Literature / What If? 2

The book you're holding weighs about as much as the electrons in two dolphins. That information probably isn't useful for anything, but I hope you enjoy it, anyway.

"This is one of those things that seems like it shouldn't work that way, but it turns out it works exactly that way."

Randall Munroe, Chapter 43: Basketball Earth

What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions is the sequel to Randall Munroe's bestseller, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Released in September 2022, the book provides full, in-depth answers to another batch of 64 extremely strange questions, ranging from "If house dust comprises up to 80 percent dead skin, how many people worth of skin does a person consume in a lifetime?" to "What if all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops?" to "What would happen if the Solar System was filled with soup out to Jupiter?", all with the classic style and classic characters of xkcd.

Randall takes these questions and answers them all, going into extreme detail about the ins and outs of the question, disassembling and explaining everything. You're almost guaranteed to learn something you never knew from this book,^{[citation needed]} such as the flammability of diamond, or how Jupiter is bulletproof, or how easy it is to destroy the solar system.

Not to be confused with What If?, a trope that involves changing an event or factor within a preexisting narrative and creating a whole new story from its effects.

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What if What If? 2 had a TV Tropes page? What examples would be listed?

• Acquainted with Emergency Services: In the form of a Call-Back to the first What If? book. In Weird & Worrying #1, one question asks "What would it take to defeat Air Force One with a drone???" Cueball, as Randall, is seen on his phone:
  Randall: Hello, Secret Service? Yes, it's Randall again...

• Anvil on Head: Explored in a question in Short Answers #4, asking what happens if an anvil falls on you from space.
  When an anvil lands on you, it doesn't really matter how high it fell from.

• Apocalypse How, Class 6 and below:
  • Chapter 50: Japan Runs an Errand explores what happens if the entirety of Japan vanishes without a trace. The result: ocean levels rising about 1.5 feet in South America, and falling the same amount in Alaska and Asia. The effects are over ten times more drastic if we choose to also remove the part of Japan that's underwater, flooding South America in 10 to 20 feet of water. Replacing Japan poses the exact same risk of flooding, this time in Asia.
  • Chapter 64: Lemon Drops and Gumdrops explores the famous Barney & Friends musical in a more literal tone. Basically, the world would be coated in so much sugar that the atmosphere would vaporize all life on Earth, leaving nothing but sugar-eating thermophilic and extremophilic organisms, alongside a lot of saltwater taffy. Don't even start on snowflakes being candy bars and milkshakes.

• Apocalypse How, Class X and up: This book features a lot of these, which is to be expected with questions like "What would happen if the Earth's rotation were sped up until a day only lasted a second?"
  • Chapter 1: Soupiter showcases the science of filling the entire solar system with soup, out to Jupiter's orbit. The result: A black hole so large, the entire solar system is destroyed within 30 minutes, after which the concept of time itself begins to fail.
  • Chapter 13: Lose Weight the Slow and Incredibly Difficult Way involves "relocating" the Earth's mass to lose 20 pounds. To do so, you'd need to remove 3,750 kilometers of the Earth's surface, which, safe to say, is very much an issue for survivability.
  • Chapter 20: Elemental Worlds explores what happens if Mercury, Ceres, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are made of Mercury, Cerium, Uranium, Neptunium, and Plutonium, respectively. While Mercury Mercury and Cerium Ceres are, generally, perfectly fine for our Solar System (brighter than they currently are, but not enough to really affect us on Earth), the other three have more catastrophic implications, especially for Neptunium Neptune, which would glow so hot that the planet vaporizes itself. Things get worse using unstable isotopes - if our Uranium Uranus were made of ²³⁵U instead of ²³⁸U, the resulting radiation would cause a nuclear reaction so strong that the plasma wave would strip Earth to nothing but a blob of magma in only 3 hours.
  • Chapter 21: One-Second Day explores what happens if Earth spins fast enough for each day to last only a second. The result: Earth begins to expand so wide that it could cover the entire Solar system, and it would be spinning fast enough to annihilate anything in its path. Once the moon crosses paths with Earth, the resulting collision is so powerful that the Moon instantly becomes a comet, and the flash of light and heat produced would be so powerful that, should you be on the surface of the Sun, it would be brighter above you than below you.
  • Short Answers #4 explores the safest location to be when slicing Earth in half, like an apple. Naturally, it's holding the knife.
  • Chapter 48: Proton Earth, Electron Moon explores the fun science of an Earth made entirely of protons, and a Moon made entirely of electrons. The result: an electrically supercharged black hole with the mass of the observable universe, expanding at the speed of light.
  • Chapter 55: Niagara Straw explores what happens when you try to funnel the entire flow of Niagara Falls through a standard drinking straw. Assuming you somehow manage to get the water to not choke, the water will be moving at a quarter the speed of light, the Earth will be destroyed, and the 5 committees in charge of Niagara Falls will be very unhappy.
    And yet I bet someone would still try to go over it in a barrel.
  • Chapter 60: Dog Overload explores an arbitrarily large number of dogs. Assuming each dog lives 20 years, the first set of 2 billion dogs are all 5 years old, and each dog (not pair of dogs!) has 5 puppies every year from age 5-15... within 120 years, the number of dogs will engulf the Sun. By the 330th year, the dogs encompass the observable universe.
  • Chapter 63: Walking on the Sun explores when you can touch the Sun at room temperature. For this, you have to wait 20 billion years, when the Sun dies and cools naturally.

• Applied Phlebotinum: Used almost exclusively for demonstration.
  • Chapter 2: Helicopter Ride explores what happens to a helicopter if you decide to latch onto the blades. Since, normally, you'd fall off about halfway through the first turn from centrifugal force alone, Randall introduces the ACME Hand Anchors, labeled as "Incredibly dangerous" and "The FAA hates it!", to keep Cueball attached. It doesn't help though, since your body won't be attatched to your arms for much longer.
  • Chapter 28: Earth Eye explores an eye the size of Earth. No matter how you upscale it, the eye wouldn't be able to work, so Randall just gives up on going for realism here and just imagines an eyeball that works exactly like a normal one.
  • Chapter 29: Build Rome in a Day explores the question "How many people would it take to build Rome in a day?" in a literal way. If everyone on Earth helped an equal amount, it could be feasibly be done in two hours to 15 minutes, but this is assuming people actually want to work together.
  • Chapter 54: Snowball replaces the snow on Mount Everest, which is dry snow that isn't sticky, with wet snow, the kind we're most familiar with. A Wizard Did It!
  • Chapter 58: Earth-Moon Fire Pole explores how long it would take to get from the Moon to Earth via fire pole. Since, normally, the pole would be snapped in two by both gravity and rotation, the pole is replaced with a magical pole that is always between the Earth and Moon, and extends and retracts so that it always stays a foot or two above Earth's surface. A Wizard Did It again.

• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: In Chapter 40: Lava Lamp, Randall discusses why a lava lamp with real lava can be both a lame idea and a terrible idea. Near the end, he veers off into calculations about a volcano made out of lamps — lamp lava, if you will.
  A solidified lava lamp is just about the most boring thing in the world. But the scenario made me wonder: If making a lamp out of molten lava wouldn't be very exciting, then what about a volcano made of lamps? This is probably the most useless calculation I've ever done,* but... what if Mount Saint Helens erupted again today, but instead of tephra,† it spewed compact fluorescent bulbs?

  * Okay, there's no way that's true.

  † The technical term for "whatever that stuff is that comes out of a volcano."

• Awesome, but Impractical: Several examples exist within the book.
  • Chapter 6: Pidgeon Chair shows that it is possible to use pigeons to lift yourself to the top of a skyscraper, but it's extremely risky and your life will be in the hands of anyone with a bag of seeds.
  • Chapter 17: Swing Set mentions the swing at the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, South Africa. The swing is over 200 feet tall, but while it's pretty cool to go down, you barely get any height once you reach the bottom.
  • Chapter 18: Airliner Catapult explores the idea of using a catapult or pulley to get planes into flight much quicker. It could work very well, but would require a lot of effort to install, and requires an extremely high vertical cliff to pull off.
  • Chapter 22: Billion-Story Building explores a building one billion stories tall. The Star Scraper would go 10 times beyond the Moon's orbit, and would be flat-out impossible to keep standing.
  • Chapter 27: Suction Aquarium explores the idea of making an aquarium by using a large container to create a sort of inverse aquarium using suction. While absolutely and completely possible, there's a number of issues, such as the water boiling due to lack of pressure if you pull it too high, dissolved oxygen reducing the water level over time, animals suffocating if they choose to breathe air from the top of the tank, and the fact that it "could be destroyed by whale farts."
  • Chapter 37: Laser Umbrella explores using laser beams as an umbrella. Since it would require an extremely powerful laser, as well as surgically precise aiming, it's a cool idea^note Megan: It isn't. that won't end up working very well.

• Bad News in a Good Way: In Chapter 61: Into the Sun:
  There's some good news: Deep in the Sun, the photons carrying energy around have very short wavelengths—they're mostly a mix of what we'd consider hard and soft X-rays. This means they penetrate your body to various depths, heat your internal organs, and ionize your DNA, causing irreversible damage before they even start burning you. Looking back, I notice that I started this paragraph with "there's some good news." I don't know why I did that.

• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The ending of Chapter 44: Spiders vs. the Sun ends with a drawing of a Sun-sized spider and a bunch of spider-sized Suns.

• Blunt "No": At the end of Chapter 42: Blood Alcohol, Megan can be seen with a gallon of blood, trying to suggest that they do the Gallon Challenge with blood.
  Megan: Hey, you know the Gallon Challenge? Why don't we try it with-
  Cueball: -NO.

• Bullet Catch: The premise of Chapter 12: Catch! Randall explains that this trope might be possible, provided you shoot the bullet upwards so that the bullet stops mid-air, and have a friend catch it there by flying with a hot-air balloon or something.

• Call-Back:
  • Chapter 38: Eat a Cloud goes into the science of what it would take to consume an entire cloud. If you squeeze the air out, eating a house-sized cloud is equal to drinking 3 glasses of water. Near the end is a nutritional label for a cloud, and at the bottom it says "* Iron value may be higher if you live downwind from the house from Chapter 4", referencing Chapter 4: Ironic Vaporization, which involved vaporizing a cubic meter of pure iron, releasing about 8 tons of iron into the atmosphere.
  • The Running Gag from book 1, "I need to know by Friday", returns in Weird & Worrying #3. The question asks "If I were to jump into a container of liquid nitrogen (or dispose of a body in that way), how deep would it have to be for me/them to shatter into frozen pieces at the bottom?" Megan is seen carrying a body bag, saying she needs to know the answer by Friday.
  • Chapter 56: Walking Backward in Time features a callback to the first book, where the time traveler from the chapter manages to meet with a time traveler from the first book.
  • Chapter 58: Earth-Moon Fire Pole contains a callback within a footnote, to an Alt Text from Chapter 40: Lava Lamp under a drawing of the "The More You Know" star.
    Chapter 40: Lava Lamp Alt Text:

    I like how it's totally not clear what the rest of this claim is supposed to be. "THE MORE YOU KNOW..." ...what? The happier you are? The more cultured you are? Are you better able to survive a life-or-death trivia contest? If I were doing the show I would replace it with "YOU JUST LEARNED THAT."
    Chapter 58: Earth-Moon Fire Pole footnotes:

    * It's common knowledge that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, measured from sea level. A somewhat more obscure piece of trivia is that the point on the Earth's surface farthest from its center is the summit of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, due to the fact that the planet bulges out at the equator. Even more obscure is the question of which point on the Earth's surface moves the fastest as the Earth spins, which is the same as asking which point is farthest from the Earth's axis. The answer isn't Chimborazo or Everest. The fastest point turns out to be the peak of Mount Cayambe,† a volcano north of Chimborazo. You just learned that.

    † Mt. Cayambe's southern slope also happens to be the highest point on Earth's surface directly on the equator. I have a lot of mountain facts.
  • A handful of subtle callbacks to How To, another one of Randall's books:
    • Chapter 4: Ironic Vaporization talks about how vaporizing a cubic metre of iron will annoy "the neighbors who live downwind from you", referencing Chapter 2: How to Throw a Pool Party, where using a giant humidifier to collect water from the atmosphere could have the same effect.
    • Chapter 38: Eat a Cloud features a nutritional label for a cloud, referencing the nutritional label for lava found in Chapter 9: How to Build a Lava Moat.
    • A footnote in Chapter 50: Japan Runs an Errand makes a direct mention of Chapter 2: How to Throw a Pool Party.

• Deadpan Snarker: Randall's personality in general. It shows up very occasionally, more often in Short Answers segments.
  Decorating Tip: The air in your house should be in gas form

• Disproportionate Retribution: Briefly hinted at in Chapter 4: Ironic Vaporization.
  But if you do have a block of iron and the means to vaporize it, and you really hate your house, yard, and the gardens of the neighbors who live downwind of you, then I have some great news about your plan.

• Don't Try This at Home:
  • Right before the book's introduction:
    Disclaimer: Do not try any of this at home. The author of this book is an internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.
  • Within the footnotes of Chapter 12: Catch!, which discusses firing a bullet in the air and attempting to catch it at its highest point, Randall states that you should not fire a gun into the air at all. People do this at celebrations in some countries and the falling bullets cause hundreds of injuries and deaths every year.

• Eleventy Zillion: Chapter 23: $2 Undecillion Lawsuit talks about bakery chain Au Bon Pain, more specifically the lawsuit for $2 undecillion USD that was filed against the chain in 2014. 2 undecillion isn't a made-up number,^note 1 undecillion is equal to about 1 trillion cubed but it's large enough that if you're trying to sue someone for that much in US dollars, it may as well be, since there's no possible way for them (not even converting the entire Earth's mass to the Treskilling Yellow postage stamp, the most expensive item ever sold relative to size) to actually come up with it.

• Everything Makes a Mushroom: The mini-sized Jupiter in Chapter 15: Jupiter Comes to Town explodes in a mushroom cloud. Justified by the fact that this is what would really happen, as long as the shrinking follows the rules of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.^{layman's terms}The density and composition of the item remains identical to itself at a normal size, and the remaining mass is treated as if it does not exist As said in the footnote, "It doesn't really matter what the source of the heat is—if there's enough of it and it's released fast enough, it will create a mushroom cloud."

• Everyone Has Standards: As much as Randall seems to enjoy describing potentially apocalyptic scenarios, he still sometimes fields questions that are too bizarre, disturbing, or borderline illegal for him to answer. A few examples are shown in each of the three Weird & Worrying chapters, for a total of eleven. Highlights include:
  • "Can bees or other animals go to hell? Or can they murder other bees without consequences?"
  • "What would it take to defeat Air Force One with a drone???"
    "Hello, Secret Service? Yes, it's Randall again..."
  • "Is it possible to hold your arm straight out of a car window and punch a mailbox clean off its pole? Could you do it without breaking your hand?"
    "This is going to hurt you more than it's going to hurt me."
  • "In a defensive situation, how much epinephrine (from an EpiPen) would it take to subdue a possible attacker?"
    "Don't worry — the EpiPen is mightier than the sword."
  • "If I were to jump into a container of liquid nitrogen (or dispose of a body in that way), how deep would it have to be for me/them to shatter into frozen pieces at the bottom?"
    "I need to know by Friday."

• Exact Words:
  • Played for Laughs in the first image of Chapter 4: Ironic Vaporization, where two people can be seen next to a cube of iron.
    Person 1: Why do you even have this thing?
    Person 2: My doctor told me I had an iron deficiency.

• Footnote Fever: Found very commonly throughout the book, in the form of jokes and nested footnotes. So many, in fact, a subpage had to be made.

• Frivolous Lawsuit: Chapter 23: $2 Undecillion Lawsuit explores what would happen if the guy who filed a 2 undecillion lawsuit against bakery chain Au Bon Pain actually won. Turns out, he'd never get the money awarded because it's flat out impossible for Au Bon Pain to gather that much money, ever. They wouldn't even get anywhere near the target amount if they were able to convert the Earth's weight into copies of the most valuable item by weight ever sold (the Treskilling Yellow postage stamp) and somehow sold all of them for the original's selling price. In fact, having 320 quintillion Ted Olsons work on the case at $1,800 an hour, 80 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, for 1000 generations would still cost 40,000 times less than losing the lawsuit. Worth It!
  Ted Olsob: Ted Olsob, pleasure to meet you.
  Ted Olson: Oh no, there's been a mutation.

• Grub Tub: Exaggerated near the end of the final chapter, Chapter 64: Lemon Drops and Gumdrops, with a drawing showing an entire ocean of saltwater taffy.
  Cueball: So that's how they make saltwater taffy.

• House Fire: Chapter 4: Ironic Vaporization explores the process of vaporizing a cubic meter of iron. It's stated that, to vaporize the cube, you'd need 60 gigajoules (60,000,000,000 joules) of energy, more than enough to set your house, your yard, and maybe your neighbors on fire. The image to go along with it shows a house (on fire), a yard (on fire), and some neighbors (mad at you, and maybe also on fire)

• Icarus Allusion: Chapter 61: Into the Sun claims that Icarus's problem wasn't flying too close to the sun, it was staying near the sun for too long. The next chapter, Chapter 62: Sunscreen, also features Icarus, now wearing five layers of sunscreen.

• Implausible Deniability: Chapter 37: Laser Umbrella ends with Cueball setting a neighbor's house on fire.
  Neighbor: Why is my house on fire again?
  Cueball: (sitting at the controls of his giant roof-mounted laser) Dunno.^{Alt Text}List of possible causes. Smoking in bed. Dryer lint. Induced currents. Sunspots. Neap tides. COX-2 inhibition. eBay. A reverse fire extinguisher. One of the ghosts from Pac-Man got loose and got into your house and knocked over a candle. Could be anything.

• Insane Troll Logic:
  • Fermi Estimation can certainly seem like this, but used correctly, it can at least get you in the ballpark of the correct answer.
  • From Chapter 14: Paint the Earth:
    Based on my impressions from walking down the aisles, home improvement stores stock about as many light bulbs as cans of paint. A normal house might have about 20 light bulbs, so let's assume a house needs about 20 gallons of paint. Sure, that sounds about right.

• It's Been Done: Played for Laughs in Chapter 54: Snowball, which explores what would happen if you rolled a snowball down Mount Everest. Obviously, since Everest is covered in dry snow, not the wet snow everyone is familiar with, nothing will happen. You'd get the same result throwing a cheeseburger down, but if we magically change it to wet snow, it will stick to the snowball. Result: avalanche. Randall sarcastically proclaims:
  Congratulations, you've invented an avalanche.
  Cueball: THIS IS ALREADY A THIIIIIING!!

• Lame Pun Reaction: Found in Chapter 20: Elemental Worlds. While Randall is talking about the complications of a Neptunium Neptune, there's a drawing of Ponytail and Cueball in a satellite dish field.
  Cueball: You can call me "Gemini," because I'm picking up a lot of bad energy from Pisces right now.
  (Ponytail, standing behind Cueball, is facepalming.)

• Layman's Terms:
  • "It can be shown" is labeled in a footnote as physics-speak for "this probably isn't too hard, but I don't want to do it."
  • "Tephra" is labeled in a footnote as "whatever that stuff is that comes out of a volcano."

• Literal Metaphor: While explaining why you can't set fire to something with a magnifying glass and moonlight in Chapter 51: Fire from Moonlight, Randall remarks the reason involving "a rabbit hole of optics". Cue image of a literal rabbit hole with a bunch of lenses in it.

• Loophole Abuse: Mentioned in Chapter 31: Expensive Shoebox. In the United States, the idea of a trillion-dollar platinum coin has been introduced to help with their debt ceiling crisis. Seeing as the chapter focuses on how much money you could cram into a shoebox, and the fact that, thanks to a loophole, you technically could legally get them minted, the topic of a trillion-dollar coin is inevitable.

• Ludicrous Speed:
  • Short Answers #1 has a question that asks if it's possible to jump out of an airplane traveling Mach 880980 (about 0.75c, or 3/4 the speed of light) at 100,000 feet altitude over New York City, and whether or not you can live with normal skydiving gear. The answer: absolutely not.
  • Short Answers #2 has a question asking how fast you have to go to break every bone in your body on a trampoline, as well as how fast you have to go to go through the holes in the mesh. The answer is indeterminate, since there are very tiny bones, mainly in your hands and feet. As for going through the mesh, it's not possible.
  • Chapter 19: Slow Dinosaur Extinction explores the Chicxulub meteor impact, the impact believed to have killed off the dinosaurs, if the meteor hit the Earth at only 3 mph (4.83 km/h). The result isn't mass extinction, but since many meteors are essentially giant balls of gravel, the impact leads to the meteor spreading outwards like a puddle via soil liquefaction, spreading faster than the speed of sound.
  • Chapter 21: One-Second Day almost speaks for itself: Earth spins so fast, each day lasts only a second. It's also moving so fast, anything in its path is either completely annihilated or launched out of the Solar System.
  • Chapter 35: No-Rules NASCAR imagines a scenario where NASCAR strips all of its rules, leading to a race where the goal is to simply get a human around the track 200 times as fast as possible. The answer is around an hour, at a G-limit of 10. If the human doesn't need to survive, it can be done even faster by making a particle accelerator, finishing all 200 laps in only 2 seconds.
  • Chapter 55: Niagara Straw shows that flowing the entirety of Niagara Falls through a drinking straw results in it traveling a quarter of the speed of light.
  • Chapter 60: Dog Overload states that under the conditions outlined in the Apocalypse How section of this page, the dog sphere will expand faster than light itself in only 197 years.

• Made of Incendium: Chapter 3: Dangerously Cold mentions that the real issue with a cube of iron at 0 Kelvin isn't the fact that it's so cold, but the fact that it's so cold it can create not only liquid oxygen, but also solid oxygen. Solid oxygen is extremely volatile, to a point where if it even touches something flammable, it can cause said item to spontaneously ignite.

• Non-Answer: Used somewhat often in Short Answers segments.
  • "What if all atoms on Earth were expanded to the size of a grape? Would we survive?"
    I'm not really sure how to answer this question using science, but now I really want some grapes.
  • "Billy the Clown is running out of cash, so in order to raise money, he devises his newest trick: He will inflate, by mouth, a standard-size party balloon until the material (some form of indestructible rubber) is just one atom thick. How large would the inflated party balloon be?"
    Randall: It's a total mystery why Billy is running out of cash.
  • "What would happen if you microwaved a smaller microwave, while the smaller one was on as well?"
    You would no longer be welcome in that IKEA.
  • "How many bones can you remove from the human body while allowing the human to continue living? Asking for a friend."
    I don't think this person is really your friend.
  • "What, in today's world and yesterday's world, does it mean to be human, in all social and biological factors?"
    I think you meant to submit this to Why If?.
  • "What if all of humanity set all of their differences aside and work together to level out the Earth into a perfect sphere?"
    I think you might find that the project would quickly create some new differences.
  • "I posted a question on social media asking what would be the smallest change that would create the biggest disaster. One of the responses I got said 'if every atom gained 1 proton.' So my question for you is, what would happen if every atom gained 1 proton?"
    Randall: Olivia. THAT IS NOT A SMALL CHANGE.

• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Chapter 63: Walking on the Sun mentions that, should you choose to keep getting closer to the Sun's remnant core, "it's not the fall that's the problem, it's the sudden stop at the end."

• Pinball Scoring: As shown in Chapter 23: $2 Undecillion Lawsuit, the Sun's weight in platinum isn't worth that much.

• Ray Gun:
  • The premise of Chapter 37: Laser Umbrella. The chapter focuses on the question of stopping rain using an extremely powerful laser to vaporize water before it reaches the ground, but not before Megan tries to stop the idea from happening.
    Stopping rain with a laser is one of those ideas that sounds totally reasonable, but if you-
    Megan: No, it doesn't.^{Alt Text}Why would that sound reasonable. Why would you say that.
    While the idea of a laser umbrella might be appealing, it-
    Megan: It isn't.^{Alt Text}What's wrong with you?
    Okay. The idea of stopping rain with a laser is a thing we're currently talking about.
    Megan: Fine.^{Alt Text}But we shouldn't be.
  • Short Answers #4 has a set of 3 questions that ask if we could destroy the moon with modern technology, if global warming can weaken Earth's magnetic field, and if we can bake cookies with lasers. The answer to all three reveals that we cannot use lasers to destroy the moon or weaken the magnetic field, but we can absolutely make cookies with them!

• Relax-o-Vision: Chapter 42: Blood Alcohol features drawings of squirrels instead of people vomiting up blood.

• Rhetorical Question Blunder: Randall does this to himself in Chapter 53: Saliva Pool:
  But it would all be worth it, because at the end of it all, you'd have an Olympic-size swimming pool full of saliva. And isn't that, deep down, all any of us really want?*

  * No. It is not.

• Running Gag: Randall tends to add Wikipedia's ^{[citation needed]} template after blatantly obvious facts.^{[citation needed]}

• Shout-Out:
  • Chapter 19: Slow Dinosaur Extinction mentions the Isla Nublar from Jurassic Park. It claims that the 3 mph Chicxulub impactor couldn't cause a mass extinction, but if it were to land on the Isla Nublar from the film instead of its original impact point in modern-day Mérida, Mexico, it could cause a dinosaur extinction.
  • Chapter 51: Fire from Moonlight likely makes a reference to the Bruce Springsteen song Dancing in the Dark.
  • The images seen in Chapter 57: Ammonia Tube are a very clear parody of The Magic School Bus. There's even a school bus and a lizard.
    Teacher: Okay, class, hop on the marvelous yellow bus of science! It's time to dissolve our internal organs!
    Student #6: We never did this at my old school.

• Star Scraper: Randall explores a billion story building suggested by four-year-old Kiera in Chapter 22: Billion-Story Building. It extends about ten times past the orbit of the Moon.

• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The entire book focuses on completely realistic outcomes of completely unrealistic events, so to narrow the list down to more comedic uses of the trope:
  • In Short Answers #1, one of the questions asks "What if your blood stream became liquid uranium? Would you die from radiation, lack of oxygen, or something else?" Randall's answer:
    Ponytail: You would die from what we in the medical profession call "Not-Having-Any-Blood-And-Being-Full-Of-Molten-Uranium Syndrome." Or "Jeff's Disease" for short. Man, poor Jeff.
  • Short Answers #1 also asks the question "What would we see if we attached a lightweight camera to a balloon and let it fly away?" The answer is a short little comic of Cueball and Megan letting a balloon, with camera, fly into the horizon.
    Cueball: That was pretty.
    Megan: Next time we should attach a transmitter, though.
  • In Short Answers #2, a question asks "If you put a vacuum at extremely high suction power and aimed it at a normal BMW sedan, what would happen?" The only answer is an image of someone pointing a vacuum at a sedan, with nothing happening besides confusing the owners.
    Person 1: Who is that, anyway? He's been there all morning.
    Person 2: HEY! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
    Person 1: ...should we call someone?
  • In Short Answers #2, a question asks "What would happen if you microwaved a smaller microwave, while the smaller one was on as well?"
    You would no longer be welcome in that IKEA.
  • In Short Answers #2, another question asks "What would happen if you put a human under a g-force of 417 Gs for twenty seconds?" Randall answers: You would be arrested for murder.
  • Chapter 22: Billion-Story Building shows Megan trying to build a tower out of peanut butter. She tries to use about five jars of the stuff, but it falls over with a small "blorp".
  • In Short Answers #3, one question asks whether one million ants or a person would win in a caged deathmatch, taking place inside a glass cube. Obviously, without air, both would die. On the other hand, if you and the ants escape, it's likely the ants will win.
  • Short Answers #3 declares Jupiter is bulletproof.
  • Chapter 31: Expensive Shoebox showcases the fact that filling a shoebox with 300 kilograms of plutonium does not end well.
    You could technically fit 300 kilograms of plutonium in a shoebox, but you could only do it so briefly.
  • Short Answers #4 has a question asking if birds could make it to space if it wasn't affected by gravity. The answer is no, because it's too cold that high up, plus they need to breathe.

• Take That!: In Chapter 31: Expensive Shoebox, Randall notes that it's difficult to get a handle on the value of diamonds because "<s>the entire industry is a scam </s> the gemstone market is complicated".

• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In Chapter 48: Proton Earth, Electron Moon, Randall warns that this scenario is probably the most destructive one he's ever written about, even compared to the former Earth-Shattering or Earth-Scorching ones found in previous chapters, the first book, and even the blog. Indeed, it ends with the destruction of the entire Universe solely via a black hole with the mass of the observable universe.

• Three Laws-Compliant: Parodied by mashing them up with Three Laws of Thermodynamics in Chapter 51: Fire from Moonlight.
  Cueball: The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that a robot must not increase entropy, unless this conflicts with the First Law.
  Ponytail: Close enough.
  
• Tongue on the Flagpole: Discussed in Chapter 3: Dangerously Cold, which revolves around the properties of a cubic meter of iron cooled to 0 Kelvin.
  Cueball: Should I lick it?
  Megan: DEFINITELY don't lick it.
  Cueball: I'm gonna lick it.

• Two-Keyed Lock: Parodied in Chapter 59: Global Snow with the idea that the National Weather Service's snow depth-measuring board is important enough to be double-locked.
  Scientist 1: It's snowing. We'd better go get the board.
  Scientist 2: OK. You'll need to come along since we need two people to turn the keys to access it.

• Waxing Lyrical: In Chapter 16: Star Sand, one image compares the Sun to stars that are "heavier, bluer, bigger, younger, harder, better, faster, stronger".