Episode 153: What if all bridges were made of spaghetti?
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On this episode of Absurd Hypotheticals, Marcus Lehner, Chris Yee, and Ben Storms return to some old questions!
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:58 - Marcus’s Answer - Zero Gravity Water Polo
00:12:49 - Chris’s Answer - Lego House
00:23:25 - Ben’s Answer - Spaghetti Bridge
00:35:32 - Would you rather: eliminate paper products OR eliminate emissions?
00:41:31 - Outro
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TRANSCRIPTION
Marcus Lehner:
Hello everybody, and welcome to Absurd Hypotheticals, the show 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 doing a throwback episode. You might be asking, what the heck is that? I'll tell you what that is, if you don't have enough context clues. What we are doing is, we have answered lots and lots of crazy hypothetical questions over the course of this podcast, and sometimes we look back and we're like, man, I've got something better. Give me a give me on that one, I've got something else, or I've got something new, or I want to take this from a new angle that I couldn't fit in the first time.
Marcus Lehner:
So we have each gone back and selected a different hypothetical question from our past, to recreate a fresh new answer for.
Chris Yee:
It's a chance for us to correct our mistakes, or?
Marcus Lehner:
Oh no, we're not correcting any mistakes. What we've done in the past is always perfect.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, sure. Sure.
Ben Storms:
Usually it's addressing something where we...
Chris Yee:
That we regret.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. How do we not do blank?
Chris Yee:
I mean, we had a whole section of our show where we put in half the amount of effort for every question.
Ben Storms:
Right, yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
That is true, and what Chris means is that we used to do two hypothetical questions per episode and squoze them both in.
Ben Storms:
Squaz. Squazed them, yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
We squipped those in altogether, and we had shorter answers with a little bit less depth so that we can always go back and do a bit more. But I feel like I'm going to get this train rolling, because we have lots of questions to go through.
Marcus Lehner:
So what I went back and did was episode 61, what if all sports were in zero gravity? And we did a lot of episodes reinventing sports under different conditions, and for some reason I always end up doing water polo. I convert water polo into all these crazy hypotheticals. I think I just like pools. But I didn't do it for zero-G sports, and I'm here to rectify that particular situation. Because-
Chris Yee:
Have you ever played water polo?
Marcus Lehner:
Heck no. I don't even know most of the rules still.
Ben Storms:
I just want to say, the most brazen of your make sport into blank answers was water polo, was the one where it's doing sports in pools, you still did water polo.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, but I did polo in water. Anyway, water polo in zero-G, and this is the reason I went back. Because the first and obvious thing is, let's start with the water. Water polo is played in a pool. For those of you who don't know what water polo is, it's basically soccer except people are swimming around and they throw the ball with their hands. There's a net on either end, and you're kind of just treading water the whole time and passing the ball around and trying to throw it into the net.
Marcus Lehner:
So what happens to a pool in zero gravity? Because it doesn't, of course, nicely stay down, because that's what gravity's for. And yes, this is at the point in which I wasted almost all my research time looking at astronauts doing cool tricks with water on the IIS and similar in zero gravity. Without gravity, the water has no reason to stay in the nice rectangular pool, and will just float around.
Marcus Lehner:
Without gravity, the next strongest force that's going to start dictating what our water looks like is going to be surface tension, so just the water holds itself together at its surface. It's what makes little droplets and bubbles and all those things. The water's surface tension in zero gravity will cause it to kind of slowly clump together into floating spheres. So it kind of looks for the most energy efficient shape it can be, and given the water tension, it makes it a sphere. If you throw water around in a space shuttle, it will make little different sized spheres of water.
Marcus Lehner:
Eventually they all come together, so our playing field will theoretically look like a giant floating sphere of water. Which you could swim in, by the way. I was looking into if you'd be able to swim in water in zero gravity, and there's really not any issues because you're just kind of pushing against a fairly dense thing to get momentum. So yeah, the water would be pushed back, but you could definitely swim in it.
Chris Yee:
You wouldn't float in it, right? You'd just be in the middle of it?
Marcus Lehner:
You would float in it in that you're also in zero gravity. The gravity of the water ball is not going to be enough to impact you. A pool-sized amount of water does not have its own gravitational pull even in zero gravity, that would be significant.
Chris Yee:
I mean, there's not going to be a buoyant force?
Marcus Lehner:
Yes, there's so buoyant force, because a buoyant force would be generated by the pressures of water from gravity, and the weight of the water being displaced by... I'm going to skip that explanation. Because I realized I would have to go back like three more steps to actually explain it, and I'm not going that far in.
Marcus Lehner:
But as cool as this is, our sphere of water would not last very long once the game started. Because while surface tension is cool in these zero gravity environments, it's not actually going to keep the ball together if there's anything else going on. The surface tension strength of water is pretty weak. You just go right through water, you sink in it, you break the surface very easily. And just because there's no other forces, it doesn't make the surface tension any stronger. So once your players start moving around and swimming, this sphere is going to be very quickly destroyed and your pool's worth of water will be flying everywhere in different sized globs and globuals and bouncing all around the place.
Marcus Lehner:
This is a problem. Astronaut Luca Parmitano kind of tested that. He was on a space walk, and there was an issue with his coolant where it was slowly leaking into his helmet. So what happened is the way space helmets are designed is that there's the big dome helmet, and right behind your head there's this plate headrest, this plastic plate headrest sort of thing, slightly off the back of the helmet that you kind of rest your head against. The oxygen and the air comes up from behind that plate, shoots upwards so it goes around the helmet in front of your face.
Marcus Lehner:
So what was happening was that the coolant was getting into the air that was coming in, and the liquid droplets were slowly building up on the back of the head plate. Because while water likes to make spheres, the other things it likes to do is it does actually get sticky on surfaces in zero gravity because it's... a dome on a flat surface is more energy efficient than the sphere, so water actually gets kind of tacky. You can see, if they ring out a towel in space, the water that comes out will actually collect on their hands and not go anywhere else. It will stay stuck to that surface.
Chris Yee:
It's like a similar force to why there's surface tension, right? Like from water to water?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, it has to do with the ions having a charge, and that lets them attract to other surfaces and hold it together. Down to a molecular level, things like to hold together. So what happened was these water droplets from this air kept slowly building up on the back of his head plate, and it likes to run across that surface, so as it built up more... it doesn't fill the helmet from the bottom up, it builds on the back plate and then slowly started encroaching on his head, like covering his ears and threatening to cover his eyes and his nose. So he could have drowned in there with an inch of water on his face.
Marcus Lehner:
End of the story, he was fine. They canceled his space walk, they brought him in, they look care of it and it was not a problem. But it shows the problem we would have if we just have a bunch of dudes floating around, bumping into water droplets all the time. They're going to build up on your face and surfaces, and you're just going to eventually have a little film of water on you that could potentially drown you. Again, it's all surface tension forces, so it's kind of easy to brush off the water if it happens, but it's going to be kind of a constant threat and it's going to be tricky to avoid doing that.
Marcus Lehner:
So what I think we need to do is, you can't just go through a pools worth of water and just always deal with it bouncing around, so what I think we need is some structure for the water to more favorably cling to, rather than just be loose in the air. So let's keep the sphere shape, because that's just cool, but the way we're going to structure it is we're going to have basically a series of wires to build the sphere and separate it into a series of honeycomb shapes, if you can follow what I'm picturing?
Marcus Lehner:
Where it's just kind of like a spiderweb of medium spaced wires that the water can now collect on, and what it will do is it will create almost walls of water, almost like a bubble wand, where you'll be able to have the surface tension create flat surfaces attracted to the wires and you'll have less floating water all around. Also, I think it would be cool, because it might open up some strategic elements of which water walls to break through as you navigate through this honeycombed sphere of stuff.
Marcus Lehner:
So we kind of have our field, it fixes the not drowning portion of our sport. But now, if we're not swimming through water, because it's hanging on our wires instead of on our faces, how do we get around? There are a lot of options here. I'm going to start with some stuff like jet packs, or just grabbing onto the wires and repelling yourself, things of that nature. But I think part of the spirit of water polo is that you can only move so quickly, and it is extremely tiring to do so over the course of the whole game.
Chris Yee:
The fact that I would die playing it for like a minute.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, exactly. This is only for real athletes who actually do cardio. So with that in mind, I'm going to skip to the conclusion then tell you why it's great. I have chosen the best method of transportation in zero gravity, the Airzooka. If you don't know what the Airzooka is, it is that children's toy that consists of this big barrel-like gun, and on the back of it it has an elastic diaphragm with a knob that you pull and you release, and it shoots out a big puff of wind. They're actually pretty cool. Have you guys ever played with one?
Chris Yee:
I have. I actually didn't know that's what it was called.
Marcus Lehner:
I think the brand named one is Airzooka, and then there's all the knockoffs.
Ben Storms:
I've always been fascinated, but never actually played with one unfortunately.
Marcus Lehner:
They do a better job than you would think. [inaudible 00:10:08] you can blow out a candle at like 40 feet with it, which is I'll say pretty impressive. If you don't know what it is, look it up, I can't explain it anymore besides you have a gun you just use to shoot air around.
Marcus Lehner:
So here's why this is brilliant and makes this sport perfect. One, it definitely fulfills the slow and tiring criteria. You're going to have to build your momentum up over a series of wind puffs. Also, I think I want to make this the only way that the players are able to move the ball towards the opposing goal, because if you can just grab the ball and chuck it, I don't think anyone has enough reaction time with any form of transportation in zero-G to actually stop you from just throwing it directly at the goal and scoring. It would be moving too fast if you could throw it.
Marcus Lehner:
So you can only air puff the ball towards the opposing goal. You have to really figure out how to build enough momentum to score a goal here. You can use it offense too. You can use your air puffs, while you're going in one direction, to push other players other directions as well. You can rob them of their momentum. You can use it to pop the water walls around you if you like. You can use this air puff to do other things as well.
Marcus Lehner:
Also, and I think this is the little cherry on top, is that it's also a safety feature, because there's still going to be water around, it's not like you're going to have no water on your face, and if you get too much you just puff on your own face and boom, water's gone, you're safe. You don't have to worry about drowning. So that's pretty much what it is. It's just you're in a sphere, you're going through these honeycombed walls of water, and you're just puffing around with your little Airzooka. And that is how you play water polo in zero gravity.
Chris Yee:
So it's not like a... because when I was first imagining this, I was imagining an orb full of water, but it's not full of water, it's just the outside is water?
Marcus Lehner:
Imagine a bubble wand where you have a perimeter with a film around it. Most of those sections would be full. So yeah, you would be in the air generally, but you'd be in a series of small hexagon-ish rooms, where you'd have five or six different ways you could go in the sphere, that would either have a water wall or have a destroyed water wall already, so you'd be moving around the sphere that way.
Chris Yee:
Okay. But you won't be in the water the whole time, you'll be going through water walls?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, and the water walls will break up and so there will be some amount of water around. But yeah, generally you're going to be not under water. You don't have to breathe... I'm trying to avoid the drowning problem.
Chris Yee:
The drowning part. Okay, that's a cool, unique take on it.
Marcus Lehner:
All my water polo sports are unique. I take pride in that. Chris, what did you do for yours?
Chris Yee:
The question that I looked back on was from episode 17, it was what if all buildings were made of legos? In this episode, I think Ben talked about what if all buildings turned into legos overnight, and everything would just break, and that's what he talked about. I think Marcus tried to build an aquarium, for some reason, with legos?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, I built an aquarium because I knew that would not work very well.
Chris Yee:
And what I did for my answer was I tried to design a house of legos, like structurally, and see how that would work. I say tried, because I definitely made mistakes.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, I'm also going to throw in here before Chris you get any further. Chris screwed this up the first time, I'm going to see how he does this time. Chris should not have screwed this up either time, because you are an actual, factual structural engineer.
Chris Yee:
I wasn't licensed before, now I am licensed.
Marcus Lehner:
Yes, I just had the eight years of education, and now I've got eight years of education plus one more year.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. One of the main mistakes I did, actually wasn't really a mistake, I sort of intentionally just made it simpler because I didn't want to spend the time to do it, was that I said that the columns for the house, all you need was like six four-by-four Lego bricks. So six wide and six long of those four-by-four Lego bricks for your columns. And obviously this is wrong, because normal houses, the columns are bigger than that for normal structural materials.
Marcus Lehner:
Yep.
Chris Yee:
And the reason why it worked in my calculations is because I basically just ignored all horizontal loads, and I only looked at vertical loads. But there's wind, and earthquake loads, and there's other loads. I basically just did it for simplicity, because I only spent like two hours doing it. I actually never got a chance to acknowledge this mistake on the show. I might have mentioned it in a behind the scenes episode or something, I don't remember. I definitely didn't mention it on any of the main episodes, so now I get to.
Marcus Lehner:
The deep guilt coming out 135 episodes later.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. We joked about me trying to do this again with my license. I'm actually not going to try to redo the calcs.
Marcus Lehner:
Wait, what?
Chris Yee:
Mainly because I'm kind of lazy, and I don't really trust myself to not mess it up again, and also because I listened to episode 17 and my portion of that episode with the calcs was actually pretty boring, there was a lot of numbers and it was hard to follow, and I just didn't like it. I'll just say that the outcome of that episode is basically that the design was pretty ridiculous. I think we said that we could use glue for it, so we ignored all the seems in the Legos, it would just be the material of the Lego. And if I did that, then my final design had a four foot thick slabs of Legos for the floors, and that's a very, very thick slab for a floor.
Chris Yee:
So yeah, it was a ridiculous design, that combined with the tiny columns. In that episode I also mentioned that they have built real Lego houses before, and those real Lego houses used wooden frames because structurally it wouldn't be able to hold itself up.
Marcus Lehner:
Such a scam. Such a scam.
Chris Yee:
I know, and then they just use the Legos as the aesthetics of it.
Marcus Lehner:
It's like Lego wallpaper. I was very excited for that special, and very disappointed about that special.
Chris Yee:
And the reason that it wouldn't be able to stand up is basically just because the material that the Lego is made out of. It's made out of ABS plastic, which isn't very strong as a building material. So I wanted to look at, instead of designing a new house with just normal Legos, I wanted to look at new materials for Legos and see if anything worked better. Lego, the company, has actually been testing new materials, they're actually looking for more sustainable materials, because they've been using the same ABS plastic for a really long time. They've been testing plastic recycled from bottles and stuff.
Chris Yee:
And for their materials, they say that it needs to meet their safety and durability requirements, because I guess they want all their new Legos to be able to fit together with Legos that are like 30 years old. It can't deteriorate and change dimensions, or else it will mess things up. And actually, the ability to snap to other pieces is what they call clutch power.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh my God.
Chris Yee:
I don't know why they gave it such a weird name. But they emphasize the importance of the material being able to be molded to an accuracy of a hair width, because if the margin of error is any bigger than that, then it will affect the ability to snap together, and it just ensures that new Legos work with old Legos. They said that they hadn't really found an existing sustainable material that meets their standards, so they're going to need to probably create a new material, is what they said, and I don't think they've found anything yet.
Chris Yee:
But this just shows that it's not the material that defines the Lego, it's the shape of the Lego and the ability to snap together is what makes a Lego and Lego. It can be any material. And to highlight this even further, there is actually an official gold Lego brick made by the Lego company. They're actually very rare. It's a two-by-four Lego brick, made with 25 grams of solid 14 karat gold. These were actually given out between 1979 and 1981. They were given to very select Lego employees and partners, just based on if they did something really special for the company or something, or they're an important person or something. I think I read they had 10 of these, or maybe fewer than 10, but each one was worth around $15,000.
Marcus Lehner:
You can't even build anything with those. What are you going to do with 10 two-by-fours? Oh, I built a wall.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, you build a wall. I don't know, you could be creative.
Marcus Lehner:
I built a weird wall.
Chris Yee:
And then there's also a kickstarter by some guy that got funded in 2020 for metal Lego bricks. So he made them out of all different types of metal. I think there's aluminum, brass, titanium, copper and iron. They actually look pretty cool. I went to the kick starter page, and the picture, he printed the table... what's the table called? Elements table?
Ben Storms:
Period table of elements?
Chris Yee:
Periodic table of elements. Yeah.
Ben Storms:
There you go.
Chris Yee:
He printed the square from that on each one, it looks very fancy. This actually got funded, and he said that he developed a method to manufacture these with a margin of error less than 0.01 millimeters, which is very precise, and that's exactly what Lego is looking for, is precise. These are very expensive. They're not as expensive as the gold Legos, but each of these bricks is around $200 per two-by-four brick, and the titanium one's a little more expensive, it's $329 per brick. These are obviously stronger than plastic, but they are very expensive.
Chris Yee:
I wanted to look at something else, so I looked at wood, because we use wood for construction a lot. Can we make wood Legos? And yes, you can. There are a lot of wood... they're not official Legos, but there are a lot of unofficial wooden Legos on Ebay and Etsy, and stuff like that. So it's definitely possible. The strength of the wood would probably just depend on the type of wood you used, it varies a lot depending on which species of tree you're using. But you could find a stronger wood.
Chris Yee:
Instead of using a two-by-four brick like we've been looking at for this whole time, I feel like that's not the ideal piece to use, I went to see what the largest official Lego piece is. The largest one I could find was... like all the pieces have ID numbers, so the ID number for this one is 30072, and it is a 12-by-24 brick. It's like a flat piece with 12 little pegs, and then 24 pegs in the other directions. It's about 3.7 inches by 7.5 inches, and then it's like 1.1 centimeters deep.
Chris Yee:
So I'm thinking that if you want to build something with this, instead of building just one on top of the other, you'd stagger them so it's basically overlapping half of the other piece, sort of like if you're laying our bricks, then you overlap them. We said that glue was allowed, so you could glue these together. You'd attach them and then you'd glue them. And what I'm basically making is a glue laminated tempered beam, which is an actual thing that we use in construction. It's a little different.
Chris Yee:
Glue laminated tempered beams, they're like you take a really, really long thin plank of wood, and then you glue them all together so there's layers of wood stacked on top, and they're all held together by blue. That's basically what we're doing. It's a little different for us because we're not using really long piece, but it's still sort of similar. We might need to make them a little beefier, just because there are more seams and stuff, but I think you could basically make a construction equivalent with this.
Chris Yee:
And since we're using wood, and since all the real life Lego houses use wood frames, I was thinking why don't we just make a wood frame out of these wood Legos, and yes it will have a wood frame, but it will still all be Legos, and it will look like Legos because we just put normal Legos outside of the wood frame and we're good. I don't have to have ridiculous dimensions for my house, it will just look normal.
Marcus Lehner:
I'm trying so hard right now to imagine this in a way where like, hey, I built my house out of Legos, and I came over very excited to look at it, and you showed me these glue laminate beams. And you're like, hey look, yeah, see they've got studs on top.
Chris Yee:
They're Legos. Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
They're Legos. I'm trying to find a way which I'm not incredibly disappointed when I see it.
Chris Yee:
They're technically Legos.
Marcus Lehner:
Technically correct, the best kind of correct.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, so that is my answer, that's how I corrected by mistake.
Marcus Lehner:
We'll try again in another 130-something episodes.
Chris Yee:
Ben, what did you do?
Ben Storms:
So we did, in episode 114, a science fair grab bag. In another episode we did, we did three answers, we did the good old volcano made with whatever you make those volcanoes with.
Marcus Lehner:
Baking soda and vinegar.
Ben Storms:
Baking soda and vinegar, there you go, thank you. One of your answers was just potato on the spread sheet.
Marcus Lehner:
It's potato charge, like the charge of-
Ben Storms:
Oh, yes. Yeah, the electrical charge of potato.
Marcus Lehner:
Potato battery.
Ben Storms:
That's right, potato battery. And then I did Coke and Mentos, and tried to make a rocket ship. Basically immediately after we recorded it I realized that we should have done spaghetti bridge, which was of course a classic science project from school.
Marcus Lehner:
We thought so long about what is the obvious third science fair project. Like a week we were talking, being like, there's got to be a third one that's really obvious that we're missing, and couldn't come up with it.
Ben Storms:
We tried so hard.
Chris Yee:
We settled for Mentos and Coke. That was our settle answer.
Ben Storms:
Exactly. Which, I mean, I'm glad we did it, but I can't believe we missed spaghetti bridge. Anyway, spaghetti bridge, the idea is you have some gap and you're supposed to make a bridge entirely out of spaghetti to bridge that gap, and then you see basically ow much weight it can support. I wanted to find some actual direct rules for this, and I found a world championship, the RACCS world championship in spaghetti building, organized by a Hungarian university, the university of Óbuda. I'm not going to pronounce that correctly. It's a competition where college students come in teams and make both bridges and the more vague structures, which as far as I can tell are more tower type situations.
Ben Storms:
They did have rules laid out. The pasta must be made solely of flour and water, optionally with eggs. They can be homemade, but it has to be just standard pasta. You can use adhesive, but only to bind together at the joints of your structure. All they say is, and I quote, "any appropriate glue can be used", which is kind of vague but whatever. And you cannot strengthen the pasta by coating it in glue, or gluing together parallel pieces of pasta. The only place you can use that glue is on the joints to keep it together.
Marcus Lehner:
Making your own pasta for this competition seems so wild to me, I love it.
Ben Storms:
It's not like a big prize money thing or anything, they're college students doing it, so they're not that involved in the rules. It felt very much like, come on guys, it's pasta, you get the idea.
Marcus Lehner:
My pasta recipe is flour, water, Portland cement-
Ben Storms:
Cement. Yep. The bridges had to be between a meter and 1.3 meters long, no taller than 0.6 meters, and it had to have a five centimeter wide pathway that you could out basically like a little tiny box car across was kind of the idea. And importantly, it couldn't weigh more than one kilogram. In terms of the results that they saw in this competition, by the way, the most successful one and the one I've seen claim is the worlds strongest, although this seems very specific so I don't know how precise that claim is, was from 2013. There was a Hungarian team that had a bridge that weighed 999 grams and it held 570.3 grams, which was pretty impressive. I will note, by the way, if you Google for this, the news article that talks about it says 570.3 kilograms, which is clearly not right. You cannot make a one kilogram spaghetti bridge that can hold 570 times its weight, I'm sorry.
Marcus Lehner:
I don't know, Ben. I don't know.
Ben Storms:
I will also say, my other assumption that that was an incorrect statement on the article is that... and the results on the page, all of the weights are unlabeled, but that includes the weight of the bridge itself, which I know from the rules has to be less than a kilogram. So it's sadly not insanely strong building material spaghetti. Doesn't work.
Ben Storms:
The problem you have when trying to scale up a spaghetti bridge from the science experiment situation, is that you can't just scale it up and have it work the same way, because of something we've talked about many times, which is the cubed square law. Which is when something gets larger, the surface area increases the square to the square of that size increase, and the volume increases to the cube of that size increase, which also means the mass will as well. And what's going to end up happening is, if you try to make a full sized bridge out of spaghetti, it's not going to be able to hold itself up. Just the weight of the pasta will be too much to even hold the pasta up. I could have conceivably done some sort of calculation to prove this. Instead, because I did not want to do that-
Chris Yee:
So I'm not the only lazy one.
Ben Storms:
Okay, I'm just going to say, I had to [inaudible 00:28:06] in figuring out the structural integrity of spaghetti, because man I searched for it. What I do have is the worlds largest pasta structure, according to Guinness, which was in 2011 a group of students from the Islam Azad university in Iran used roughly 33,000 noodles of spaghetti to make a 103 kilogram, 24 meter long, five meter tall, 545 meter wide structure. And that's just as a structure that can support itself, that appears to be the max, because no one has... I mean, I'm sure that you might be able to get a little bigger, but not to a huge scale, and certainly not to the point where you could support a vehicle with it.
Ben Storms:
I also liked, by the way, the article I saw about that, it noted that while the structure was built completely of spaghetti, in the future similar structures could be build out of other materials, such as aluminum, which yes, is true. That is a thing you could do, build things out of not spaghetti.
Ben Storms:
So we're going to just rule out using literal spaghetti to build a bridge. Could you make a brick out of pasta? Hypothetically, yes, right? Pasta is just flour and water and sometimes eggs, and conceivably you could make a pasta dough, make a brick of it, and put it in a brick press the way you press clay into bricks, and heat it until it dries out to the point where it is solid. Technically, yes, you could do that. The problem you're going to run into... there's a couple.
Ben Storms:
One, pasta is far more brittle than clay. I don't even have a source for that, I think that one's self evident. So there's a lot of issues with that. But bigger than that, your problem is going to be water. Pasta will absorb water just anytime it's in contact with water. It obviously goes much faster with boiling water, like you're actually cooking it, but if you put dry pasta in room temperature water, it will go soft like it was in boiling water, in a couple of hours. That's actually a way that you can save energy when you are cooking pasta while you're camping, is just soak your pasta in water first, and then it will cook faster because it doesn't have to soften while it's cooking fun fact. Life advice.
Chris Yee:
Could you just soak it and then eat it like that without cooking it?
Ben Storms:
You could, but it would be raw flour, which I think is weird for your digestive system in some way. I don't remember exactly what happens, but it's not great. But if you conceivably made pasta bricks, and made a pasta bridge out of pasta bricks, when it got wet, overtime it would eventually just get all jiggly and doughy again, which is not something you'd really look for in a bridge generally. Conveniently, most bridges are very close to, if not directly on top of water. So even ignoring rain, you're still going to have a very humid environment, it's just not going to work out well.
Ben Storms:
So long story short, you're not going to be able to use your good old fashioned flour and water pasta to make a bridge. So let's go slightly more outside the box, and stretch our definition a little bit. Let's talk about nuclear pasta.
Marcus Lehner:
What?
Ben Storms:
Nuclear pasta is a theoretical substance that makes up the crust of a neutron star. When a star collapses, if it's at a certain mass where it's between one of the three solar masses, so one to three times the mass of our sun, the core of the star will collapse and crush together all of that matter into an incredibly dense neutron star. If it's bigger than that, it just becomes a black hole instead. That's kind of the density we're talking about here. So it's like you're not quite dense enough to get a black hole, but you get the next best thing.
Ben Storms:
This nuclear pasta, what happens on the crust of this neutron star is the nuclear attraction and Coulomb repulsion force that act on the neurons and protons are at the same magnitude, which means that they form these complicated pasta-like structures, that have fun names like spaghetti, lasagna, gnocchi, and my personal favorites, anti-spaghetti and anti-gnocchi.
Marcus Lehner:
Come on, you're making it up at this point.
Ben Storms:
I am not making up anti-spaghetti and anti-gnocchi. Those are real.
Marcus Lehner:
I tried to Google anti-gnocchi, and it just came up as, is gnocchi anti-inflammatory?
Ben Storms:
Hold on, I'm putting the fun scientific diagram I found in our chat. It doesn't help our listeners unfortunately, but this is the diagram that shows the seven structures of nuclear pastas. Gnocchi, spaghetti, waffles, lasagna, defects, anti-spaghetti and anti-gnocchi. So this substance is incredibly dense and incredibly strong. Theoretically it's around 10 billion times stronger than steel. So obviously if you had nuclear pasta you could easily make an incredibly sound bridge out of it.
Ben Storms:
One small problem. That problem being that neutron stars, as I mentioned, are incredibly dense, which means that any neutron star becomes, much like in the similar black hole situation, much, much heavier than it would anywhere else in the universe. So the sort of not really figure, but rough figure I saw, was that a sugar cubes worth of matter would weigh more than one billion tons inside a neutron star, which is roughly the weight of Mount Everest. So if a tiny, tiny bit of nuclear pasta was to somehow wind up on earth, because it would suddenly not have that environment that would allow it to stay so dense, it would basically explode like a nuclear bomb. And that's for that tiny, tiny bit of matter. So if you somehow had a bridge that just popped into existence, made out of nuclear pasta, I did not do any actual math on this...
Marcus Lehner:
I don't think it's required.
Ben Storms:
My assumption is that it would be quite a big explosion, that would probably, I don't know, tear the planet into several pieces.
Marcus Lehner:
In twain.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, at least. If not thrain. So I guess the answer is, you probably shouldn't make bridges out of pasta, whether terrestrial or nuclear, because it's not going to end well on some scale of disaster.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, we blew up the world.
Ben Storms:
We blew up the world with pasta.
Marcus Lehner:
But Ben, the world has so many cool facts. I fact checked that bridges couldn't hold that much, and they fucking can. That wasn't a typo, Ben.
Ben Storms:
Bullshit.
Marcus Lehner:
I'm reading this high school thing right now. These kids, this is a totally different site, a totally different school, they weigh less than a pound, the winning one was 10.85 ounces. To pass, it needs to hold 25 pounds. Decently constructed ones can support 40 or 50 pounds. The all time record is 795 pounds.
Ben Storms:
Well, all right then.
Marcus Lehner:
So you can build a one pound bridge that holds... yeah, you can build a one pound thing that holds 800 pounds, and it will be made out of spaghetti, and that is why engineering is cool.
Ben Storms:
I stand corrected then. I stand corrected.
Marcus Lehner:
Live fact check, why don't have to do throwback episodes for it.
Ben Storms:
Nailed it. Jesus, those Hungarians are insane.
Marcus Lehner:
All right, and with that hot fact check and exploding the world, I guess that brings us to our would you rather question. Ben, are you ready for a would you rather here?
Ben Storms:
I am ready.
Marcus Lehner:
All right, setting the stage, you are a world leader, you are in charge of everything, your dictatorship has ruled the world, you are in power, you can make decisions. But you have this decision before you, to save the planet. Would you rather eliminate paper products or eliminate emissions to save the environment?
Ben Storms:
Oh.
Chris Yee:
What does eliminate emissions mean? Does that mean we can't do things that emit?
Marcus Lehner:
We'll just say no fossil fuels.
Chris Yee:
Okay. It's not like we still consume it, and it just doesn't emit?
Ben Storms:
Because I was going to say, technically also we emit carbon dioxide when we breathe. I would not eliminate that one.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, that's like, careful what you wish for.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, and the monkey's paw, one more finger curls down. I feel like with regards to paper products, paper is something you can recycle relatively well, right? I know that different things recycle different degrees. Is paper one of the ones that actually recycles well or no?
Marcus Lehner:
I'm going to say the answer is, both of these save the world. You don't have to worry about which ones more eco friendly.
Chris Yee:
Okay, so both of these are a final solution that solves everything?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, your expects have come in, either of these two things will save the world, it'll keep it under 1.5 degree warming.
Ben Storms:
Oh, okay. So it's just which is more annoying to deal with, not having paper or not having fossil fuels, huh?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah.
Ben Storms:
I mean, I'm under the belief that we should get rid of fossil fuels anyway, so personally this one seems pretty clear to me.
Chris Yee:
But I feel like fossil fuels effect a lot more things that we use. Like we won't be able to use a lot more things.
Ben Storms:
In the short term yes, but mostly because most of our infrastructure is designed around fossil fuels. So hi, it's time to drop some knowledge that I just know off the dome here. One of the big issues with power generation is converting from fossil fuels into electric power. Getting something that's more directly electric, like solar power, is actually way more efficient in that regard. The problem is that our infrastructure relies on that combustion process, where you lose like 80% of the energy in a thing before you even turn a wheel or whatever.
Marcus Lehner:
And solar panels, it doesn't work at night, so that's a problem.
Ben Storms:
That is a technically true statement.
Marcus Lehner:
Sorry, I just knew that would infuriate you a little bit.
Ben Storms:
Yep. Yep.
Marcus Lehner:
But then we won't have lights when we need them.
Ben Storms:
We won't. What's the use in it? We don't need solar power in the day, the sun is up there. Who cares, we can already see.
Chris Yee:
I also feel like this question though is an overnight thing, so sure, long term we'd be able to adapt, but right now our infrastructure is relying on it, and if it happened overnight then we'd be screwed.
Ben Storms:
If it's an overnight thing, you have to get rid of paper, because there's going to be a rush on bidets, and that's your big consequence I guess. But what's the timeline where it becomes the fossil fuels one?
Marcus Lehner:
Let's say it's going to happen quickly, like ASAP, it can go as fast as you go. Again, you are ruler dictator of the world, and your people are going to be dealing with this.
Ben Storms:
I mean, I feel like if that's the case, you unfortunately have to go with paper products. Invest in bidet stocks first. I already made that joke, I don't care.
Marcus Lehner:
I can do what I want, I'm the dictator.
Ben Storms:
Exactly. Dictators can retell jokes.
Marcus Lehner:
Bow to me. Laugh again, peasants.
Chris Yee:
Have you ever used a bidet? I haven't.
Ben Storms:
I actually have not somehow.
Marcus Lehner:
I also have not used a bidet. I want to though. I think I want to get one.
Chris Yee:
You're going to buy one?
Ben Storms:
They're pretty cheap.
Marcus Lehner:
Not that expensive, right? They're like $100 or something?
Ben Storms:
There's definitely ones that are cheaper than that, that aren't standalone ones, they're ones that you just hook into your toilet bowl.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, you've just got to connect it. You can buy an accessory.
Ben Storms:
Now I'm like, let's see, hold on, bidet, Amazon.
Marcus Lehner:
We did not go into an actual dull conversation about bidets and costs, and the convenience of installing them.
Ben Storms:
We probably shouldn't. All right, I see a crappy one for $40 on Amazon, so there you go.
Marcus Lehner:
You don't want a crappy bidet. It's supposed to be uncrappy. That's the whole point of it.
Ben Storms:
Hey, it has four and a half stars on Amazon, so that's all I'm saying.
Chris Yee:
So it sounds like this would you rather is purely based on the timeframe.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. Unless I'm not thinking of something here, right?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, I guess the issue with the premise is that paper products is just a life inconvenience where I lose a bunch of stuff that I can't have anymore. Emissions is like, okay, there's a societal change, but once things are running on alternate fuel sources it really doesn't impact me at all.
Ben Storms:
So I will say, in terms of society change, the one big thing with paper products that I want to make sure that's not toilet paper. That would, I would assume, include like cardboard? Which would have a lot of ramifications, but I feel like they're...
Chris Yee:
I mean, I think we could replace cardboard still.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, more replaceable than fossil fuels, unfortunately.
Marcus Lehner:
Everything's plastic. We save the planet, but tripled our plastic output.
Ben Storms:
Oh wait, don't those all use petroleum?
Marcus Lehner:
Oh man, that's a much better would you rather, remove paper or plastic products? That would be so good. I should have modified this one.
Ben Storms:
Well, now we know for next time.
Chris Yee:
On a throwback would you rather.
Marcus Lehner:
All right, let's do our final determinations. I think we've hit the bottom of the barrel here on this would you rather.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
I'll start. I usually don't start, but I'll start. I'm going to say get rid of the paper products. I'm a dictator, I'll let the world burn. I'll just ride the narcissism to the grave.
Chris Yee:
I also say get rid of the paper, just because the time frame thing, I think that's what this question is.
Ben Storms:
I'm going to throw a wrench in this. I'm the dictator, I'm going to say get rid of fossil fuels because I personally want to do that, and I'm a dictator so I'll be fine. Y'all can figure it out.
Marcus Lehner:
All right, awesome. So if you would like to pay tribute to your three overlord dictators that are definitely not going to have to duel to the death immediately after this show to determine who is actually in charge of the world, you can do so directly with your hard earned cash money that you tilled the fields for, by going onto our Patreon. www.patreon.com/absurdhypotheticals. You can put your dollars into the vault that we dive into, that's full of money all the time, like a Scrooge McDuck, except in charge of the whole world instead of... I don't know, does Scrooge McDuck have a business empire? I don't know how he makes his money.
Ben Storms:
How did Scrooge McDuck make his money?
Marcus Lehner:
Don't know, but that will be a question for next time.
Chris Yee:
I don't know.
Marcus Lehner:
You can do that to help support the show, out of the goodness of your hearts and your loyalty to your overlords, or you can do it because you want that sweet, sweet extra bonus content that we release each month for our Patreons exclusively. Every month we release a bonus episode, with all sorts of different things in it. They're cool, check them out, you get access to all them for just a singular dollar. No tears, no nothing, just one singular dollar.
Marcus Lehner:
If you enjoy the show and you don't want to give us money directly, you can always leave us a review, that helps us grow the show. Or if you want to be part of the show directly, send us questions. absurdhypotheticals@gmail.com, you can just email us a question straight to that email address and if we like it we will let you know, and it can be right on the show, and that's a really cool way to be involved. But any case, if you don't want to do any of those things, or if you've already done all three of those things, you can join us next week, where we answer the following question. Which robot would win in a fight?