would radio waves have to be to stop a car from going over the speed limit, and what would happen if this were attempted? Soda Sequestration. How much CO 2 is contained in the world's stock of bottled fizzy drinks?

How much soda would be needed to bring atmospheric CO 2 back to preindustrial levels? Tungsten Countertop. Great Tree, Great Axe.

I just moved into a new apartment. It includes hot water but I have to pay the electric bill. So being a person on a budget Windshield Raindrops. Billion-Story Building. My daughter — age 4. It turns out not only is that hard to help her appreciate this size, I am not at all able to explain all of the other difficulties you'd have to overcome. First of all, it would bot stand under it's own weight. Also, it would be many times the distance the Earth is from the Moon.

If we could convert the energy to build the Great Pyramid, would it be enough to send a rocket to the Moon and back?

What if you were to somehow ignite the pollen that floats around in the air in spring? Other than being a really bad idea, what effect would it have? I was watching this video and was wondering: How many birds there would need to be for gravity to take over and force them into a gargantuan ball of birds?

For that matter, which war has the highest movie time:war time ratio? Plastic Dinosaurs. As plastic is made from oil and oil is made from dead dinosaurs, how much actual real dinosaur is there in a plastic dinosaur?

As a writer, I'm wondering what would be the cumulative energy of the hundreds of thousands of keystrokes required to write a novel. Vanishing Water. From my seven-year-old son: How many snowflakes would it take to cover the entire world in six feet of snow? I don't know why six feet Suppose you were to print, in 12 point text, the numeral 1 using a common cheap ink-jet printer. How many molecules of the ink would be used?

At what numerical value would the number printed approximately equal the number of ink molecules used? Expensive Shoebox. What would be the most expensive way to fill a size 11 shoebox e. If I shot an infinitely strong laser beam into the sky at a random point, how much damage would it do? Walking New York. People sometimes say "If I had all the money in the world I'm curious, though, what would happen if one person had all of the world's money? My year-old daughter is proposing an interesting project.

She is planning to attach a number of helium balloons to a chair, which in turn would be tethered by means of a rope to a Ferrari. Her year-old friend would then drive the Ferrari around, while she sits in the chair enjoying uninterrupted views of the countryside. Leaving aside the legal and insurance difficulties, my daughter is keen to know the maximum speed that she could expect to attain, and how many helium balloons would be required.

Visit Every State. When I was about 8 years old, shoveling snow on a freezing day in Colorado, I wished that I could be instantly transported to the surface of the Sun, just for a nanosecond, then instantly transported back. I figured this would be long enough to warm me up but not long enough to harm me. What would actually happen? The core on the other hand, would vapourize you. If you stripped away all the rules of car racing and had a contest which was simply to get a human being around a track times as fast as possible, what strategy would win?

Let's say the racer has to survive. Physical Salary. What if people's incomes appeared around them as cash in real time? How much would you need to make to be in real trouble? Stopping rain from falling on something with an umbrella or a tent is boring. What if you tried to stop rain with a laser that targeted and vaporized each incoming droplet before it could come within ten feet of the ground?

Alternate Universe What Ifs. What would happen if all of the rivers in the US were instantly frozen in the middle of the summer? What if I made a lava lamp out of real lava? What could I use as a clear medium? How close could I stand to watch it? Fairy Demographics. How many fairies would fly around, if each fairy is born from the first laugh of a child and fairies were immortal?

What if there was a lake on the Moon? What would it be like to swim in it? Presuming that it is sheltered in a regular atmosphere, in some giant dome or something. You are in a boat directly over the Mariana Trench. If you drop a 7kg bowling ball over the side, how long would it take to hit the bottom? If you made an elevator that would go to space like the one you mentioned in the billion-story building and built a staircase up assuming regulated air pressure about how long would it take to climb to the top?

Would it be possible for two teams in a tug-o-war to overcome the ultimate tensile strength of an iron rod and pull it apart? How big would the teams have to be? What in my pocket actually contains more energy, my Zippo or my smartphone? What would be the best way of getting the energy from one to the other?

And since I am already feeling like Bilbo in this one, is there anything else in my pocket that would have unexpected amounts of stored energy? Black Hole Moon. What would happen if the Moon were replaced with an equivalently-massed black hole?

If it's possible, what would a lunar "holar"? I've long thought about putting a flamethrower on the front of a car to melt snow and ice before you drive across it.

Now I've realized that a flamethrower is impractical, but what about a high-powered microwave emitter? I have had a particular problem for as long as I can remember. Any time I attempt to heat left over Chinese food in a microwave, it fails to heat completely through somewhere.

Usually the center but not always and usually rice, but often it will be a small section of meat. It's baffling and has made me automatically adjust heating times to over 2 minutes. In most cases this tends to heat the bowl or plate more than the food. So I suppose the question is what is the optimal time to heat left over Chinese food in the microwave, how about an watt microwave?