Episode 152: What if no one had to sleep?
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On this episode of Absurd Hypotheticals, Marcus Lehner, Chris Yee, and Ben Storms stop doing very important things!
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:21 - Marcus’s Answer - Eat/Drink
00:12:46 - Chris’s Answer - Sleep
00:23:31 - Ben’s Answer - Breathe
00:34:56 - Would you rather: enter a boxing match with no gloves OR a soccer game with no shoes?
00:41:01 - 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, today, we are tackling a question that is very near and dear to my heart. What if people didn't need to do things? Because boy, do I hate doing things?
Chris Yee:
I don't want to do anything.
Ben Storms:
I never want to do anything.
Marcus Lehner:
I want to live on the couch and consume all the Netflix all... Just end to end, like a human centipede of viewership. But I can't. I have to do things. But that's not exactly what... We're not going to explore the wonderful world of no responsibilities. This episode is going to be one of our grab bags. Which means instead of doing one specific question, we're going to break this one up into three different questions, each covering a different, very important thing that we no longer have to do.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, the things are essential, basically.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, these are the things that even on the couch, you do need to do. So I'm going to go ahead and get us started off. And the one I'm going to cover is, what if the thing that you didn't need to do was eat and drink? What if you didn't have to eat or drink at all? Funnily, about two thirds of the way through prepping for this answer, I realized we kind of did this question once before. And by kind of I mean, literally, in episode 108. But I forgot we had done that. And that was already too deep. And I have a totally different answer. So this is extra bonus content for them I guess.
Chris Yee:
All three of us didn't realize that we'd already done it.
Marcus Lehner:
We've talked about it like a bunch. And then I was like, "Oh, I have some research from back when that's kind of hitting on this topic." And I checked, I'm like, "Wait, God dang it." But anyway, if you want to know some other answers... If you want to hear more about this question after I'm done. In episode 108, we covered kind of like how civilization would develop differently, the food chain and dead animal bodies, and some farm economy stuff is what we did in episode 108.
Marcus Lehner:
But this episode, what I'm looking at is population, because one of the things that we have to do is eat and it's really a very big part of existing and being alive on the planet. Farming is pretty damn cool. So the scientists of the internet like to use the term carrying capacity for basically how many humans can live on the earth before you hit your peak, and you can't support them. And you can't really make it past that number. Because if you add more humans, they'll just die of starvation and whatnot before you ever get your population up.
Marcus Lehner:
And so before farming, the carrying capacity for human life on Earth was 10 million people. So once you got past 10 million humans, we no longer had the ability... There wasn't enough resources around for us to consume and stay alive on the planet. Now, with our fun, farming infrastructure, and all the good things that we do, we can feed 10 billion people. But with this question, there's really no limit to how many people you could have. Because one of the biggest things, the hardest thing for us to do is feed them all. And if we don't feed them, well, what's stopping us from having lots of humans.
Marcus Lehner:
My first thought was the poop problem, because one of the limiting factors of cities as they grew, was, if you put a lot of people all together, you got a lot of poop. And it was actually a real problem for these ancient cities before they really established like all the sewage systems, people literally just pooped on the streets, and it would just pile up and then it would be nobody wants to live in the city anymore.
Chris Yee:
And horse poop.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, then the horse poop too. Yeah.
Chris Yee:
I'm pretty sure I covered this in a previous episode as well. I don't remember what episode but they had a whole meeting about it because they can expand their cities anymore. So they like, tried to come up with a solution. And they had this like day long meeting and they came up with nothing.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, so poop problem's a real problem. But if we're not eating or drinking, I don't think we're pooping, what would the poop be. So I'm saying it's not a problem. And as far as the population goes, the other thing that's not really going to be as big a deal is that we're probably going to have significantly reduced heart disease, obesity, all the stuff that eating unhealthy does to you. If we're not eating, I'm assuming everyone just kind of ends up generally healthy from a food perspective. So that's also going to bump the population up a little bit.
Marcus Lehner:
So I started looking at, okay, so how fast is our population kind of going to expand? We don't really need natural resources is the sky the limit? So to kind of get an idea of how much we expand, I looked at the last few 100 years where the earth population has actually exploded. What do you guys think the earth's population, keeping in mind that it's what eight now? I think we've crossed eight billion. 1950. What do you think the earth population was in 1950?
Chris Yee:
1950, I'm going to say...
Ben Storms:
I have a number in mind on how you don't steal mine.
Chris Yee:
I'm going to say 6 billion.
Ben Storms:
I'm going to say 2 billion.
Marcus Lehner:
Ben, you win a prize. 2.5 billion people in 1950. In the last 70 years modern times, people were alive before this that are still going strong right now, the earth's population has more than tripled since 1950. That's crazy. And so of course, I'm like, wait, are we just going to blow up the world now. Are we just going to like go from... Because it's exponential growth. So are we going to go... If we went up from 2.5 to 8, are we're going to go from eight to 24 billion in the next few years?
Marcus Lehner:
And the answer is actually, no, the biggest factor of why our population is so much higher right now than it was before is actually infant mortality. It's not that people are having so many more babies, or that it's just like natural exponential growth, it's that babies are no longer dying at the ridiculous rates they were in the... Really all the way up through the 1800s. Up through that point, before, I'm going to call modern medicine, the average woman would have six kids, but four of them wouldn't make it to adulthood, which sucks.
Marcus Lehner:
And if you ever think of time traveling, living in the Middle Ages, keep that one in mind. Now women are have an average of about the suburban two and a half kids or so. And they tend to make it to adulthood nowadays. So the population stays pretty steady, because you have a couple that makes 2.5 kids, increases a bit. So the population keeps increasing as the surviving children get older and older. But by 2100, the UN estimates the world population will be about 11 billion, but then plateau and kind of just stay there for indefinitely, almost.
Chris Yee:
I thought you said our food supply can only support 10 billion.
Marcus Lehner:
Well, hopefully in the next 100 years, we will get a little bit more efficient at farming somehow. That's the next generation's problem. I mean, they also made the point that we can feed 10 billion people, but we're only barely feeding eight, and people are going hungry. So what about the extra 2 billion people with food and that's an whole inefficiency and a whole nother topic. Anyhow.
Marcus Lehner:
So theoretically, real world, it's going to kind of cap out at 11 billion, but I suspect people might be having more kids in our no eat and drink world. Because if you don't need to feed the kids, kids are really going to be a heck of a lot easier to take care of. Like, all a baby does for the first few bits is just eat and sleep. And if you take away the eating bit, that's like a lot of effort.
Marcus Lehner:
And it's going to be significantly cheaper. I imagine there's lots of families that want another kid, but it just financially doesn't make too much sense.
Chris Yee:
And they won't poop, no diapers.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, exactly. No diapers, the whole poop clean up. [inaudible] you just got to put them down and let them exist until they're bigger. And besides sleeping, there's really not much else you have to make sure your kid does at that point. So how much cheaper are kids really? So the cost of a new child according to the USDA report, that recently came out. Food costs takes up about an estimated 18% of the cost of raising a kid. Which is actually a little bit less than I thought it was. They got some weird numbers in here, they have 16% for childcare, they have 15% for transportation, and they have the biggest number 29% for housing.
Marcus Lehner:
And 24% is other like health care, personal stuff like that. So housing, food, childcare and transportation. So food, obviously, zippo, gonzo, 18% gone right there. The other one is housing. Because I want to look at housing for a second. Because what I did not realize is exactly how much of the world we're using up for farmland. 38%, nearly 40% of all the world's land, period. Just the world's land surface area, 40% of it is used for farming. That's crazy.
Marcus Lehner:
That is so many, many acres of farms. And with that, like not only is we get that 40% of land back to build extra suburbs and all that. If you don't need to go out like shopping and all this stuff all the time, there might be less incentive to live like near major industry because you don't really need to go out consistently to get anything really to survive. And I think a lot more housing options kind of pop up with that. So I'm thinking housing is going to get cheaper, food is going to be free, childcare and transportation or whatever. I'm not sure how much I believe those USDA numbers. I mean, there were some really smart people that did a whole lot of work, but I'd read it on the internet, so I get to have my opinion too.
Marcus Lehner:
And then you have all this housing popping up, but it kind of got me thinking if you don't need these kinds... If you don't have these basic needs... Like food is our biggest basic need as a consistent costs. And housing is cheaper, but it is... I'm going to say with a big asterisk that housing is optional. So like food and housing if you don't need those costs. You have a legitimate option to simply not take part in the economy. You will not die if you do not ever make any money. If you can live in a temperate climate, you'd have kind of minimal housing needs.
Marcus Lehner:
If you are comfortable being like either a bit nomadic or camping forever, and that kind of floats your boat a little bit, you don't need to buy anything or maybe work a couple... Work for like a month every once in a while to make a little bit of like small cash, but you don't have to actually be part of the economy because you don't have this, like constant oppressive, "Oh, I need to eat, like three times a day," thing going for you.
Marcus Lehner:
Also, you don't need a house for a... You don't need a bathroom anymore. You don't need your own bathroom. That's nice. Yeah, that's one of the main things that having your own space is good for. And you don't need a kitchen, you don't need a fridge, you don't need an oven, you don't need a freezer, you don't need any of those stuff. So really, what's left in your house that you're using is like, your bed, and storage.
Marcus Lehner:
There's not much else that your house is doing for you, besides being a place to store your things and sleep. So kind of stuff like that, I think people are going to have more kids, it's going to be a lot easier for people to get houses or live these kinds of nomadic lives. So they're just going to be able to spread out and just more densely populate everywhere. So now we're going to have more and more and more people kind of explode that population. And so circling back to the very beginning, what kind of resources do we depend on? What do we need if we're not fighting over food and water and all that.
Marcus Lehner:
And I think the biggest one is going to be energy. Because as much as we don't need all these fancy restaurants anymore, we do all need to charge our iPhones and get all the good entertainment. And that power has got to come from somewhere. We definitely cannot use fossil fuels for an extra giant population. Because already with our current population, it's no good. If we just triple our output for fossil fuels, we're going to die very, very quickly.
Marcus Lehner:
So we do have to turn towards the green alternatives. And really the most consistent is going to be solar. So what limits our access solar power? Is it all good and great, kind of sort of, in that we're not going to run a sun? But we might run into some bottlenecks on actually producing solar panels. That production bottleneck is going to be silver. Solar panel actually consumes about 11% of the world's silver production. So if we start scaling up our solar power, I'm going to say drastically, we barely use the crap. So it's going to be a lot, a lot. There's going to be quite a bit of competition for the world' silver.
Marcus Lehner:
So what countries will be invading for their silver mines? Which countries will be the motley crew from world war three? It's going to be Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, China, Australia, Chile, Poland, and Serbia. Which I could not have picked a more disjointed group of like nine countries, so it's going to be a weird world war three guys, but it's going to happen. So yeah, if there's no... If we don't got to eat, we got to invade Mexico. Chris, what did you do? What don't we have to do?
Chris Yee:
So my thing that I don't have to do is sleep, which is like sort of something that I really wish was real. Because I don't like... I enjoy sleeping. But I wish I didn't have to waste that time sleeping. Because obviously, you'd get a lot more time. And a lot of people actually agree with me on this. There was a survey from Sleep Junkie, they surveyed more than 1000 Americans and 65% said that they found not having to sleep desirable or very desirable. 17% were neutral on it. And 18% for some reason, were undesirable, or very undesirable. I don't know why you would say that's undesirable.
Marcus Lehner:
People like sleeping or people don't want to work another eight hours in the day.
Chris Yee:
I guess, yeah, that's true, too. In my mind, it's very obvious, I want this to be real. But it is a little different if you look at it, in the perspective of everyone. If it's not just me, and everyone doesn't have to sleep, it's a little different. So I looked into that. And first I looked at the time aspect of things, because obviously you save a lot of time.
Chris Yee:
So I'm just going to say that people normally sleep eight hours a day. So if you sleep eight hours a day, that means you save 56 hours a week, which is more than a workweek. And you save 2,920 hours every year, which is obviously a lot of time. But there's some other factors that go into this. So one of the factors I want to look at was metabolism, because like in my mind when you're sleeping metabolism goes down, and you burn calories slower.
Chris Yee:
So there is a study that was published in 2010 that looked at metabolism during sleep. And they talked about something called energy homeostasis, which is basically calorie intake versus calorie expenditure. So making sure that the amount of calories coming in is equal to the calories going out or getting burned. And this is regulated by hormones. So there's a hormone called leptin, which inhibits hunger and there's one called ghrelin, which promotes hunger.
Chris Yee:
Now, during sleep, both leptin and ghrelin rise, but then near the end of your sleep cycle, ghrelin drops and leptin stays elevated. So you have more leptin than ghrelin, that means that you're less hungry. And in this study, they also looked at people that were sleep restricted, so they made people sleep a little less. And what happened is that there was a drop in leptin and a rise in ghrelin, so they're more hungry.
Chris Yee:
Now, this might just be like a result of people actually needing sleep. So I don't know, if we didn't need sleep, maybe this hormone thing wouldn't actually happen, I don't know. But your hunger is also regulated by your brain, things that are happening in your brain. So in your hypothalamus, it uses a chemical messenger called orexins which promotes wakefulness. So orexins, like if you're trying to be alert or something and trying to do something, then your brain is using orexins.
Chris Yee:
But it also increases your food cravings. So just whenever you're trying to pay attention to something, you're going to be more hungry. Now, your metabolism actually drops a lot less than I expected when you're asleep. So your basal metabolism makes up about 80% of your metabolism in general, just to maintain the basic needs of your body. So that's 80%. And then the other 20% is your brain burning glucose. So your basal metabolic rate stays the same when you're asleep, that doesn't change at all. But when you're asleep, glucose utilization drops, mainly during like the stages leading up to REM sleep. And then when you're awake, your glucose utilization goes up. So it works out to about a 15% reduction in metabolic rate when you're asleep. Which I mean, it's something but it's not nearly as drastic as I thought it would be.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, I thought it was going to be like a hibernation thing, where it's like you use like 10% of the energy. But now it's crazy.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, you still use 85% of the energy. So I want to see like how this affects me personally. So I looked at my own basal metabolic rate, just based on like an equation that has, I input, my age and my weight and stuff like that. So for me, while I'm asleep, I burn 74 calories per hour. When I'm awake, I burn 92 calories per hour. Now, that 92 calories per hour is only if I'm like sitting, doing nothing while I'm awake. I'm probably going to be a little more active when I'm awake, though.
Chris Yee:
Even if I'm just doing like light activities, like cleaning the house, or like doing office work or something, I'm going to burn around 280 calories per hour. So with eight hours of sleep, if in a normal day, with eight hours of sleep and light activity, I would burn 5,000 calories. But if I didn't need to sleep, and I was just doing light activity all day for 24 hours, then I would burn 6,700 calories. So that's an extra 1,700 calories, which is like two extra meals in a day.
Chris Yee:
So if you didn't sleep, people would be eating two extra meals, which is a good amount. So I was like, okay, people are eating two extra meals, how's this going to affect, like food production. Because, as Marcus mentioned, we're already kind of struggling to feed people. So calorie intake is a 32% increase. So that means that crop production is going to need to increase by 32%. And we can't really like speed up like how fast the crop grows.
Chris Yee:
So we're really going to have to just expand the amount of land that we're using for agriculture. That's really the only way to do it. So I looked at the US specifically just because they're the largest exporter of food crop by value. So the land usage of the US I know, Marcus gave numbers for the world. He said 40% of the world uses farming land. For the US, it's just 17% for agriculture. It's number three on the list that I found. Grasslands also was 17%. They put that as number four though, number two was shrub lands at 24%. And number one was forests at 27%. So theoretically, there is enough land for us to expand our farming. We'll just have to destroy nature to do it.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, we're good at that.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. So we'll probably... I mean, we can use the shrub land and we might need to cut down some trees and forests and stuff. Especially if like population is growing and stuff which it is.
Marcus Lehner:
Or some deer look at us weird and they deserve to have their homes destroyed.
Chris Yee:
Sure.
Marcus Lehner:
Make way for industry Bambi.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, so we're going to be cutting down trees. Which brings me to my next issue, which is carbon cycles and CO2 emissions. Because I think the bigger concern is not the energy consumption in our body. It's the energy consumption that like society is using outside of our bodies. Because if we're awake, then we're using energy. And we're not just lying there sleeping.
Chris Yee:
So the US Energy Information Administration has this real time electric grid monitor thing that, it like displays the electricity demand in generation in the US in real time. So, I looked it up last Friday, I specifically chose Friday, because I think it's a little different during the week than it is during the weekend because people behave a little different. But last Friday... Well, actually, it doesn't really matter what day but it shows like a pattern of obviously, higher electricity generation during the day and less at night, when people are asleep.
Chris Yee:
And there's actually what they call a morning ramp when people are waking up. And then demand is high from around 8:00 AM to the evening, it peaks around like 6:00 or 7:00 PM. And then it drops again when people go to sleep. Now on a typical weekday, at nighttime, I average sort of between like between midnight and 8:00 AM. The average electricity use is 358,000 megawatt hours. And during the day, it's 435,000 megawatt hours. So during the day, it's a 22% increase from the night.
Chris Yee:
Now, the problem is that 60% of electricity production is actually sourced from things like natural gas, coal, and petroleum fuels. And all these things emit CO2 into the atmosphere. So for increasing all of our electricity, then we're also increasing our CO2 emissions. So how much energy in a normal day are we actually using just based on my average power, hourly rate things. So in the US, we use about 9.8 million megawatt hours just on a normal day.
Chris Yee:
But if we're always awake, we're going to be using 10.5 million megawatt hours total. So that's a 7% increase in total electricity generation. 7% isn't that much of an increase, but it is still an increase and we are already struggling with like CO2 emissions and stuff like that. So that in combination with non-electricity related fuel consumption, like driving cars, and like gas heating, and stuff like that, and in combination with us cutting down all the trees to make farms, that's not good. That combo is not good.
Marcus Lehner:
And starting with the fact that we're already screwed.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, we've already screwed ourselves before this even happened, we're going to have a very big climate change issue, unless we like, implement some laws or something. So I think what's going to happen is if nobody can sleep, or if no one has to sleep, we're going to make a law that has like minimal activity levels, and energy consumption and emissions, and someone is going to develop some pill that artificially induces sleep anyway, just to keep us under the numbers that we need. And we'll just sleep anyway. Even though we don't need to, because we will need to save the world.
Marcus Lehner:
Save the planet, knock yourself unconscious.
Chris Yee:
Exactly. Ben, what did you do?
Ben Storms:
So I looked at what if people did not have to breathe? This is a kind of interesting question in different ways than your guys were because a lot of yours, at least a portion of yours was related to time saving. These are things you have to do that take up time that you can really drastically change how you live your life by not having to eat or drink or sleep. Breathing is something we kind of just do.
Ben Storms:
It doesn't take any... I mean, it can take effort if you're like sick or something, but it's not something that you have to think about something. It's not something that you have to go out of your way to do. It's something you just do naturally. So really the answer to this is not anything related to day to day things. It's definitely much more big picture stuff.
Ben Storms:
And one thing that I did realize very early on that is pretty relevant currently, is that it would cut down pretty heavily on diseases. Because most diseases are either spread through the air or through droplets. And those droplets are from respiration. So one very nice thing we don't have to breathe is that the only diseases that would be a problem would be things that are animal or food borne, or like bodily fluid borne, and all of those are much, much easier to avoid than breath.
Marcus Lehner:
I can tell you there's definitely not many foodborne diseases because I was hoping that would be an answer for part of mine, but it was not.
Ben Storms:
Yeah they're around but they're certainly not as bad as like, droplet and airborne diseases.
Marcus Lehner:
The number two disease was the people that die from salmonella, which is not many.
Ben Storms:
Exactly. So we'd have disease. So that's cool. But that's obviously not that fruitful of an answer topic. So if we can't get over any big like, current life changes what about going places we couldn't go before. Where are places where we were limited by not being able to breathe. So the first thing I thought of... Well, not actually, but the first thing I looked into was caves. Is that a problem? Are there these big cave networks that we know about that we can't go into because there's deposits of bad air in there that we can't... It just becomes way too dangerous to go into?
Ben Storms:
And the answer is not really, it turns out bad air is really not... It can be a problem in some caves. Generally, like tropical caves, you can get buildup of CO2, or sometimes methane, mostly due to either some kind of bacteria, that's there, or animal activity or things like that. But generally, caves will have multiple entrances, they'll have conduits, and things like that, that give really good airflow. So usually, because of that airflow, you don't have bad air problems in caves. That's not really our limiting factor ever.
Ben Storms:
There's actually research... Well, I say there's research, there are, quote, unquote, doctors who say that going in caves can be good for people who have asthma, or allergies, or things like that treat those sorts of conditions, because of the humidity in the caves and the lack of allergens. And there's apparently in Germany and Austria, there are... What do they call it? Speleotherapy facilities, which are basically just caves you go in and breathe. I don't know, to treat asthma and stuff like that. There have been studies that have shown no actual real proof this actually works. But who knows, it's a thing people do.
Chris Yee:
But doctors just say it anyway.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, who knows? It's something that came around like around World War Two. And I think no one ever really bothered looking into it too much. Who knows.
Marcus Lehner:
Plus, the caves also got leeches in them for some easy bloodletting. I mean, that's going to cure your other diseases right there.
Ben Storms:
There you go. Something's going to get cured. So really, in terms of caves, there's not much there. We don't go into slash live in caves. Because going into and living in caves has other problems that are not air related, so let's move past that. Let's look at water. Obviously, you cannot breathe water. So that limits a lot of things we can do in water. And not having to read will solve some of our problems with being able to live underwater, I guess.
Ben Storms:
And some of the problems that you have when say diving are actually going to be solved by this. A lot of these are coming up because you have to breathe compressed air. And that compressed air contains nitrogen. So for example, the bends, which is kind of the most common issue while diving is when you're breathing and there's compressed air under pressure, that nitrogen starts getting stored in your body's tissue. And if you come back up at a measured pace, if you do what you're supposed to do, which is take your time on the way back up, it sort of goes back into your lungs, and you breathe it out, and you're fine.
Ben Storms:
But if you come up too quickly that forms bubbles, which will cause tissue damage, nerve damage. And if they form in your brain, they can paralyze you or kill you. There's also nitrogen narcosis, which is, if you dive too deep, that nitrogen can build up in your brain and cause a feeling similar to drunkenness. And this is a direct quote I saw, "You might make poor decisions, such as taking out your regulator, because you think you can breathe underwater."
Chris Yee:
But we can breathe underwater.
Ben Storms:
But we can, and this is only happening because of the nitrogen in that compressed air mixture. So this would not be a problem. And on that one in particular, you're probably thinking, "Wow, that sounds really bad." That must happen really deep. That starts happening when you're you're diving around 100 feet underwater.
Marcus Lehner:
Maybe that's why all the deep sea fish looks so weird, because everyone's so drunk down there.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. And it's just a real problem is that even though we don't have to breathe, when you go underwater, the pressure goes up really, really fast. So every 33 feet you go underwater, the atmospheric pressure goes up an entire nother atmosphere's worth of pressure. So that builds up very, very quickly. And that takes us to the other pressure related danger that you get when diving, which is barotrauma, which is just there are parts of our body that have air in them, most obviously, our lungs, which I'm guessing is not really a problem anymore, but also your inner ear, your sinuses, your digestive tract, all have air in them.
Ben Storms:
And when the pressure builds up, those tissues can be damaged or rupture, which in all those cases is really bad. It's not good. I'm not going to go into detail on that because it's kind of terrifying. I also saw something about apparently back in the days when they had like the big like metal diving helmets, there was an issue where if the tube had an issue, and the valve that went between like the breathing tube and the helmet wasn't correctly set up to not allow air to go back up the tube, if there was an issue, what could happen was there will be an issue with the tube, and the pressure would try to equalize up the tube and the diver will be sucked off into their helmet, which is exactly as bad as that sounds. Diving is terrifying, I never want to do it anymore.
Chris Yee:
I never wanted to do it.
Ben Storms:
I kind of want to do it still anyway. So there is some stuff we could do with shallower water. So technically, the average depth of a lake is around 10 meters or 33 feet, which is where we're getting like one extra atmospheric pressure, which is not great, but certainly adaptable, livable, you're not going to have a problem there. The problem is lakes only make up about 2.8% of the Earth's surface, which is like 1.6 million square miles, which is about six Texas's. So technically, that's a decent amount of extra like, room to put people, but not that much compared to the scale of the planet.
Ben Storms:
And you couldn't use it for farmland or anything, because it's also water. And obviously, there'll be a lot of ecological impacts of that. So we shouldn't live in lakes just in general. So water, also kind of a dead end, I guess you can... You can free dive more easily, who cares, but not actually useful.
Ben Storms:
So that leaves us now with his space. Clearly, you can't just go float around in space without a spacesuit, there's cold and pressure, or I guess lack of pressure. And obviously, that's not going to work. But one, it definitely helps with getting to space. Oxygen is heavy. And we don't have good ways to produce oxygen in space right now. We have some things we can do with hydrolysis, and things like that. But there's just no way to produce enough oxygen to even support like the astronauts in the International Space Station right now.
Ben Storms:
Right now, they are constantly being shipped up new tanks of oxygen to keep them alive. It obviously doesn't have to happen when you are sending a shuttle or anything up into space. You don't have to include oxygen there. And that'll save weight, which is obviously very important for achieving spaceflight. But all in all it's kind of small potato stuff. But the one place where we can actually maybe, maybe help things out, is terraforming.
Ben Storms:
There are really two key things that terraforming does. So one is obviously make a breathable atmosphere so that life can exist without having to have external oxygen sources. The other thing it does is make the temperature high enough to support life. Because on a planet without an atmosphere, you're usually going to wind up, because you don't have those greenhouse gases to trap in heat, with just a very, very unbelievably cold situation.
Ben Storms:
And the difficulty in terraforming is not getting that warm atmosphere. If we just want to make Mars hot, we can apparently just, assuming there is enough like CO2 resources on the planet, which there may or may not be, it's not clear, we can do that in about 100 years, just by releasing a bunch of CO2 and warming up the planet. That's not quick, but it's definitely relatively fast.
Ben Storms:
The problem is, in order to actually support life, currently, we also have to get the oxygen and nitrogen that we would need in the the air to allow us to live oxygen, you can plant plants, do things like... There's ways to get oxygen from CO2 pretty easily. Obviously, nitrogen is actually the big issue. Because really what you need is basically to pull atmosphere from... Or pull nitrogen from Jupiter's atmosphere and bring it there, which is not currently possible.
Ben Storms:
But if we don't have to breathe, and we just have to make it hot enough to live that is something that we could accomplish. Hopefully, just with what's currently on Mars. So I guess overall takeaway is that if we didn't have to breathe, we could technically within, I'm going to say a few 100 years, maybe live on Mars, which is something and also not the sick. So that's also something.
Marcus Lehner:
You know else you can do if you don't have to breathe, you can enter an Abercrombie store.
Ben Storms:
Wow,
Chris Yee:
How long have you been waiting to say that joke?
Marcus Lehner:
Literally the whole time.
Ben Storms:
I kind of figured that was the case. So that's what I got.
Marcus Lehner:
Awesome.
Chris Yee:
Now what if we didn't have to do all three of these things?
Marcus Lehner:
We'd be invincible.
Ben Storms:
It'd be way easier to live on Mars.
Marcus Lehner:
All right with that we are going to hop over to our Would You Rather question.
Chris Yee:
Ben are you ready for a Would You Rather?
Ben Storms:
Sure.
Chris Yee:
Would you rather enter a boxing match with no gloves or a soccer game with no shoes?
Ben Storms:
All right. In this hypothetical, I'm entering as myself, not as someone who is trained in doing one of these things.
Chris Yee:
Yes.
Ben Storms:
Okay.
Marcus Lehner:
What's the competition?
Ben Storms:
That's also an important question.
Chris Yee:
I would say somebody that have similar skill level.
Ben Storms:
Okay.
Marcus Lehner:
All right, Ben, you're up against the potato. What do you do?
Ben Storms:
Here's the thing about boxing is that boxing gloves, I believe, actually, in some way... A boxing glove somewhat cushions the impact. They are weighty, which isn't great. But I believe that part of the reason that boxing is more dangerous within terms of like head trauma than, say, mixed martial arts is that there's a lot more like sub-concussive force applied to the head. And it's definitely worse just getting like a bunch of gloved hits to your head that don't actually knock you out then like a one good punch that knock you out. So in some ways, you kind of have an advantage not wearing boxing gloves.
Chris Yee:
I assume you're not a long term boxer. You're only in one boxing match.
Ben Storms:
But like it's still... It's easier to knock someone out with one punch, I think with just a bare fish than with a boxing glove. Don't quote me on that. So you kind of have an advantage. However, you still have to box someone. And I would rather run around shoeless on a soccer field than have to box someone.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, it's like would I rather get punched for five minutes or run for 90 minutes.
Ben Storms:
I've run for 90 minutes before I can do it again.
Marcus Lehner:
I haven't. I don't think I could do it once.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, I haven't either.
Marcus Lehner:
I will say like a fully inflated soccer ball is very hard. It would not be fun to kick.
Chris Yee:
Kicking it barefoot.
Ben Storms:
Counterpoint. If you are playing soccer, and one of the players in your team is not wearing shoes are you going to pass the ball to them? Because I don't think you are.
Marcus Lehner:
Just play like the quiet kid on the team where you don't try not to get passed to the whole time.
Ben Storms:
You can make it work.
Marcus Lehner:
Is it easier to get thrown out of a soccer game or out of a boxing match?
Ben Storms:
Oh, probably... Well, okay, so you're probably going to have to like do some aggressive tackling in a soccer match. And that might be rough going at someone's spike cleats with your bare feet.
Chris Yee:
Boxing match, you just go for the low blow.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, you go for the low blow and try not to get punched on the way in.
Marcus Lehner:
Although I guess if you just started like... I guess if you just run up to someone and just like kick them in the stomach. I think that's a red card. I think if you do that in boxing, it's still not allowed but I don't think they'd kick you out of the match
Ben Storms:
They probably would. If you... There are things you can do to get thrown out with like one action. I'm just pretty sure that against any like semi-competent boxer you get knocked the hell out before you can do one of those things.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, in order to do one of the things you have to get close.
Marcus Lehner:
What if you just go and like just start boxing the ref. You just square up immediately towards the referee.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, that would be a good bet.
Ben Storms:
That would probably get kicked out. I still don't know if you would be able to like get close enough to him to not get punched on the way in by the other boxer.
Chris Yee:
Where's the ref usually standing?
Ben Storms:
He's in view of but away from the fighters. So if you move towards him he moves away.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, he'd be avoiding you so you'd have to chase him down.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, and while you're doing that the other guy is just trying to punch you in the side of the head.
Marcus Lehner:
But you'd also have to chase down the soccer much further away and also he's probably better at running.
Chris Yee:
There's probably there's more than one soccer ref, though.
Ben Storms:
Could you just like truck a linesman, would that like... They don't move.
Marcus Lehner:
It'd be great if this was tennis, there's ball boys everywhere.
Ben Storms:
I mean let's put it this way you can get out of a boxing match much faster but the way of getting out is probably like-
Chris Yee:
Going to hurt.
Ben Storms:
Going to hurt, yeah. I know personally where my opinion lies, but I don't know about you guys.
Marcus Lehner:
I think I've decided.
Ben Storms:
Chris
Chris Yee:
I haven't decided yet but other side last minute, last second.
Ben Storms:
All right. I am going to go with a soccer match.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, I too, am going to go with the soccer match. I think one if we don't cheese it and you have to actually play out the thing I would rather be involved in a thing that where I don't get punched. And it's just the risk of getting punched a lot that I really don't enjoy.
Ben Storms:
I also feel like if you are in a soccer match and you don't have shoes on, you're going to be turned into some sort of weird, tragic story. Whereas in a boxing match you show up without gloves and then just get knocked the hell out people are laughing you a lot on Twitter.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, I mean, it's just really... It's more about the difference in the sports than the difference in the hypothetical where like, if Ben if you just were like "Hey, Marcus, do you want to go box some more?" I'd be like, "Hell no." But if you're like, "Hey, you want to go play soccer?" I'd be like, "Well, it's probably cold outside, so also no." But I would consider it more right.
Chris Yee:
You make a compelling argument, but I'm going to choose boxing anyway.
Ben Storms:
Of course you are.
Chris Yee:
So I said a similar skill level. So I'm fighting basically me.
Marcus Lehner:
So he has it coming.
Chris Yee:
I think I can take myself, I think having no boxing gloves, that gives me an advantage. So if I'm... Because I can knock them out faster. So I think if he's has a similar skill level to me, then I just have an advantage over him.
Ben Storms:
I guess that's fair, you're still going to get punched.
Chris Yee:
Probably I'm still going to get punched. But I don't know, I'm going to win.
Marcus Lehner:
But so is that idiot. But you should see the other guy.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
And so with that brings us to the end here where I do the stuff where I asked you guys, the listener to do things for us because of the kindness in your hearts. And because you enjoyed this content. And that's how this relationship works. So if you enjoy the show, go to www.patreon.com/absurdhypotheticals and become a patron, support the show directly with just one singular hard earned dollar. You get access to all our bonus content that we post, specifically, exclusively, specially for our patrons, our wonderful hypothetipals.
Marcus Lehner:
If you want to help in a non-financial way, you can leave us a review. Leaving us a review on your podcast player is awesome and great, and helps grow the show. Or if you want to be directly things from your mind palace coming into the show, send us a question. Just shoot us an email absurdhypotheticals@gmail.com. And if you send us a question, we'd love to get listener questions and you might see it on the show. And we spent time answering it in stupid ways. And you'll be like, "Oh my God, these guys are idiots. Why did they just do this?" But it'll be your question. So you'll be doubly frustrated?
Chris Yee:
And then we'll answer it like 20 episodes later, not realizing that we already answered it.
Marcus Lehner:
Speaking of re-answering questions, everyone is welcome to join us next week, where we do a throwback episode. So we've done a couple of these before, this will be our third but the throwback is where we go back into the archives. Find questions where either we didn't like what we did the first time or have some new thoughts or an interesting twist. So we're going to do it grab bag style. We're all going to pick an old question and do a fresh, new, modern answer to it. So we'll see then.
Chris Yee:
Modern.
Ben Storms:
Modern.