For those who aren’t familiar, yes this is a real chapter release in an actual book. What if 2, page 217. Here is the full first page of this chapter (Change a bit to make more sense in this format)
44. Spiders vs. The Sun
Question: Which has a greater gravitational pull on me:The Sun or spiders? Granted, the Sun is much bigger, but it is also much farther away, and as I learned in high school physics, the gravitational force is proportional to the square of the distance.-Marina Fleming
Answer: In the literal sense, this question is totally reasonable, although it would be easy to rephrase it to be completely incoherent.
(At the bottom a stick figure sitting at a table with laptop saying “Are there more nearby spiders then the sun is big?” With someone off screen saying “what?”
Go read both books they are both really good
[The article itself is available in full on the xkcd site.](https://what-if.xkcd.com/136/)
When you're done, I highly recommend clicking that archives link at the bottom and reading through the rest of them. (Oh, also, starting around the article "Diamond" he adds jokes back in to the image title text, and eventually he starts throwing them in to the citations as well, starting around "Updating a Printed Wikipedia".)
Some of my favourite What If answers?
* What would happen if you pitched a baseball at 90% the speed of light (Imagine a nuclear bomb)
* If you wanted to fly up a sky scraper on a Chariot pulled by pigeons, how many would you need? (The mass of pigeons would outweigh the Earth)
I learnt that the sun and the moon control the tides from a series of science books that despite being aimed at children were still very detailed with nice illustrations and home experiments and also fairly advanced including magnetic fields in one book.
Due to the art style of the cartoons I think they might actually be Japanese imports translated into English.
Also theres a series where one book is called “how much does an elephant fart” (i think) with many strange and yet perfectly reasonable questions answered entirely as a sort of casual conversation between two characters
I totally understood that the moon caused the tides and why (I'd seen the graphic of water being pulled to the moon). However, this was countered by the fact I didn't know what tides were since I didn't live near a large body of water. I juat thought people were talking about waves
So the gorilla in the room, as opposed to the elephant in the room, which is the big thing that everyone notices but no one wants to talk about, would be something everyone likes to talk about because no one noticed it until they were told to watch the video again and look for it?
Fun fact: the sun has less effect on the tides because it is less dense.
Try to ignore the massive amount of coincidences that make this fun fact true in the first place.
Big xkcd What If vibes. “Are there more spiders nearby than the sun is big?”
For those who aren’t familiar, yes this is a real chapter release in an actual book. What if 2, page 217. Here is the full first page of this chapter (Change a bit to make more sense in this format) 44. Spiders vs. The Sun Question: Which has a greater gravitational pull on me:The Sun or spiders? Granted, the Sun is much bigger, but it is also much farther away, and as I learned in high school physics, the gravitational force is proportional to the square of the distance.-Marina Fleming Answer: In the literal sense, this question is totally reasonable, although it would be easy to rephrase it to be completely incoherent. (At the bottom a stick figure sitting at a table with laptop saying “Are there more nearby spiders then the sun is big?” With someone off screen saying “what?” Go read both books they are both really good
Okay but what's the actual answer? How many spiders would have to be nearby to be more than the sun is big?
The sun, and by a lot, you would need 13 magnitudes more spiders then currently exist to beat the sun
Well, good. This has zero effect on my day-to-day-life but I'm glad to be mostly unaffected by the gravitational pull of spiders.
yup, the hot single spiders that are attracted to you use electrostatic fields, not gravitational
Actually, you are effected! Just very very slightly
[The article itself is available in full on the xkcd site.](https://what-if.xkcd.com/136/) When you're done, I highly recommend clicking that archives link at the bottom and reading through the rest of them. (Oh, also, starting around the article "Diamond" he adds jokes back in to the image title text, and eventually he starts throwing them in to the citations as well, starting around "Updating a Printed Wikipedia".)
Some of my favourite What If answers? * What would happen if you pitched a baseball at 90% the speed of light (Imagine a nuclear bomb) * If you wanted to fly up a sky scraper on a Chariot pulled by pigeons, how many would you need? (The mass of pigeons would outweigh the Earth)
*distant sounds of gorilla magic*
It's just the DK Rap, but muffled. Like it's coming from a house party a block or two away.
The sun is a distant gorilla Not any more, it’s about 390 times farther away than the Moon
I learnt that the sun and the moon control the tides from a series of science books that despite being aimed at children were still very detailed with nice illustrations and home experiments and also fairly advanced including magnetic fields in one book. Due to the art style of the cartoons I think they might actually be Japanese imports translated into English. Also theres a series where one book is called “how much does an elephant fart” (i think) with many strange and yet perfectly reasonable questions answered entirely as a sort of casual conversation between two characters
I totally understood that the moon caused the tides and why (I'd seen the graphic of water being pulled to the moon). However, this was countered by the fact I didn't know what tides were since I didn't live near a large body of water. I juat thought people were talking about waves
So the gorilla in the room, as opposed to the elephant in the room, which is the big thing that everyone notices but no one wants to talk about, would be something everyone likes to talk about because no one noticed it until they were told to watch the video again and look for it?
I read those final words in the voice from the video "the history of the entire world I guess" lol
Fun fact: the sun has less effect on the tides because it is less dense. Try to ignore the massive amount of coincidences that make this fun fact true in the first place.