Episode 159: 2021 Remix
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On this episode of Absurd Hypotheticals, Marcus Lehner, Chris Yee, and Ben Storms mash together lots of questions from 2021!
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:18 - Chris’s Answer - Spider-Man/No Concrete/Animals Fly
00:16:46 - Ben’s Answer - Water Power/Rain Forever/Fludd
00:28:56 - Marcus’s Answer - Hockey/100 MPH/Deserts Are Desserts
00:39:22 - Would you rather: get motion sickness every time you run OR green slime shoot out of your nose when you sneeze?
00:46:24 - Outro
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TRANSCRIPTION
Marcus Lehner:
Hello, everybody. And welcome to Absurd Hypotheticals. The show where we overthink dumb questions so you don't have to. I'm your host, Marcus Lehner. And I'm joined here today by Chris Yee and Ben Storms. Say hi, guys.
Chris Yee:
Hey, I'm Chris.
Ben Storms:
Hey, I'm Ben.
Marcus Lehner:
Guys, we've done it. We've done a whole 2021 except for this episode.
Chris Yee:
And also, except for like a chunk in the middle there.
Ben Storms:
We've done most of 2021.
Marcus Lehner:
Nevermind the hiatus, but it is now the end of 2021. And we are recording our last episode for the year. It's very exciting.
Chris Yee:
We survived Christmas and everything being Christmas. And we are at New Year's now.
Marcus Lehner:
And we survived the rest of 2021. I mean, 2021 wasn't really a cake walk. A little bit better than 2020, but we got to pat ourselves on the back for getting through that whole year as well. But to celebrate, we like to do a very special year end episode. We call it the 2021 Remix, where instead of just doing a New Year's theme hypothetical question, or silly things like that, what we do is we look back at our whole year of questions that we did and we mash them up and we combine multiple questions into one super Frankenstein hypothetical.
Chris Yee:
We did this last year for the first time. And it was a lot of fun. It was a lot better than what we used to do.
Ben Storms:
Which was a fake awards show.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, we used to do our own awards show, but nobody voted. So it was just us. It was.
Chris Yee:
Especially it was us going, hey, wasn't that funny? Yep, sure was.
Marcus Lehner:
Sure was. We definitely did a good job there. I don't think it was the worst thing in the world, but it definitely would've helped if ... This one's better.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. This is better.
Ben Storms:
That's the main takeaway. This is a better option.
Chris Yee:
So we're picking questions specifically from 2021.
Marcus Lehner:
Yes. So these will all be questions that we've done in the past year. If you want to hear full answer for those questions, just scroll up a little bit or scroll down. However you organize your player. I never know ... I don't like podcast players. They always put them in different orders, but anyway, Chris, why don't you get us started before I ramble on more about nonsense?
Chris Yee:
Yeah. So the first question that I chose to start us out with is what if you had Spider-Man's powers, that's from episode 129. This one is pretty straightforward. You should probably know what Spider-Man's powers are already, but if you don't I guess there are a bunch of different versions of Spider-Man, but the traditional Peter Parker Spider-Man has three main powers. He has the web slinging so he can shoot webs. And depending on the mechanism, it's either from a web shooter or it's biological.
Chris Yee:
And he uses those to swing around. He can crawl on walls. So he can stick to walls and climb up them with very little effort. And then he has Spidey-Sense. So he can sense when things are going to hit him and he can dodge them easily, stuff like that. And Spider-Man, his stories usually take place in New York City.
Chris Yee:
And there's a pretty good reason for that is because of the web slinging. He needs things to swing off of. And the tall buildings in New York City are a very good way to do that. So tall buildings are very important for Spider-Man, but that brings me to my second question, which is what if concrete didn't exist? So that is episode 143 and obviously New York City has a lot of tall buildings. I think the average building height in New York City ... Marcus, because you looked this up before and it was actually lower than you expected because their sample size was kind of weird, but it was 45 feet tall. I think. That includes areas with much shorter buildings though. But if you include only the buildings that are 10 stories or higher, because there are areas that are more concentrated with tall buildings, the average gets closer to 190 feet tall, which is much taller.
Chris Yee:
And those are the types of tall buildings that we would need to swing on. But if concrete didn't exist, would this still be possible? So tall buildings are usually a combination of concrete and steel. Usually they have like a central concrete core of some kind or something like that, they have concrete columns, concrete foundations. Concrete is very important for skyscrapers. And yes, you could technically make a skyscraper out of steel and not concrete, I guess, but that would be very cost ineffective. It wouldn't really be a practical option.
Chris Yee:
So I wanted to see, I wanted to look at a different option and I started to look into timber to see if that was more cost effective. So how high can you actually build with timber was my first question, because from my recollection, I don't know of any timber only skyscrapers. So, the International Building Code allows timber buildings to be built up to 270 feet tall. That was actually revised just this year. It used to be only 85 feet before that.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh my.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. So in 2021 they revised that.
Marcus Lehner:
That's a big change.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, it is a pretty big change. And one of the main concerns for building such high timber buildings is the fire resistance. Obviously, wood is very susceptible to fire, but technology has gotten better. We have better ways to treat wood now. So I guess they felt they were more comfortable increasing that a little bit or a lot.
Marcus Lehner:
Or maybe some dude who was just super into wood buildings kept pestering the building community. it's like fine. Fine. Let them burn. Just let them all burn down. And then we'll see, then we'll revise it after that.
Chris Yee:
I think they used to build taller timber buildings. And then there was like a ... I think it might have been in like Chicago, there was a fire or something and it was really bad and spread a lot. So they stopped doing that. But I think you are allowed to go past this 270 feet if you get special approval from them. They have to review your design and stuff. But 270 feet is the base limit. So next I wanted to look at some examples of timber buildings just to see how tall we've actually gotten. And the first one is in America. It's oh, it's actually not technically in America right now because they never built it, but it's called Framework and they're going to build it in Portland, Oregon.
Chris Yee:
The design was 12 stories high and 148 feet tall. And it was going to be considered the tallest timber building in north America. They called it the nation's first high rise building made of wood. And it eventually was canceled because they had a lack of funding. I think they got a grant for 1.5 million or something like that but then they couldn't get additional funding. They had to scrap it.
Marcus Lehner:
When someone had a funding meeting it was like, why don't you just build it out of concrete?
Chris Yee:
Yeah, exactly. So that didn't happen. That's only in North America. There are some other examples around the world and one of them is the Mühlacker Broadcasting Transmissions Facility. I don't know if that Mühlacker, that doesn't sound right when I say it, but that's how it's spelled. And that is the tallest wooden structure in the world. Or it was. Again, this doesn't exist anymore. So this was 623 feet tall and it was actually demolished in 1993. So it no longer exists. Also, it's not a building, it's just a radio tower, but it is tall. So it's an example of something really tall that's just made a timber.
Marcus Lehner:
Like a tree.
Chris Yee:
Like a tree. Yeah, exactly. But something that is really tall that is a building or I guess also technically not yet, because they haven't built it, but there's something called the W350 Project, which a proposed building. They haven't built it yet, but it's going to be in Tokyo. And the design is for 70 stories and it's going to be 1,150 feet tall, which is way past the 270 foot limit. So this probably had some special approval of some kind. Now the design of this says that it's made of 90% wood and the rest is made of steel. And if they do build this successfully, it will be the world's tallest wooden skyscraper. So they plan on starting construction in 2024. And then they plan on finishing in 2041. So it's a really long construction cycle, but 2041, it might be finished by then.
Marcus Lehner:
I work in construction. It's not being done before 2050.
Chris Yee:
Definitely not. And the cost of this building is $5.6 billion to construct it. I want a different example just to compare to like a normal building for the costs. So I looked at a skyscraper in Moscow, it's called the OKO and I picked it because it's a similar height. It's 1,160 feet. It's a little taller, but not by much. And it's built with concrete and steel and this costs only $1.2 billion. So it's a fifth the cost of our timber building. But if you look at the square footage, it's half the square footage of our timber building.
Chris Yee:
So it is, if you're looking purely at the square footage, the cost per square footage is about twice as much as the timber building. So it is still more, but it's a little more reasonable and we don't have to build buildings that tall. We can build shorter buildings and have them be cheaper. It'll still be high enough for Spider-Man, I think.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Spider-Man, what, what do you need? Five stories. Four. Six stories, 20 stories. You tell us.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I don't know how tall Spider-Man prefers his buildings to be. The problem is that the W350 project, its foundation is going to be concrete. So it was actually kind of annoying. I got pretty far into my research thinking that it was all timber, because they said the 90% timber thing. And then I saw a random sentence that said that the foundation is going to be concrete and foundations are a big problem that we run into with taller buildings in general. It's actually what Marcus looked at when he was answering this question in his main answer. He looked at if all concrete foundations disappeared, then all the buildings would fall and what the impact of that was and large buildings like their foundations, even if they're not primarily concrete, they usually use concrete in some way. So you can use timber and steel piles for deeper foundations if you want.
Chris Yee:
Concrete is favored over wood and steel because there's moisture and insects in the ground, which contributes to rotten stuff. But you can treat the wood and there are ways to sort of combat that a little bit. But the main thing is that pretty much all buildings that use these timber or steel piles, they also have pile caps to distribute the load to these individual piles, so the load isn't just on one pile. It's distributed. And those pile caps are pretty much exclusively made of concrete. I couldn't find any examples of foundations with zero concrete at all. I don't know. It was kind of difficult just researching foundations because when you look for a building, they don't really say the ... they look at the big part that you can see and they don't look underground. They don't talk about it. So it was a little difficult to research, but maybe they're out there.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, No one's looking at it quite through the lens that we're looking at it.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
We're like, "Hey, I want to build this building out of wood." Why? Because it costs five times as much. Yeah. We're not doing that, is usually the end of the conversation.
Chris Yee:
And I guess technically you could make your pile caps out of different materials. I didn't really look that much into it. The main takeaway is that they get a little more complicated to build these tall buildings and that we probably would not have tall buildings if concrete didn't exist. We'd probably have smaller buildings with just small wooden frames. And that means that we'd have no walls to crawl on as Spider-Man ... or we'd have short walls to crawl on as Spider-Man I guess. And we wouldn't be able to swing anywhere, which is boring. Because I don't want to run everywhere as Spider-Man because web swinging is obviously faster than just running. At least that's what I thought. But apparently there is a comic that suggests that Spider-Man can travel two miles in five seconds, which is 1,440 miles per hour. People tend to agree that this speed is ridiculous.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I would agree with that.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
It's either a typo or someone didn't really do their math out, but ...
Ben Storms:
It's probably that they didn't do their math out knowing comics.
Chris Yee:
So apparently the online consensus for the upper limit of Spider-Man's running speed is about 250 miles per hour, which is still really high. That was according to Screen Rant, which I assume they just looked at a bunch of different opinions about his running speed. I don't know where they got their sources from, but I got my source from them. So blame them.
Marcus Lehner:
The burden of proof is on them.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Again, I think this 250 miles per hour is pretty ridiculous. I don't agree with it personally. So I'm going to say that if I'm Spider-Man, even if I can run this fast, I don't really want to. I want to web sling because it's cool. So how can I web sling without any tall buildings around me? And that brings me to my last question that I answered, which is what if all animals could fly? Episode 137. So, technically humans are animals. When we're answering this question, the first time we kind of ignored that we just said, "Humans don't count for this. It was only animals that aren't humans."
Chris Yee:
I'm going to follow this for my answer right now. I'm going to say that I cannot fly as Spider-Man. So I only have Spider-Man's power as Spider-Man. One of his powers is not to fly, so I can't fly, but I can use these flying animals to web sling. I can just attach my webs to them and swing off of them. The question is, can they hold my weight? Because you never sees Spider-Man webbing birds, and swinging off of birds.
Marcus Lehner:
Why haven't we seen that honestly?
Chris Yee:
Actually, maybe that exists. I don't know. I didn't really look too hard into it.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Where's the pigeon that ends up between the building and Spider-Man that gets dunked and just thrown to the ground and they both crash?
Chris Yee:
Yeah. So when I was answering this question originally, my metric for how much animals could carry when we fly, well, so I base my flying methods off of physics. I like all my animals wings and then I calculated whether they'd be able to fly or not, where Marcus's interpretation was a little different. He didn't give animals wings. He just said that they could fly in general. And then that the caring capacity was based on the example of an eagle. So a 10 pound Eagle can carry a five pound object. So he assumed that any animal can carry half their weight in flight. So I'm going to use this method for my situation.
Marcus Lehner:
I don't know where this guy got his sources from, but I checked him. So ...
Chris Yee:
Yeah, I blame Marcus. So basically any animal that's twice my weight will be able to carry me when I'm swinging off of them. I weigh 160 pounds. So any animal that's 320 pounds can carry me. So like elephants, bears, hippos. That sort of thing. Those types of animals aren't necessarily around where I am, but I wanted to see what was the most common animal that could carry me, and the cow is the most populous animal or the populous land animal other than humans. There are 1.46 billion cows in the world and a smaller breed of cow like the lightest weight adult cow weighs around 600 pounds, which is way over what we need anyway. So, and then larger breeds get up to like 2,500 pounds. So my physics-based interpretation of this question says that cows wouldn't be able to carry me because they wouldn't be able to physically fly anyway on their own. But Marcus's interpretation means that I can web sling off of cows and I don't need buildings. I don't need concrete. I just need cows
Marcus Lehner:
Hope there's a lot of crime to fight in the mid-country.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I don't know. I'm sure there are. People will tip cows, but I don't know. They can fly now. So I don't know. Anyway, Ben, what did you do?
Ben Storms:
So I looked at ... the questions I looked at sort of in order of importance to my answer. We'll go with that. Are first off what if it rain nonstop, which was from episode 157 where it basically said that just there was a constant, moderate rainfall eternally. We did a power grab bag where we looked at what if all of the power in the world was generated by some source? So we did originally human steam or nuclear power. As you may imagine, going with the nonstop rain and going to look at water power. And finally I'm looking at ... oh no, sorry. That was episode 145. And finally I looked at for reasons that we'll get to down the line. What if you had a video game item, specifically Fludd, which is a water jet pack slash, I don't even know, power washer, I guess, from Super Mario Sunshine. And then that was episode 134.
Ben Storms:
So, let's talk a little bit about hydroelectric power. How it works is very simple. Water is heavy as we talked about before and when it flows, you can use it to move a turbine and that you can spin a generator and produce electricity. Any time you do any kind of power generation, that's always how it goes as you have something pushing a turbine to push a generator.
Ben Storms:
There are really three kinds of hydroelectric power. There is pumped storage, which isn't really what we're looking for here, but it's cool and I wanted to talk about it. It's basically a water battery and the idea is that you have power from other sources that you use to pump water from a low elevation reservoir and to a high elevation reservoir. And then when you have power shortages, you can release that water back down through turbines to generate power to make up whatever shortfall you're having, which is pretty cool because theoretically it's a way that you can have an entirely renewable energy system, right? You can store your solar and wind, whatever power in pump storage, hydroelectric, and then use that when you don't have the other available. Pretty cool.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, I've actually seen them do it with basically concrete blocks.
Ben Storms:
Yes.
Marcus Lehner:
That they would put on train rails and they would just literally, when they had the energy, they would pull this big, heavy rock up a hill and leave it at the top of the hill. And when you needed that energy back, you just push it down the hill and that motion generates the power and I'm just like, oh yeah, you could just ... it's a potential energy battery. They had some over the top name for it, but I loved it.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. It's pretty awesome. I remember you talking about that actually on the podcast, I'm pretty sure. I don't remember when or why.
Chris Yee:
Yeah you did. I don't remember, but yeah.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. But yes, you could do it with water too. Which is pretty cool.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I could definitely say it's not the what if concrete didn't exist question. Definitely wasn't on that one.
Ben Storms:
It was not that one. So there's two ways to actually generate power using water. So the first and the most common is impoundment, which is dams. The idea is you have a reservoir behind a dam. It's kind of the pump storage, but without that whole pumping part, right? You just release water down from that reservoir at a controlled rate and as that flows down, you're using it to spin a turbine. There's also diversion or run of river, which the idea is that you're basically channeling part of river through a canal and that is pulling it across turbines just with the natural flow of the river. There are actually more problems with hydroelectric power than I expected it turns out. It's sort of different ones for each, both dams and run of river systems. So dams are actually a lot worse environmentally than I knew about. The big and maybe obvious one when you think about it is that to make that reservoir you're flooding an area that's ... you're creating a lake where there isn't a lake effectively, which can obviously have a lot of impacts to both people and the environment around that area.
Ben Storms:
They actually lead to a lot of greenhouse gases. It's kind of weird. It basically comes down to the microbes in that reservoir, algas and whatnot, will release a lot of greenhouse gases. And I've seen some kind of insane numbers that I didn't entirely trust enough to cite them here for how much that leads to. The more sane ones I saw suggested that reservoirs lead to around as much greenhouse emission as Germany, which is a lot. Don't get me wrong. But I saw someone saying it was like 20% of emissions and it was like, well that's clearly not right.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah.
Ben Storms:
And then finally, because they are damming off this river, they will stop sediment from moving further down the river, which will make coastal erosion worse because you don't have that sort of replenishing of what is worn away by at the coastline from the ocean crashing against it. Run of river has issues as well, less sort of environmental and more just because of the nature of the run of river system. They're not as reliable, I guess, as a dam is because they rely on that flow of the river. So with a dam, you have that reservoir that's going to be full of water even if you get into a reasonable drought situation. You don't have that with a run of river system. It's just the river. So if the river dries up or even just if it slows down, you're going wind up having less or no power depending on how bad the situation gets.
Ben Storms:
That's kind of the more obvious one. The trickier one I had that was less obvious, I guess, you can't support the highest possible flow of the river. You have to kind of build your system to expect the average flow. And if you get more than that, you just sort of have to let the extra water go by and quote unquote, "Waste that potential energy," just because of the way that turbines work basically. However, both of those problems are no longer problems if we have a constant rainfall. With that, we will have constant flow of river and it'll be a higher rate than we currently have. So how much hydroelectric do we do now? The U.S. does 300,000,000,760 kilowatt hours, which is only about 7.3% of the U.S.'s power. We're not great compared to the rest of the world.
Ben Storms:
Overall, the world gets about 16% of its power from hydroelectric. So we're still definitely far below what we're talking about in terms of powering everything with hydroelectric power. So we have to bridge that gap from 16% of power to 100%. Can we get there? The answer is tricky. I'm going to say probably and explain my logic, but there are a lot of factors that go into this. I was looking at the equations that they use to determine how much power a run of river system will generate. And they are really complicated. And as far as I can tell, not even actually that accurate. They kind of just use it as a guide for where it's viable. It's weird. But I will say that currently the Chief Joseph Dam, which is on the Columbia River, is the third largest run of river power facility in the world.
Ben Storms:
Largest one the U.S. has, and it is the third largest producing high electric plant in the U.S., despite that river only being the fourth largest by volume in the U.S. So even currently we have a lot more room where we could do this with a large amount of power generation. Beyond that there are many countries that are much better than us at using hydroelectric power. The best example in terms of geographically and them being great at it is probably Canada. Canada is actually the second large producer of hydroelectricity in the world. And they actually generate 59.6% of their power from hydroelectric, which is kind of ridiculous. So despite my best efforts, I was not able to figure out exactly how much power we could get from, say, a series of these on like the Mississippi River.
Marcus Lehner:
Well, Canada's stealing all the energy from us.
Ben Storms:
I know.
Marcus Lehner:
Before it even gets to us. Freaking Canadians.
Ben Storms:
Well, and this is one of those things that I'm pretty sure there's nothing stopping you from just having multiple of these in a series. The water's all still going down. I guess technically you might have to speed up again, but it's not like you can have one of these on each river. I know the velocity of the flow is part of it. So you couldn't just have it go forever because it will slow down, going through the turbines obviously.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I don't know where the conservation of energy breaks down exactly. But yeah, it's probably velocity or ...
Ben Storms:
Yeah. So my rationale here on us being able to do more than we even could now is that with the rainfall, you'll have a lot more water flowing into rivers just from everywhere anyway. So you should be able to have a pretty high rate throughout the river. This is all avoiding one big problem. And also the other question that I looked into for this answer, which is that when we did this question before and we looked at making everything whatever powered, we try whenever possible to avoid batteries.
Ben Storms:
And all of this is great for generating power just generally for a country or whatever, but it's not great for, say, running a cell phone. And that is where we're going to bring in Fludd. So Fludd for those of you who haven't played Super Mario Sunshine or listened to the episode where Chris talks about Fludd is basically I'm going to call it a back mounted pressure washer that can also serve as a jet pack. And some other stuff. It's complicated.
Chris Yee:
It can make you run really fast on water.
Ben Storms:
Run really fast or jump up like 50 feet in the air. It's yeah ...
Marcus Lehner:
It fills up with water and it shoots it out in various directions.
Chris Yee:
It's main purpose is to clean walls.
Ben Storms:
It's a pressure washer, but high functioning. So the question I had to figure out was would it be possible to use Fludd, not just to sort of spray water haphazardly, but to fire that water through effectively a portable run of river hydroelectric power center you could use to power your phone? So I sourced a lot of numbers from a variety of YouTubers. The three I mostly looked at were Swanky Box. So I think Chris said you used when you actually your answer initially. Tetra Bit Gaming and Trick Theory who did a bunch of complicated calculations. And let's be honest here, guessing, to figure out a lot of properties of Fludd. And what they figured out is that Fludd, despite being pretty small, has to contain around 700 gallons of water that it can discharge in about 42 and a half seconds.
Ben Storms:
Out of a nozzle, that's about a foot in diameter, which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but it's the only way that it makes sense considering the dimensions of the game, which is around 63 kilograms per second of water. And if I took those kind of wonky calculations you can use to determine the power generation of one of these power plants, at the highest theoretical efficiency it only actually generates around 8.5 watts, which isn't that much. It's enough to charge a cell phone or run one without charging cell phones, draw two to six watts while charging or around half a watt when not charging. The problem with that being that like I said, it discharges in 42.5 seconds, and then you're out of water. So technically yes, you could use Fludd to power your cell phone, but only if you only had to make a very short phone call or check Twitter for about 42 seconds.
Marcus Lehner:
I also just imagined like, you have a little turbine that plugs into the bottom of your phone and you just aim your nozzle at it and you shoot it.
Ben Storms:
Right.
Marcus Lehner:
And then your phone just goes flying.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Across the street.
Ben Storms:
It's a lot more important now that all our phones are randomly waterproof. I was hoping I could figure out some way to, oh, well, if you reduce the flow, you can make it last for longer. But the problem is all of that flow and everything goes into the power generation. So there's probably some level where you can get up to like a few minutes, but we're working on a pretty small margin as it is. So the long and short of it is, yes, we can almost certainly generate enough power for civilization in general, but having it portable might be a bit complicated. So that is what I have. Marcus what'd you do?
Marcus Lehner:
All right. So probably my favorite thing to do on this show is make up ridiculous versions of existing sports. So I couldn't resist-
Chris Yee:
Did you make water polo again?
Marcus Lehner:
No. Ben took all the water questions.
Ben Storms:
I did.
Chris Yee:
Okay.
Ben Storms:
I'm not going to say that's why I did it, but I'd like to say that's why I did it.
Marcus Lehner:
But anyway, I couldn't resist tapping off the year and we had fictional sports that didn't really work with what I wanted to do. So the sport that we did this year is hockey. So first question episode 141. How would you improve hockey? And I did that through these two questions. I tacked on, what if everyone moved 100 miles an hour from episode 156. And what if deserts were desserts, which was actually in our lightning round episode 130. So making something better, you just make it faster. Let's start with the speed. Hockey players actually end up going around like 20 miles an hour plus, when they're at top speed on the ice, which is pretty fricking fast. At 20 miles an hour, they can actually do a lap around the rink in about like 13 to 14 seconds when they do that like in training and stuff like that.
Chris Yee:
I mean, it's no Spider-Man.
Marcus Lehner:
It's no Spider-Man. It's not a thousand miles an hour. It's not. And then when you kind of cap out like skating speeds, the fastest high speed ice skater was hitting 56.5 miles an hour. Typically if you're watching Olympic sport on like a shorter distance speed skate, they're usually around 35 miles an hour, which still pretty crazy.
Ben Storms:
That's pretty insane. Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
So if you look at that 13 to 14 second lap, at a hundred miles an hour, they're five times faster, one-fifth the time. They're doing that same lap in two to three seconds, instead of 13 or 14. And I don't think the sport really works if you can cross the whole rink in two seconds. So really we're going to need a bigger hockey rink. Luckily, the other question I craftily selected is a convenient hypothetical to pair with that because if all your deserts are desserts, you just play your hockey game on a giant desert of ice cream. And you just have these rolling hills of ice creams and sherbert, and you just play hockey on those at a large scale at these high speeds.
Chris Yee:
Can you ice skate on ice cream?
Marcus Lehner:
So not with a blade. You're going to want a wider surface, but there's nothing stopping you from skating on top of it.
Ben Storms:
So you're saying like a performance snowshoe effectively.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. A high speed performance snow shoe. A shoe canoe. Except deserts, oh my God, reading deserts or desserts in my notes is actually horrible. Except that deserts tend to be kind of hot. So I was worried that our beautiful ice cream would soon be soup, which is less good for playing hockey on. So I was doing a little research to see if any deserts stayed cold enough to maintain a nice ice cream surface at night times because you don't want to play in the dark and very quickly realize that, duh, the largest desert on earth is also the coldest. It's Antarctica. Antarctica's a desert. So what you can do is you can take your hockey team, you can ship them down to Antarctica and you can play large scale hundred mile an hour hockey. And so this works and maybe under normal episode circumstances, I would wrap it up with this and throw in a couple fun, little rules about throwing chocolate chips at it or something. I don't know.
Chris Yee:
That's a good rule.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's a good rule. You only get two minutes for throwing chocolate chips at somebody. So people do it all the time. But there's a couple issues I'm ignoring if I conclude with this. One, I don't think humans can physically keep up with any sort of action at a hundred miles an hour. One just kind of like reaction-wise gets a little tricky if people are moving as fast as a professional baseball player's fastball and two, I couldn't find really numbers for it, but maneuverability, like when you see these high speed skating events, it's like a very controlled, very clean thing. All they have to worry about is going forward. And even that is like an Olympic level skill to go 35 miles an hour. At a hundred, you're just zooming. You're just, you're zooming and turning around is going to be a task.
Chris Yee:
I just want to point out that you said high skeet spading events.
Marcus Lehner:
High skeet spading. High skeet spading is good. So that's problem number one is I'm not sure if hockey actually works at a full hundred miles an hour, because you need some amount of dexterity and that's just not really happening at those speeds. And two, I think if you turn Antarctica into a rich hub of nutrients via making it all ice cream, I worry that kind of the penguin and seal populations would explode and then seals and penguins would literally explode as players bump into them at a hundred miles an hour, because really penguins and seals default state is huddle up in a pile, not moving anywhere. And though they could run away at a hundred miles an hour, they're just not going to. And if you've ever seen those big masses of penguin and seals around, I don't need this kind of carnage going around.
Marcus Lehner:
So it's the big year end remix. And if you listened to last year, I didn't stop at three questions. I combined five questions. So I have a reputation to uphold. So I'm going to start, I'm adding two more questions into my answer. The two I'm adding are episode 147. What if the Earth spun 10 times as fast? And episode 152, what if no one had to eat, sleep or breathe? So I'm adding those two to the pot and you might be asking why? That does not really line up with Antarctica. Because there's one more giant desert we can play our hockey game on. the Moon. So, eat, sleep, breathe. This is an easy one. I just took this one to solve the first problem. It's going to be annoying to play in space suits. And if we want our players to play effectively and generally hang out and function on the Moon, it's going to be a lot easier to do that trip and play that game without the need for like full NASA logistics to keep them alive at all points.
Marcus Lehner:
Plus, not that many people watch hockey. It's going to get kind of expensive. So this will help cut down on those costs a little bit. the Earth spinning 10 times as fast actually helps us in two ways. The first way is actually getting to the Moon in the first place with the Earth spinning 10 times as fast. It both elongates at the equator and I'm not sure, I think the rotational momentum helps you a little bit with to counteract gravity. That might be an incorrect statement. I'd have to check the physics a little bit.
Chris Yee:
Oh it should. I think it should.
Marcus Lehner:
But yeah, basically at the equator under these conditions, Chris, you had actually done this math out on the original episode, instead of competing against a gravitation acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared, it goes down to like 0.4. Also, increased speeds helps escape velocity as well. Spaceships will actually launch. When they launch, they actually start heading east to obtain their orbit velocities because they can actually borrow that spinning momentum from the Earth to give them a little bit of a boost.
Marcus Lehner:
So, it makes it easier to get to the Moon. That's nice. The second thing is a bit more complicated. You can't really have an ice cream surface on the Moon. First of all, as cold as the Moon generally is, the surface that's exposed to the Sun gets really hot, like 200 degrees plus hot on the surface of the Moon, which would cause our ice cream to melt. But it wouldn't just melt because the second problem is that there's not enough air on the Moon for ice cream to exist. The reason you don't see really any liquids on the Moon, there's actually plenty of water on the Moon, but you don't see it because the air pressure is so low.
Marcus Lehner:
And so if you have a liquid, there's a vapor pressure where if the pressure around the liquid decreases because there's no air, for example, it vaporizes at lower and lower temperatures. So really liquid water doesn't exist in the Moon because there's no air. And then if there's no air, there's nothing to kind of keep a little bit of pressure on to keep it in that liquid state. So what I had actually covered in the Earth spitting faster episode is that the faster the Earth spins, the more it expands its magnetic field. And if the Earth is spinning 10 times faster, it actually, it expands the magnetic field of the Earth far enough to fully shield the Moon. And the end result of that, if you listen to that episode, is that with that, the Moon can actually start to begin gathering an atmosphere because it won't be blown away by the solar winds.
Marcus Lehner:
So, this helps by both allowing one, having enough air pressure to have ice cream and once we start having a little bit of an atmosphere on the Moon, it's actually also going to help mitigate the wild temperature swings, because a big part of that is that there's just no protection, nothing to moderate all the energy it's getting from the Sun. So even though the Moon won't have like a full breathable atmosphere and be like Earth-like if it gets into this magnetic field protection, it should be enough to allow us to get not oven temperatures and allow us to have ice cream existing. There is one last piece of puzzle though. I had said originally a couple minutes ago, I did not want to play ice cream ... play hockey on melty ice cream land. And even though we won't be up to like 260 degrees, it's still going to be warm and I don't want to play it in the dark because that's just annoying, but I'm starting to come around to it.
Marcus Lehner:
And here's why. At 70 miles an hour, this the magic number where if we could run this fast, humans reach the point where they could be like the green basilisk lizard and run across the surface of water. So if you're running 70 miles hour faster, you can run on the surface of water without falling in for a few steps. This kind of imitates the lizard. This would be like where it reaches like the lizard ability. They can run like 15, 20, 30 steps, like a good distance, but eventually it kind of caves, but this is how that works on Earth. And I still think 70 miles per hour is pretty fast to play, but another benefit of being on the Moon and part of the reason I chose this is that on the Moon, you don't need to go 70 miles an hour.
Marcus Lehner:
The gravity is way less on the Moon. You could actually manage it at normal human running speeds. If there was a pool on the Moon and you went there today, you could run across it without falling in. So it doesn't matter. And it's almost cooler if our ice cream melts a little bit. So pick a big ice cream bowl crater, set up some goals and madly run across the ice cream while slapping a puck around and that is how you play moon hockey, the real sport of 2021.
Chris Yee:
So you kind of did water polo with melted ice cream.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I ended up dangerously close to water polo after all. But with that, I think we can move on to our would you rather question. All right, Ben, are you ready for the last question, would you rather of the year? Last would you rather question of the year?
Ben Storms:
Are you ready for it?
Marcus Lehner:
Absolutely. Chris will edit out the one where I sound stupid and it'll sound like I got it right the first time.
Ben Storms:
Well, even that statement. All right.
Marcus Lehner:
Would you rather get motion sickness every time you run or green slime shoot out of your nose when you sneeze?
Ben Storms:
I mean, I like to run.
Marcus Lehner:
That's why I started with you.
Chris Yee:
Do you like to sneeze?
Ben Storms:
No, but I do have allergies.
Chris Yee:
What are you allergic to?
Ben Storms:
Pollen and cats. And I do like cats. I don't have any particularly strong feelings about pollen aside from knowing it gives me allergies. How much slime are we talking here?
Marcus Lehner:
Noticeable and definitely weird. It's not boogers. Like ...
Chris Yee:
Is it like Nickelodeon slime?
Ben Storms:
That's kind of what I was seeing in my mind was that color and viscosity.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's just like brighter green. It's noticeably different than regular snot because otherwise this question is would you rather get motion sickness when you run or sneeze like a normal person that's congested a little bit?
Ben Storms:
Yeah, but wetter.
Chris Yee:
How much of it though?
Ben Storms:
I would say when you sneeze and there's a reasonable amount of snot that comes out. You know when you are congested and you sneeze and like a nose worth, right? Like ...
Chris Yee:
A nose worth of slime.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. A nose worth. Of course. A nose worth of snot for a sneeze.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. We're not talking like exorcist torrents here. We're saying, you know ...
Chris Yee:
Is this like projectile shooting it out?
Marcus Lehner:
As much as sneezes are. I mean, again, imagine a snotty sneeze except each sneeze is snotty and it's green snotty.
Chris Yee:
I mean, you could just use a tissue and cover it up.
Ben Storms:
You could, but you're not always going to have a tissue.
Chris Yee:
True. Well, if you have this, you might want to. You might just do that.
Ben Storms:
If, yeah. If you have this condition, you probably would always have a tissue. Would you be one of those people who carries like a cloth handkerchief around like in your pocket just in case?
Marcus Lehner:
A very green one.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I feel like you wouldn't want to reuse any handkerchief or anything.
Ben Storms:
So, my thought is that you'll probably have like a pack of paper tissues on you, but I feel like I would have a pocket handkerchief as a-
Marcus Lehner:
A emergency one, right?
Ben Storms:
Right. Yeah. That's just always in my pocket, available.
Marcus Lehner:
What you need is one of those, like a Spider-Man wrist thing, except it just shoots out a tissue.
Ben Storms:
It's like are you guys in favor of the running motion sickness one as people who don't run?
Marcus Lehner:
I'm still not sure because I was thinking, and this is kind of what was interesting for me on this question is how much do I need to run? It's not a lot.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Chris Yee:
I guess I don't have to run a lot.
Marcus Lehner:
I mean, it puts you off of like, oh, you can't play a lot of sports. Obviously, there's other types of exercise. Like you could go swimming or you could do stationary things. I think an elliptical would be like the borderline, but there's plenty of other exercises you could do. It's not like you couldn't exercise and get in shape.
Chris Yee:
So it's not like a speed thing. Because like definition of running is when you leave the ground, right? When you don't have at least one foot on the ground.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. You have a point where you are fully off the ground.
Chris Yee:
So it's not a speed thing.
Marcus Lehner:
I mean, I'll say this, instead of technically defining what running is, let's just say, if someone looks at what you're doing, it's like, oh they're running. That's when it's motion sickness.
Ben Storms:
You know it when you see it.
Marcus Lehner:
I think jogging is okay. I think a light jog would be okay, but you just can't-
Chris Yee:
See, I would say that was running. I think a jog is a run.
Ben Storms:
I would say jogging is a subset of running. Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Okay. So no jogging.
Ben Storms:
You can walk aggressively, but that's as much as you can do.
Chris Yee:
I wouldn't say skipping is running. You can skip, I think.
Ben Storms:
Okay. You might be able to skip but point being.
Chris Yee:
So you could still sort of get your exercise, Ben.
Marcus Lehner:
All right, Chris, when was the last time you ran?
Chris Yee:
When I broke my ankle.
Marcus Lehner:
And never looked back.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I guess I've technically jogged since then. But yeah, ever since I broke my ankle, I've been really cautious about running.
Marcus Lehner:
I think, I mean, I haven't gone for a run in a billion years. Oh no. I definitely ran with my little cousin around in the house, like small spurts of running, which I guess you could overcome with motion. Oh, that'd be so annoying.
Ben Storms:
It wouldn't be great. No.
Marcus Lehner:
It's the little emergencies in life. It's not about running, like going, running. I think it's like running from the living room to the kitchen when you fuck something up or your pet has grabbed something. You're like, "No, no, no you can't," and then you have to run 10 feet to where they are to stop them from doing something.
Chris Yee:
If it's an emergency though, then you're probably willing to just be a little motion sick for that. Motion sickness isn't like you're going to die. It goes away after a little bit.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh yeah. No. It's not like it'll incapacitate me. But also I could just pick the sneezing thing.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. But the sneezing thing, it's probably going to happen. I sneeze a good amount.
Marcus Lehner:
It's a bit annoying just being a wet sneezer. I think it's annoying to have to explain it to people where every time you sneeze, even if you sneeze into a tissue or whatnot, people are going to see and eventually it's a bright green snot. So, it's like, oh, that was weird. Yeah. I have this thing. You should get that checked out. Yeah. No, I've been to the doctor. And he was like, "You should have just gotten motion sickness instead."
Ben Storms:
I will say both of these are going to be things where we're going to tell people, "Hey, there's this weird thing that happens." And they're going to believe you way more with sneezing one because you're going to sneeze and it'll be bright green. And they'll be like, "Oh, that was true."
Marcus Lehner:
I would believe anyone who told me to get motion sick whenever they run.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I could believe that's like a medical condition if someone told me that. I think.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. I guess that's fair. It does sound a lot more reasonable, doesn't it?
Chris Yee:
I mean vertigo is a thing.
Ben Storms:
I mean, it would be weird when they're only running, not like biking or be in a car or anything. It's just their running.
Chris Yee:
I mean, you don't have to be that specific when you tell them.
Ben Storms:
Well, yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
It's vertigo fast.
Ben Storms:
Jesus.
Marcus Lehner:
I just hate being nauseous. It's like the fricking worst. It's so bad. Also, I was doing one of those VR headsets and I was on one of the rollercoaster things and that was the first time where I was like, I don't typically get my motion sick on most things. So it's been a while, but that actually made me like a little bit motion sick in bursts when I was doing that. And I'm like, oh no, I hate this. I don't want this at all. So maybe I just have a more vivid memory of that at this moment than a wet sneeze. And so I'm going to start, I'm going to say, I'm going to go with the green slime sneezes.
Chris Yee:
Okay. I'm going to go with the running just because I don't think I'm going to be running that much. And if I do that, I can deal with a little bit of motion sickness for that very short period of time. It's going to be unpleasant, but I'll just deal with it.
Ben Storms:
I am certainly going to go with wet sneezes because I do like to run, even though I haven't done it that much this past year.
Marcus Lehner:
I like how both of these answers are five times the worst for Ben than me or you, Chris.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I know.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. You kind of gave me pretty bad options here, dude.
Chris Yee:
I mean I'm allergic to pollen, too. So, I would sneeze a lot during the spring.
Marcus Lehner:
Okay. Well, that's decided then. Hey, reminder, this is our last episode of the year. We do have a hiatus coming up. Well, right after this, after today, we are going to be taking a break for the holidays as we go back and see all the families and do all that holiday stuff. So we will not have time to record or edit or any of those things, but we will be back on February 7th. We will be returning to start off our 2022 year of episodes.
Marcus Lehner:
If you cannot wait all the way until February to get new Absurd Hypotheticals content and hear our beautiful voices, we still do continue to do our Patreon specific episodes. So if you go to www.patreon.com/absurdhypotheticals and click on the become a patron for just a singular dollar, you get access to all our Patreon exclusive episodes. We do one every month. We do some crazy stuff back there, but they're kind of just generally it's a bit more free form. We talk about behind the scenes type stuff. Me and Ben have some eating challenges to execute that we promised to do on the previous episode. So that'll be on the next one.
Ben Storms:
Oh right. I have to buy eggnog. Oh no.
Chris Yee:
And you're cereal of choice.
Ben Storms:
Yeah,
Marcus Lehner:
Ben, you're doing eggnog cereal and I'm doing-
Chris Yee:
Candy cane sandwich.
Ben Storms:
Candy cane sandwich.
Marcus Lehner:
Candy cane Nutella sandwich. That's going to ...
Ben Storms:
It can technically be any candy cane sandwich you want, we just decided that was probably the most palatable option.
Chris Yee:
It has to have bread and candy canes and then anything else can be in it.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. So if you're into listening to podcast hosts eat weird things live, that's something you can pay money for. We accept that over on Patreon. But there are plenty of non-monetary ways to help the show. Leaving us a review, like, commenting, subscribing on if you're listening to this on YouTube, or sending us questions. We're always looking for more questions to do on the show and if you send us one, either through e-mail absurdhypotheticals@gmail.com, or if you're, again, if you're on YouTube, you can put it just right in the comment section. We like your question. It might be on the show and you'll be immortalized forever on Absurd Hypotheticals
Chris Yee:
For as long as YouTube exists.
Marcus Lehner:
As long as the Internet exists. So as long as YouTube exists, it's probably as long as the Internet exists. So probably forever, like literally immortal. We're offering literal immortality for free. So, hop on that. But again, that's how you get more of us. Otherwise, we will see you in the new year again, February 7th, 2021.
Chris Yee:
2022.
Marcus Lehner:
2022. Yep, man. I need a break. That's perfect. Perfect timing. Obviously I need a hiatus.
Chris Yee:
Yep.