XKCD: It's more than a comic

What-If #87: Enforced by Radar

When someone asks a question like, "How powerful a radar gun would be required to stop a car via radiation pressure alone?" you know the answer is going to be semi-apocalyptic. In this case, the amount of energy required would be equivalent to nuking the highway, which you have to admit would probably deter speeders.

edited 11th Mar '14 9:44:25 AM by Fighteer

Unfortunately, it would also cause fragments of the driver to violate the speed limit in all directions.

Much as with the Relativistic Baseball article, the matter of stopping a car (or hitting a ball) becomes utterly trivial once you are dealing with that amount of energy.

A much less destructive speed limit enforcement method.

edited 11th Mar '14 7:39:21 AM by Nohbody

What if you lay down a permanent set of spikes on the road? Speed limit enforced by whoops there go your tires.

I've read somewhere (though it may not have been reliable) that technology exists to shut down a car's motor from a distance via certain types of electromagnetic radiation. That would be a far superior method to stationing Apache attack helicopters on every highway or going through trillions of tires every year.

I think I remember that one ... it's basically a focused beam of microwaves that fries the engine control computer. It'll stop the car, but it's not exactly non-destructive.

EDIT: After reading the What-If, he explicitly mentions that you could fry the car's electronics a lot more easily than stopping it through radiation pressure.

edited 11th Mar '14 7:59:50 AM by Shinziril

It's slightly less so than nuking the highway, at least.

Edit: By inference, the radiation used would indeed fry the car's electronics (not to mention everything else) long before it achieved its objective of exerting enough physical pressure to slow the vehicle.

edited 11th Mar '14 11:36:54 AM by Fighteer

Unless you are driving a 30 year old car that doesn't require electronics to work (except for the ignition, but even that is mechanically controlled and far too high powered to be fried by microwaves, not counting the aforementioned nuke).

Types of Editors.

Also, What If I Wrote A Book?

Although at the moment, the answer to that is "my blog would crash."

Yeah, I got that as well.

#1342: Ancient Stars

Why so Sirius?

-rimshot-

It depends on what you're looking at, of course. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2 and a half million light years away.

Any visible object at that distance would have to be a galaxy or equivalent or it would be too faint for the unaided eye. Calling it a 'star', while technically not incorrect, is akin to calling a glass of milk a 'molecule'.

I lost the link to that cosmos tv special. I'm not sure if it was this thread or the space thread where someone gave it to me

Manuals.

The problem of manuals being more obscure than the thing they are instructing you to use is definitely a real one.

Where do poorly translated manuals fall on that line?

I lost the link to that cosmos tv special. I'm not sure if it was this thread or the space thread where someone gave it to me

What-If #88: Soda Sequestration

I like these ones that play with the fact that the scale of planetary issues is so great that it defies our usual capacity to judge amounts.

If you ignore the absurdity of the premise, the conclusion — that you could take the cans of soda used to store the annual human output of CO₂, turn them in for recycling, and use the money to buy up the entire world's oil reserves — would have to count for some kind of irony.

edited 18th Mar '14 11:46:05 AM by Fighteer

Of course, by making the soda cans and store the soda itself, you would probably use up all of the said reserves, and generate even more CO 2 in the process, even before you are finished.

Of course, considering that people with a first-world standard of living have a vastly greater ecological footprint than people in poorer countries, in terms of sustainability it would be more effective to make all the rich countries poor.

edited 18th Mar '14 3:43:09 PM by Desertopa

You mean the rich countries that don't clearcut ginormous swathes of rainforest to make room for farming purposes, like Brazil? Or countries where they burn cow (or local equivalent) chips for heat in spite of the noxious stuff it releases?

Of course, since living past about 40-50 (guesstimate) would be difficult there's not as long to deal with that kind of thing as with the 70+ years most in "first world" countries nowadays can make it to without a whole lot of extra effort beyond "don't do stupid shit that will kill you". Oh, and those fewer decades you get will have a lot less free time in them to do things like read web comics or forums.

Me, I'll keep the Wiki Walks, Archive Binges, and being able to sit comfortably in a climate controlled building while fucking off on the internet, thanks.

—-

On an actually on-topic note, though, that What If? was amusing, even without some stupidly ridonculous "kill everyone" scenario. Especially the penultimate picture about Diet Coke and Tab, I nearly spewed the Coke (regular kind) I was drinking at that moment.