What If? 2

July 15, 2022
Former NASA roboticist Munroe continues his quest to answer the world's unlikeliest questions. Assuming you had enough fuel, how long would it take you to drive to the edge of the observable universe? If you traveled at 65 mph, writes the author, "it will take you 480,000,000,000,000,000 years...to get there, or 35 million times the current age of the universe." How Munroe arrives at such calculations isn't always clear, and his math doesn't always show the work, but roll with it. He estimates that a hungry T. rex set loose on the streets of New York might be placated with 80 hamburgers--and if the dinosaur decides to devour a friend of yours instead of the proffered treat, "anyway, hey, you have 80 burgers." Speaking of eating, can a person eat a cloud? No, writes the author, not unless you can squeeze the air out of it, and never mind whether the water within the cloud is potable. Munroe takes clear delight in his odd investigations--e.g., whether a person--or a vampire, maybe--can get drunk drinking a drunk person's blood. The answer has to do with the dilution of ethanol, but Munroe pauses to counsel that it's a very bad idea to drink someone else's blood in the first instance: "I'm not a doctor, and I try not to give medical advice in my books. However, I will confidently say that you shouldn't drink the blood of someone with a viral hemorrhagic fever." You've got to like a book that blends deep dives into such matters as the nature of black holes and the mathematics of genealogy with handy pop-culture references--as when Munroe brightly likens the unfortunate Greek king Sisyphus to Hollywood stalwart Dwayne Johnson, because, of course, rocks are involved in both cases. A delight for science geeks with a penchant for oddball thought experiments.

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