The amount of power in question, 700 watts, is about a horsepower, so if you want to boil tea in two minutes, you’ll need at least one horse to stir it hard enough.
We keep trying to make our units of measurement make sense. But the truth is that the world is an absurd place; why not embrace it? It’s true, unit conversion errors have caused us to lose space probes once in a while. But isn’t that a small price to pay for silliness?
But this is where it gets weird. The mole planet would be a giant sphere of meat.
There are hopes that carbon nanotube-based materials could provide the required strength – adding this to the long list of engineering problems that can be waved away by tacking on the prefix “nano-.
Q. What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface? – Jonathan Bastien-Filiatrault A. Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.
To put it another way, the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan.
Even calling DNA “source code” sells it short – compared to DNA, our most complex programming projects are like pocket calculators.
Red Delicious apples, whose misleading name is a travesty.
If 10 percent of them are close to your age, that would be around 50,000 people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you would find true love only in one lifetime out of 10,000.
Eventually, they give up, and the unexplained meteorological phenomenon is simply called a “dubstep storm,” because – in the words of one researcher – “It had one hell of a drop.
Magnitude -15 A drifting mote of dust coming to rest on a table Sometimes it’s nice not to destroy the world for a change.
Centuries from now, deep in concrete vaults, the light from our most toxic waste will still be shining.
But maybe it won’t. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus.
That’s one in 27 quinquatrigintillion.
It would blast the material out of the way with powerful shockwaves, leaving a trail of superhot plasma behind it. This would be something never before seen in the history of the universe: an underground shooting star.
Actually, what I’m confused about is how.
You can work through the physics of interstellar radio attenuation,1 but the problem is captured pretty well by considering the economics of the situation: If your TV signals are getting to another star, you’re wasting money. Powering a transmitter is expensive, and creatures on other stars aren’t buying the products in the TV commercials that pay your power bill. The full picture is more complicated, but the bottom.
If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?
The Moon would shine as brightly as the midmorning sun, and by the end of the two minutes, the lunar regolith would be heated to a glow.
Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?