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.

— Randall Munroe

Randall Munroe Quotes

The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.

— Randall Munroe

Statistically, your first neutrino interaction probably happens somewhere around age ten.

— Randall Munroe

Our most lasting relic will probably be the layer of plastic we’ve deposited across the planet.

— Randall Munroe

Eventually, humans will die out. Nobody knows when,12 but nothing lives forever.

— Randall Munroe

A 1-watt laser is an extremely dangerous thing. It’s not just powerful enough to blind you – it’s capable of burning skin and setting things on fire.

— Randall Munroe

Then the 92nd little pig built a house out of depleted uranium and the wolf was like, “dude.

— Randall Munroe

It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing.

— Randall Munroe

However, the tests still suggest that nuclear weapons probably don’t make great bottle openers.

— Randall Munroe

From 1960 into the 21st century, Pennsylvania has voted for five different people named Bob Casey.

— Randall Munroe

Anyone who says that they’re great at communicating but ‘people are bad at listening’ is confused about how communication works.

— Randall Munroe

There’s no nondestructive test for indestructibility.

— Randall Munroe

Physics doesn’t care if your question is weird. It just gives you the answer, without judging.

— Randall Munroe

This is a completely ridiculous suggestion, so it should come as no surprise that it was studied by the US government during the Cold War.

— Randall Munroe

In Thor the main character is at one point spinning his hammer so fast that he creates a strong tornado. Would this be possible in real life?

— Randall Munroe

If a Venus fly trap could eat a person, about how long would it take for the human to be fully de-juiced and absorbed?

— Randall Munroe

Hello! This is a book of bad ideas.

— Randall Munroe

I really love that we can ask physics ridiculous questions like, “What kind of gas mileage would my house get on the highway?” and physics has to answer us.

— Randall Munroe

To this day I have no idea where I got “3 billion” and “5 billion” from. Clearly, I didn’t really get how numbers worked.

— Randall Munroe

It might seem confusing that someone navigating toward Earth’s north pole would be attracted to the MRI’s south pole, but that’s because the Earth’s pole names are backward. The “north” end of a magnet is the one that points toward the Earth’s north pole, which means the Earth’s north magnetic pole is technically a south magnetic pole, and vice versa. This is deeply annoying to me, but there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well move on.

— Randall Munroe

Removing Japan would also have a big effect on ocean currents.

— Randall Munroe
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