Could You Eat a Cloud? How Randall Munroe Became the Guru of Absurd Science Questions

It’s a pretty safe bet that nobody is going to fill the solar system with soup, out to the orbit of Jupiter. For one thing, that would take a lot of soup—2 x 10 to the 39th power liters, which is also 10 to the 42nd power calories worth, or more energy than the sun has put out in its entire lifetime. So a soupy solar system is not likely to happen anytime soon. That fact, however, did not stop a five year old girl named Amelia from asking about the possibility on the website xkcd.com, hosted and written by Randall Munroe, 37, the author of 2014’s bestseller What If? and the just-released sequel What If? 2. Since Amelia asked, Munroe answered, devoting the opening chapter of the new book to the matter of what he calls Soupiter. The answer, briefly, is not pretty—involving a soup-based black hole that would swallow up our entire solar system, annihilate everything caught within it, and cut a swath through a not-insignificant part of the Milky Way. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] “I loved the specificity of the question,” Munroe says. “I mean, why soup? The questions I get from little kids are always the best, because they’re not being put together by adults, who understand lots of stuff. They’re just sort of pushing concepts together in surprising ways.” There’s a little bit of Amelia in all of us—and Munroe has made it his mission to keep our curiosity satisfied. What If? 2, like the original...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news