Episode 157: What if it never stopped raining?
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On this episode of Absurd Hypotheticals, Marcus Lehner, Chris Yee, and Ben Storms it rains forever!
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:48 - Chris’s Answer - Flooding
00:12:07 - Marcus’s Answer - Prehistoric
00:23:21 - Ben’s Answer - Snow
00:35:47 - Would you rather: have it rain honey OR oil?
00:41:56 - 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:
Are you guys feeling that winter chill in the air?
Chris Yee:
Sort of, we record this ahead of time. I guess it's technically winter. Oh, no, it's not winter. It's fall for us right now.
Ben Storms:
I am, because I'm in parents' attic right now, because I'm at their house, and that's where I could record. So yes, I do feel the winter chill, actually.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, Ben sounds slightly different in this episode, he's on a different microphone. So just give him that much. He's not just being weird.
Ben Storms:
Yeah, grade me on a curve. Also, my parents have a cat and I have allergies. So if I sound kind of weird, that's also part of the reason as well.
Marcus Lehner:
I mention this just because right above our couch, we have a window that opens up, that we've had pretty open for some nice fresh air. And now, we're still in the habit of keeping it open, but boy, is it getting chilly coming in, right on top of me.
Chris Yee:
No, I'm pretty hot right now because our apartment building cranks the heat and I have no control over it, and I'm on the top floor.
Marcus Lehner:
All right. Well, so we're all in different spaces.
Chris Yee:
That's like 80 degrees for me right now.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, man. I don't miss living an apartment, I'll tell you that. We'll be talking about the weather today, not cold weather specifically. Our question today, though, is what if it rained nonstop for a year? So just raining all the time.
Chris Yee:
Well, I thought we changed it, didn't we? Oh, we didn't change it in this, but I thought it was, what if it never stops raining?
Marcus Lehner:
Oh. Cool. I wasn't sure, behind the scenes here, I wasn't sure if we committed to that completely, so left the question alone.
Chris Yee:
I think we did.
Ben Storms:
Hold on. Does that actually change anything for anyone? Wait, quick, side table.
Marcus Lehner:
No, it doesn't. We're good.
Chris Yee:
I thought it might have changed stuff for Marcus, but I guess not.
Marcus Lehner:
No, I'm good. I'm good.
Chris Yee:
I didn't know exactly what you're doing. Okay. Actually, it does kind of change stuff for me a little bit.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. I also would've done something different for mine if it was only a year. So let's call it eternity.
Marcus Lehner:
Okay. So we're settled. We're doing, what if it rained nonstop forever, all the time?
Chris Yee:
Not just a year.
Marcus Lehner:
What if it never stopped raining?
Chris Yee:
A year is for wimps.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. We're cooler. We also selected an amount of rainfall. We're going with moderate rain, which is 0.2 inches per hour, according to Wikipedia, if any of you have already started your at home calculations. But Chris, before they have a chance to finish those and prove us wrong, why don't you get started with your answer?
Chris Yee:
Yeah. So I started in what I thought was the most obvious place, which is flooding. So I want to see what would happen with flooding. And I wanted to focus in on a specific city, so I focused on Boston, because that's where we are. And according to the Boston Water and Sewage Commission, the Boston sewage system is designed for a storm of 5.15 inches of rain over a 24 hour storm. And that comes out to around 0.214 inches per hour. So based on our 0.2 inches per hour of rain right now, we would actually be fine or we wouldn't have any flooding, but I actually kind of dealt with the 0.2 inches per hour, a little differently.
Chris Yee:
So instead of saying that it was, I don't know how you guys dealt with it. But instead of saying that it's uniform, that's the rate distributed evenly throughout the entire world, I said that that's like the base rainfall. So right now the average worldwide annual rainfall is 39 inches per year. And if you multiply 0.2 inches per hour out to a year, then that equals 1,752 inches per year, which is 45 times the average of the world right now. And that's with, obviously we get bigger storms than just moderate rain.
Chris Yee:
And that's because rain is like concentrated in certain areas and you have a lot of space that doesn't have rain. So I'm basically saying that all that space that doesn't have rain, has the base 0.22 inches per hour. And then all the stuff that does have rain is just added onto that. And then it's all the normal weather patterns and stuff. So with those new numbers, we would get flooding. Yay.
Marcus Lehner:
I like the hmm, based on this, Boston's fine. Let's fix this.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. We definitely need flooding in this answer.
Marcus Lehner:
Definitely not fine.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. So we'd have urban flooding, which is obviously an issue. You get a bunch of problems with that, but you'd also, in addition to urban flooding, there'd be an increase in the volume of water and rivers. So rivers would flood as well. And the majority of river erosion actually takes place during the flood stage. So rivers would erode a lot faster than they normally would. I don't know the exact rate, because I actually tried to find the rate of erosion and it is very difficult to find, because I think it's really dependent on the shape of the river and stuff.
Chris Yee:
But yeah, you get a lot more erosion of river banks. So that's like moving sediment in the river down the river, you're moving land. But that also happens on a larger scale where you're not just moving little small sediment and stuff. You're also moving big pieces of land, and that results in landslides. So we'll have a lot of landslides and mud flows. And according to the US Geological Survey, an average of 25 to 50 people die from landslides every year, which is actually relatively low compared to other causes of death. And that's with normal rain patterns.
Chris Yee:
So landslides, obviously they're caused by lack of friction in the ground. So flowing rain and water downhill would cause more landslides. Cities and towns near mountains would be in danger, and you wouldn't want to live near a mountain. But that's a physical danger. In addition to physical dangers, there would also be biological dangers. So, talking about water moving land, it would move other things. You'd have runoff, and runoff can contaminate reservoirs and drinking water, especially during flooding.
Chris Yee:
Our water supply would be a lot easier to be contaminated, and it would put a strain on our water treatment. We'd have a water supply issue. You might be asking, if it's raining all the time, why can't just everyone collect their own water? You can just stick a bucket out or something and everyone can collect it on their own. You don't need this wide water distribution system.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, Chris, why can't I put a bucket out my window?
Chris Yee:
You could. Theoretically, rainwater is potable, I guess. But according to the CDC, they say that privately collected rainwater isn't necessarily safe to drink. They say that dust, smoke, and particles in the air can actually contaminate the water before it hits the land. And it can be contaminated even from your bucket.
Marcus Lehner:
I like how CDC has to hedge on that. Yeah, it can be contaminated so that you can't yell at us if you get sick.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. Even if there isn't any runoff, it can still contain chemicals and bacteria and parasites and viruses, if it's not properly treated. And speaking of viruses, mosquitoes thrive in humid and rainy climates. So mosquito populations are pretty big in Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. And with mosquitoes, they bring mosquito-borne diseases like Zika virus, West Nile virus, dengue and malaria. About 700 million people contract mosquito-borne illnesses each year, and about one million of those people die each year, from mosquito illnesses. That's a lot bigger than our 25 to 50 people from landslides.
Chris Yee:
So there are almost 3,600 different species of mosquitoes, which is a lot. And it's actually pretty difficult to track the number of mosquitoes in the world because they're just all over the place. But according to MosquitoJoe.com, which I'm sure is reliable, female mosquitoes lay about 100 and 200 eggs every three days. And they lay as many as three sets of eggs before they die. So they lay a lot of eggs. Mosquitoes, there's a lot of them. And this number of mosquitoes will increase if there is flooding, and humid climates increase.
Chris Yee:
So directly from that, there'll be more deaths from these illnesses, which is not ideal. I've been naming all these problems, all these issues. I came up with four major problems. The flooding, so we don't want to be close to the land, like down low to the water. There's landslides, so you don't want to be near mountains or anything. We have drinking water, which is an issue. And we have mosquitoes. Based on these four things, I wanted to try to come up with, how, where do we live or where can we live that's safe.
Chris Yee:
My first thought was tree houses. That just popped into my mind right away. But it really only solves the flooding and the landslide problems. Like if you're in a forest that's away from a mountain, and you'll stay away from the water, but it doesn't solve the mosquito problem. It doesn't solve the drinking water problem. I looked into mosquitoes a little bit and I found out they can't survive in temperatures under 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So I thought maybe we could go to colder climates, but foreshadowing a little bit to Ben's answer, because I have sort of an idea of what he's doing, not exactly.
Chris Yee:
But he'll probably have reasons why that's not a good idea. So we're not going to move to a colder climate. I was thinking, instead of trying to stay away from the water, why not embrace the water. Instead, we can live under the ocean. So if we're under the ocean and it's done correctly, it's completely sealed and stuff. Then we don't have to worry about flooding or anything, that's not an issue. We don't have to worry about landslides obviously, because we're not near any mountains or anything, we're just in the middle of the ocean. Mosquitoes aren't going to be a problem.
Chris Yee:
And for drinking water, I don't know exactly how the set up will be, but I don't know, we'll have like a giant funnel type thing in the middle of the ocean. Runoff will still technically be an issue, because there can be contaminants in our funnel. But one of the main concerns with runoff right now is, that like it's going through and carrying trash and waste from humans. In our funnel, we're not going to have any humans living on our funnel. So we're not going to have trash in our funnel. I think that solves the drinking problem.
Marcus Lehner:
Aren't we able to desalinate to some degree, as well, if we're in the ocean? We are humans, we are science.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I don't think ...
Ben Storms:
Did you just say we are humans, we are science?
Marcus Lehner:
Yes, I did.
Chris Yee:
We are humans. We are science. I feel like we looked into that a little bit before, but we found that it wasn't entirely efficient yet. I mean, we might get there at some point, but I don't remember. It was in a past episode.
Marcus Lehner:
I like the big funnel. I won't knock on the big funnel anymore.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. I like the big funnel too. And we did actually do an episode where we designed an underwater city. It was episode 67. Each of us tackled a different part of it. I think I did the water pressure, and what our shell would have to be. Marcus did heat, I think.
Marcus Lehner:
I think heat and power, yeah.
Chris Yee:
Heat and power. And then Ben did food supply. I don't remember exactly what the outcome of that episode was, but if you want to hear if it's could be successful or not, go listen for yourself, episode 67. But that's what I think we should do, is live under the ocean. Marcus, what did you do?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. So when I started researching what might happen if it just rained continuously for a while, I was surprised to find that not only had this actually happened before, but it happened not for just that year we originally had talked about. But for two freaking million years. So, take a walk back with me, 234 million years, about a third of the way through the Triassic period. We're going all the way back. We've got the super-continent of Pangea, creating this landmass that cuts across the entire globe.
Marcus Lehner:
The thing about putting all your land in one place is that it makes it very difficult for clouds and rain and all that stuff to actually get to the middle of it. So back at this 234 million years ago, the clouds tend to get caught on the shorelines and didn't form over land. So the middle of Pangea, AKA most of the land everywhere, was just one big giant desert. Then we hit the Carnian pluvial event, AKA the Carnian pluvial phase, AKA the Carnian humid episode, AKA the middle Carnian wet intermezzo, which is my favorite name for it.
Chris Yee:
Why are there so many names?
Marcus Lehner:
Because people keep trying to discover it differently and they all have different ideas of exactly what they're going to call it. But basically just before this 234 million year mark, we had a fairly modest amount of volcanic activity in what is now modern day Alaska, known as the Wrangellian eruptions.
Chris Yee:
Also known as ...
Marcus Lehner:
AKA the middle Carnian wet eruptions. A series of volcanoes became incredibly active for a period of about ... Very, very active for a period about 40,000 years and continuously active for about a million years. And a lot of what is modern day Alaska was created by this volcanic sediment. It's several miles thick. It's kind of tough to put into perspective, but over this period, over a million cubic kilometers of volcanic materials had erupted, which is enough to cover the entirety of the United States in 500 feet of material. So this is how much stuff was spewing out in Alaska at this time.
Marcus Lehner:
And a very brief time in a geological sense. And it messed with the climate quite a bit, mostly because this released about 5,000 gigatons of carbon, in the form of CO2, into the atmosphere. Which the equivalent of several hundred years worth of what we're releasing now, in our "oh man, we're messing up the planet" phase. It actually caused a global temperature rise of about seven degrees Celsius, which, with that temperature rise, it's caused it to finally start to rain and rain and rain. There's not a whole lot of data on exactly how much it rained 230 million years ago weirdly, I was trying to check just like a daily average, but somehow there was no one tracking that back then.
Chris Yee:
I'm always shocked about how they can learn any of this stuff at all, that you just said.
Marcus Lehner:
It's actually pretty fascinating. I'll talk about in a second. But first the numbers quick. Estimates put the average rainfall per year at about 55 inches, which is about the level of a temperate rainforest. And this was actually everywhere in what was previously, basically a desert. So it basically went from desert to rainforest over this period. And what's kind of crazy to me, and what I was kind of alluding to a second ago, is that we didn't even really know that this happened until quite recently. It was like theorized in the 1970s and '80s that this was going on.
Marcus Lehner:
But actually the first like couple papers that were like, "Hey, maybe there was all this rain around here," got fairly quickly dismissed by the larger scientific community. And it wasn't until 2012 where we actually had enough good data to support the theory. What happened was, they started off with, hey, we know we have all this dry red sandstone and all these rock formations that are from a very dry arid climate. But then, hey, we suddenly find a bunch of river rocks and big rocks that indicate there was a lot of water around all of a the sudden. And it's very abrupt. It kind of got shuffled away as like, oh, there's probably some literal hurricanes or individual weather events that might cause that.
Marcus Lehner:
But they kept finding these same kinds of deposits all over the world. Like China had these bigger rivers, kind of in the same thing, and they're able to cross reference all these geological ages. Because we get better at dating things, they coalesced into, instead of being kind of sporadic over this hundred million year average, it was like in the specific two million year span, which is again, in geological terms, very quick. So now it's commonly accepted that this Carnian pluvial event occurred. Given that no one really knew it existed, and I had never heard of it before. It was kind of an important time in history of evolution.
Marcus Lehner:
First off, during this time, a third of all marine life went extinct. Now, this is partially due to all the volcanic activity, it does add some acid rain and stuff into the picture. But on the land, also mass extinctions, because all these creatures that had been adapted to this arid climate, suddenly were not in a dry arid climate anymore. And kind of what tripped up a lot of these scientists going through, and what makes this unique as far as these mass extinctions go, is that as much as it killed off a whole segment of life, it's pretty special in that, it also jump-started pretty much just as much life as it kicked down.
Marcus Lehner:
You have events like a meteor impact, it makes the whole planet toxic for a while and basically your species diversity goes way down, and it takes time for it to rebuild and recover and the planet to acclimatize back to a steady state. This really, it just became a warmer, wetter climate that was actually conducive to life, just different types. So the underlying cause for a lot of what was happening is, thanks to all this rain, larger plants were able to be supported.
Marcus Lehner:
So in these dry arid regions that were before, you'd have bushes. I don't know if cacti were there back then, but lower to the ground shrubs, not a lot of vegetation. Now, suddenly trees are sprouting up, large vegetation, huge ferns. It's actually the birth of the conifer forests. So the first time you have these ... I think conifers are pine trees and crap like that.
Chris Yee:
I believe so.
Marcus Lehner:
But actually the first versions of these forests were happening in this period. Also this period, this little window here is where you're seeing the first evidence of any mammals to exist. The modern versions of plankton, algae and corals made their appearances here. This is like the building blocks of our modern ecosystem. And most importantly, and of course I saved it for the last, it was the start of the reign of dinosaurs. The thing that all these archeologists are looking at. Prior to this Carnian pluvial event, about 5% of fossils that are found are of dinosaurs. After this episode, the number of fossils that are dinosaurs, is closer to 90%. So basically they went from barely any dinosaurs to almost every fossil we have from this era is of a dinosaur. This shaped the whole fricking world, like wildly.
Marcus Lehner:
It kick-started everything that we know today. So that's just wild to me. Really cool stuff going on. But of course here, our hypothetical, we're not stopping at a measly 55 inches of rain. Chris, like you said, if we consider a moderate rainfall of 0.2 inches per hour, we have 1,752 inches of rain per year, rather than 55. This much rain is well beyond the wettest rainforest. Not as much as you think, though. Top-end real life rainforest, they get about 400 to 500 inches per year, in the wettest ones. That's like the extreme top-end. So yeah, our scenario, even with our more extreme conditions, I think on the long term, I think we still end up with rainforests, maybe a bit more extreme.
Marcus Lehner:
I was initially a bit worried about trees surviving, when they're more or less always submerged in water, but there are trees that already do that. Like mangrove trees are cool. These are the ones that you imagine, if you're imagining a swamp or a tree like just off the shoreline, that have the roots go down and form like this intricate kind of web. Those are all different types of mangrove trees. And they're pretty cool, because not only can they grow in water, they can grow even in salt water.
Marcus Lehner:
They actually have the ability to filter salt out from the water that they're in, and absorb just the fresh water from the salt water. And then store the salt in, they store it in their leaves and their bark on their extremities, that will eventually fall off and get rid of it. So they're really cool. They're really able to get rid of like contaminants and all that type of thing.
Chris Yee:
I should use them for my drinking water under the ocean.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, you just need mangrove trees. So assuming the trees can evolve to handle this water, they'll have plenty of it, which means the next competition point for evolution will be getting sunlight. We've talked about this once or twice before on the show, but there's an issue where ... I was worried about photosynthesis, for example, if there's no sun, because it's always raining. Plants can still capture sunlight that penetrates through the cloud.
Marcus Lehner:
So even on cloudy days, plants are able to absorb the sunlight that's able to make it through the clouds. Like if you can see, there's light getting through the clouds. Actually, there's like an efficiency point somewhere where a partly cloudy or slightly overcast day is actually the best time for photosynthesis, because then the plants don't dry out. But long story short, trees can still survive, even if you always have the cloud cover, even if it's always raining.
Chris Yee:
If you want to hear that long story, I think we had a whole episode, or a whole answer on it in, episode 104.
Marcus Lehner:
What if it was always overcast? That's the one, right?
Chris Yee:
Yeah. What if it always overcast?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Good stuff there. And so, I'd expect to see this same race to the sky, which creates these huge rainforest canopies. The reason rainforests have such big plants is that, there's all these resources to grow and it makes the last competition for the sunlight. So whatever can be the biggest and fastest to get up there and build out that canopy, is going to be that. So we're going to have basically big forests. It's going to be rainforest everywhere.
Marcus Lehner:
And then, I didn't get too much into the details of what goes on at the forest floor. It's going to be probably a bit swampy, swamp critters and tree climbers and marsh. Swampy animals are going to thrive and evolve towards that. Probably less dinosaurs and more alligators, I guess? Unfortunately, probably lots of mosquitoes too, which is just no fun. I kind of ruined the whole idea. I really had a cool image in my head, but yeah, it's just going to be full of fracking mosquitoes.
Chris Yee:
Yup. It's going to suck. Yay, puns.
Marcus Lehner:
Because they suck your blood. And with that wonderful joke, Ben, what did you cover?
Ben Storms:
I looked at, we're saying that it's raining constantly. But that can't actually be true, just that statement on its face, everywhere in the world, all the time. Because when the atmospheric temperature anywhere gets below freezing, that rain is going to instead be snow. And I wanted to figure out, what happens when that 0.2 inches of rain suddenly is becoming snow for likely, in most places, an extended period of time. And first off, there are very few places where you won't get snow at some point, in this constantly raining world.
Ben Storms:
I'd expect there would be a band where you wouldn't ever get snow, but even very close to the equator, like at the equator, you're still going to at least approach freezing occasionally. So the lowest recorded temperature ever in Quito, Ecuador, which is the capital of Ecuador and is just off the equator, was 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
Chris Yee:
Do you know when that was?
Ben Storms:
I don't offhand.
Chris Yee:
Forget I asked it.
Ben Storms:
Yep. Sure. It was a January, I remember that.
Chris Yee:
Okay.
Ben Storms:
But I do not remember the year, unfortunately. But basically anywhere, you're going at some point have to deal with snow. So when this happens, how much snow are we looking at here? Because I've always heard, the rule of thumb is that an inch rain is roughly a foot of snow. But I had no idea if that was actually true or just something people said.
Ben Storms:
And according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it's actually, one inch of rain is roughly 13 inches of snow. And that'll vary, depending on the moisture content of the snow. So if it's sleet, it's more like two inches for every inch of rain. There are apparently conditions, very particular conditions, where an inch of rain will make about 50 inches of very dry, powdery, snow.
Marcus Lehner:
What?
Ben Storms:
They sadly did not give those conditions, and I desperately want to know what they were. Because that seems insane to me.
Marcus Lehner:
Is it just because it's making a crystal pattern that's really not dense?
Ben Storms:
Yeah. So it would have to be, it's super weird. It would have to be the lowest moisture content possible. Right?
Marcus Lehner:
It's got to be mostly air. It's got to be just like a cotton candy, almost.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. And I think the other thing too is you'd have to have ... Because snow will accumulate larger flakes when it blows around up high in the atmosphere before it actually falls. You basically have to have a situation where there's just enough moisture to actually form snow, and very little wind activity in the higher atmosphere, so it can just drop immediately, without collecting a bunch of extra mass on it.
Chris Yee:
I feel like bigger flakes would be better for more volume. You'd have more void space in it, right? I think, I don't know. I could be wrong.
Marcus Lehner:
It would really depend on how thick the structure is. Because you have a thick band that's very dense, even though the thing as a whole is bigger. It would depend on the math.
Ben Storms:
Right? Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
And it's really tough because every snowflake is unique. So you can't even math it.
Ben Storms:
Exactly. I really tried to figure it out, because I just wanted to know. Because that was absolutely insane to me. But they sadly not elaborate on that. I was really sad. But I figured, I was just going to use that average, we're talking about using moderate rain, we're going to use the average snow equivalence. So that 0.2 inches of rain per hour winds up being 2.6 inches of snow per hour. Which on its face doesn't sound like that much, but that's a foot of snow every four hours and 36 minutes. And for a little context, the all-time seasonal snowfall record in Boston was, you guys probably remember, the 2014-2015 winter where we had like-
Marcus Lehner:
Oh my God.
Ben Storms:
... four blizzards, including I think, two within a week of each other.
Marcus Lehner:
I actually wasn't living in Boston at that time, but I came up for a corporate event. And I remember besides it just being buck wild snow everywhere, I had to switch train cars.
Ben Storms:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Because the doors were frozen shut on the train. Like half of them were frozen shut, because of the snow. They literally came out with the announcement, like, "Hey, if your door doesn't open, move to another car, some of the doors are frozen shut."
Chris Yee:
I just remember wandering on the highway because there were no cars at all.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. I was living at the time in Brighton, which is a very student housing area. And there were snow walls in Brighton that were easily seven feet tall, because there was just nowhere else to put any of the snow. No one has yards to pile it in really, so it was just all in these huge walls on the sidewalk, that felt incredibly dangerous at all times. But in order to hit that amount, over the entire winter season there, that would take about four and a half days. So we're going to have a lot of snow falling. It's actually every square mile.
Ben Storms:
It's roughly six million cubic feet of snow per hour. And freshly fallen snow is, depending on the density, six and a quarter to 12 and a half pounds per cubic foot. So that's something like 28,000 tons of snow per square mile, per hour, which is slightly more than the weight of the Statue of Liberty, which is 27.1000 tons. So lots of snow. Really what I immediately thought of was just, is there literally any way that within the first few hours, every single roof in every single city has not collapsed? And the answer is probably not. A good condition roof can generally hold around 20 pounds per square foot of extra weight.
Ben Storms:
That'll vary depending on what your roof is made out of. If you have a, apparently like an aluminum roof, because it is a lighter material, it can support more, just because of the way houses are built. But generally around 20 pounds per square foot. And that only winds up being around two or three feet of snow, which is going to fall in half a day. So I looked into, if there was any way that people have to automatically clear snow off your roof, I was hoping that, not that just a normal person to have, but some crazy rich guy would have, so he doesn't have to go out with a rake and clear off his roof in a snowstorm.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, that's what I do. That's what I do when I get too much snow in my roof. I go out with a rake.
Ben Storms:
A snow rake is a thing, it's not just an actual rake. A rake was probably the wrong word to use.
Chris Yee:
I mean, what you're talking about right now was an issue that year that we're talking about.
Ben Storms:
Yes, exactly. Yeah. So I was hoping there was some system that people have made to deal with that. And there's not really, so the answer, as far as I can tell, is just to have a steeply sloped roof that doesn't have any flat spots or anything. What you can run into and what they do have, when snow freezes, it'll freeze in an ice dam sometimes, where you'll just get this little wall of ice, that'll basically stop run off from running off your roof. And that's where you can run into trouble in a normal snowstorm, because it'll just build up behind that and eventually collapse your roof. People do just wire their roof and then heat those up to melt gaps and ice dams, so there's always place for it to flow through.
Ben Storms:
But no one heats up their entire roof to melt all the snow on it constantly. That's very extra and no one's ever done it. And it's probably a really bad idea for home safety to make your entire roof get hot. People do do it with driveways. And I try to figure out if there is any way you could use the same system for a roof. But I eventually decided that just having a sloped roof is probably going to be easier. So short answer on that, our houses probably all look really dumb once we've rebuilt after this starts. And they all have party hat spire roofs.
Chris Yee:
Like really, really pointy.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. Just because you can't have anywhere for the snow to stay. So now that we've resolved being able to have homes, on a larger scale, what are we going to even do with all this snow? Because as long as the temperature is below 32, you're going to continue getting snow, at this 2.6 inches per hour, and someone's going to have to handle it. The way that we handle it now, if you are a city or an airport or someone who has a large area you're trying to keep clear, you melt it.
Ben Storms:
There are snow melting machines. You'll set up in a parking lot or some area like that, haul snow to them. And then they'll have usually a tank of warmed water that snow is dumped into, to melt it. The one I looked at specifically was the, I'm going to probably not pronounce this right, Trecan Combustion 350-PD Snow Melter. Trecan Combustion, they're a Canadian company. As far as I can tell, most of their business is snow melters. Their website has two categories, snow melters and other products.
Chris Yee:
What's in the other products?
Ben Storms:
The other products were all boilers and stuff. It was like very much what they do is make things hot, and their best application apparently is melting snow, because they're in Canada. It's basically a 52 foot long, 10 foot wide truck that has a large tank of hot water and four huge burners that keep it warm. The water is kept about 35 degrees Fahrenheit. So not like boiling hot, because it doesn't have to be, it has to be above freezing, you dump snow into. It's called a 350-PD because it can handle around 350 tons of snow per hour.
Ben Storms:
It uses around 405 gallons of diesel per hour, which is roughly $1,500 of fuel per hour, at market price. And the problem you may have picked up on is that that 350 tons of snow per hour is a lot less than the 28,000 tons of snow we're getting per square mile. And it works out that we actually need 80 of these per square mile, just to break even on snow in any area people are trying to live. Which would be around $120,000 of diesel per hour, to keep all those running. Along with whatever you need to actually get the trucks to haul the snow there.
Marcus Lehner:
Just put an order on their website. Yes. I'd like 437,000 of these, please.
Ben Storms:
Yes, yes please. So the short answer is, if you want to live somewhere, you're probably going to have to have, for basically yourself, one of these insanely expensive snow belting machines. Or I don't really know what your other option is, honestly, how else you could live.
Chris Yee:
All that diesel, global warming, less snow months.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. I was going to try to figure out some way to figure out exactly how fast we completely destroyed the climate and no longer have temperatures below freezing ever, but that got depressing pretty quickly.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah, because you have to compare it to what we're doing, and you find out that ...
Ben Storms:
Oh, it's only an increase of 10%!
Chris Yee:
Yeah. It's not too far off.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. It's like, oh, we're we're doing this already, huh?
Ben Storms:
So I think answer is basically, you don't live anywhere north of Texas or the equivalent elsewhere around the world. And even then, you're going to have months where you're just running from creeping snow storms as the temperatures drop. Unless you happen to have one of these insane machines that you can run for millions of dollars a day.
Chris Yee:
Or if you live under the ocean.
Ben Storms:
Or if you live under the ocean.
Chris Yee:
Oh, the funnel, though. The funnel's going to get clogged with snow, oh no. A flaw.
Ben Storms:
Why didn't we think of this? The only flaw in the system.
Marcus Lehner:
My system's fine though. My system of letting the world evolve is just fine. My solution of letting mass extinctions occur and then evolution take its toll is still working out swimmingly, guys.
Chris Yee:
Pretty reliable.
Marcus Lehner:
Pretty reliable system there.
Ben Storms:
I mean, if anything goes wrong with Chris's system, his will also work out swimmingly. Hey.
Chris Yee:
Hey.
Marcus Lehner:
Hey. Well, now that Ben has ruined Chris's answer, we can move on to our would you rather question.
Chris Yee:
Marcus? Are you ready for a would you rather?
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah.
Chris Yee:
Would you rather have it rain honey or oil? I guess like vegetable oil or something.
Ben Storms:
Well, we should determine what type of oil, because that would actually change my answer.
Chris Yee:
For now, I'm going to say vegetable oil. I might change it though.
Ben Storms:
See, my gut was like crude oil, which is very different.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. I was imagining gasoline, tar raining from the sky, in which case it was pretty obvious. But no, I think it's better as a vegetable oil or honey. I mean, I'd rather be out in oil than honey. I'll say that right off the bat. If I'm going to get caught in it, I'd rather it be raining oil. That said, I think oil is going to mess with our infrastructure way worse than honey's going to.
Chris Yee:
Probably.
Marcus Lehner:
Honey gets to dissolve. Oil's job is not to dissolve.
Ben Storms:
That's a good point.
Chris Yee:
I feel like honey will ... it's harder to wash away.
Marcus Lehner:
Is it always honey? Or is it one rain of oil or honey?
Ben Storms:
That's a really good question. A very important question.
Chris Yee:
I guess we can just say one rainstorm, of equal volumes.
Ben Storms:
Is this like a summer thunderstorm or is this like a ... How much are we talking here?
Marcus Lehner:
It's a good storm. Like a good rainstorm.
Chris Yee:
Yeah. More than a moderate rainstorm.
Ben Storms:
So like a couple hours of pretty good rain.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
Yeah. Oh, man. This is really brutal. Because it's one of those where I think a lot more things break with the oil, but also, the honey is just so bad for me personally.
Ben Storms:
So here's the other problem with honey is that, it's going to ... Like oil, if you don't clean it up immediately, it's going to just hang out as oil. Honey's going to crystallize.
Chris Yee:
Does vegetable oil attract animals and stuff?
Marcus Lehner:
Well, if it does, it's going to attract them everywhere equally.
Chris Yee:
Right. I was going to say, that honey definitely attracts animals.
Marcus Lehner:
Bugs are going to have a field day with the honey.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
You're going to have a bug problem.
Chris Yee:
I mean, the oil is probably more dangerous, in terms of just like stepping outside and doing anything.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, because the trip hazard?
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
I was thinking even a little smaller scale, where I don't de-icing my car. I don't want to have to de-honey my car to go somewhere.
Chris Yee:
But I feel like you could just hose down your car and you'd be fine.
Ben Storms:
All right. So here's the thing I've learned. I was trying to figure out if animals are attracted to vegetable oil. Apparently, maybe?
Marcus Lehner:
Good job, Ben.
Chris Yee:
Good, conclusive answer.
Marcus Lehner:
Thanks for doing some research.
Ben Storms:
The answers I've seen, a lot of them are related to used cooking oil, which is obviously different. Because then they're attracted to the fact that you fried chicken in it or whatever. But one thing I did just learn, is that apparently sometimes, or at least for dogs, cooking oil can induce diarrhea or vomiting. So that's maybe a point against the vegetable oil.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh yeah. Speaking of diarrhea, Chris, when you were talking about your funnel and contaminants. When we were hiking this last weekend, we ran out of water, and we're hiking right by like this beautiful mountain stream. And I'm like, oh, it's so clear and good. I think you can drink these. Like, I think it's generally fine if it's a running stream. And then I Googled it and it was like, yeah, most of them are fine. But if you get one that's not fine, you can end up with months of bloody diarrhea. So I didn't drink that water.
Chris Yee:
Good call.
Marcus Lehner:
Honey is so sticky and bad, honey is so sticky and bad.
Chris Yee:
I'm trying to figure out which one's harder to get rid of.
Marcus Lehner:
Oil.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, probably the oil.
Ben Storms:
I mean, soap gets rid of oil.
Chris Yee:
Yeah, but you need to use the soap. Honey just dissolves in water, right?
Marcus Lehner:
Well, think about it this way. You're going to have, the oil's going to go down and it's going to go down the creek and end up on the pond, and now the pond's going to have a film of oil all over it.
Ben Storms:
Oh, yeah.
Chris Yee:
We have the same issue with the honey.
Marcus Lehner:
Honey's the worst short term thing. Honey is way worse the day of. Oil, I think, just will be a huge problem.
Chris Yee:
It'll stick around, yeah. And be a problem long term.
Ben Storms:
Either one of them is going to wind up in your groundwater. And I feel like I'd rather have honey in my groundwater than vegetable oil.
Marcus Lehner:
Well, it can't end up in your groundwater, it specifically won't dissolve in it.
Ben Storms:
Okay. You got me there. Touché, sir.
Marcus Lehner:
I'm going to say this. If I was put in charge of keeping society going, if I was mayor of a town, I would rather it rain honey. If it's just me, and everything breaking is somebody else's issue, and I've just got to deal with what happens on my property, I'm going to have to go with the oil. So oil is better for Marcus personally, but worse for society as a whole.
Chris Yee:
Okay. So which do you choose, yourself or society?
Marcus Lehner:
If you want me to pick one, I'm going to pick myself, so boom.
Chris Yee:
Oh, so you're choosing ...
Marcus Lehner:
I'm choosing oil.
Ben Storms:
Marcus is choosing oil. So this only dawned on me, but oil is slick.
Chris Yee:
Yes.
Ben Storms:
And I feel like walking places, but specifically driving places is going to be-
Marcus Lehner:
Hella fun, like Tony Hawk Pro Skater?
Ben Storms:
What I'm thinking about is, doing any kind of large scale cleanup is going to require vehicles and all those vehicles are going to be driving through buildings, because they can't stop.
Chris Yee:
It's going to be very dangerous. I think specifically during the storm too, a lot more people are going to die in the oil storm, than the honey storm.
Ben Storms:
Yeah. I think I'm going to go with honey just because, I hate it, but I feel like the oil's going to be so bad.
Chris Yee:
I'm also going to go honey. I think it's easier to get rid of. It's more of a short term problem, but I also think that, the oil's more dangerous, until you actually deal with it.
Marcus Lehner:
All right. There you have it, folks. That was a good one, I liked that. I want to talk about that one more.
Ben Storms:
That was good. Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
But sadly, we're at the end of the episode. So instead of more riveting honey oil rain conversations, instead you get to listen to me pitch our stuff. Basically pitch the thing you're already listening to. So, if you like the thing you're listening to, and you want more discussions like this amazing discussion we just had, one way to help support the show is to leave us review. Hop on your podcast app, whatever you're on, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, some new thing that I haven't heard of, because I'm an old man.
Chris Yee:
Spotify? Does Spotify do reviews? I don't know. I don't use Spotify.
Marcus Lehner:
Are we on Spotify?
Chris Yee:
We are.
Marcus Lehner:
Well then, heck yeah. Put it on, right in Spotify, I love Spotify. Go hit the review button. It's somewhere there, you can navigate there. You're clever. It's a really good way to help with the algorithms. And when people find the show, they're more likely to actually listen to it, if there's some good reviews there waiting for them. So, super great way to help the show. And it's free, unlike this next option, which is going to www.patreon.com/absurdhypotheticals, and becoming a patron. You can donate a dollar a month, and you get access to all our extra content that we produce specifically for our hypothetipals on the Patreon. We come out with cool stuff. We call them fireside chats right now, where we have kind of chill hangout. We talk about the previous month's episodes, but mostly we're there to hang out and just chill. It's a very cool and chill vibe and we go on many, many, many tangents.
Chris Yee:
Marcus tried to be an audio book reader last time.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh my God. Yes. And I could only do British accents, it seems. God, I forgot I did that, man. Thank God that's behind a pay wall.
Chris Yee:
Yeah.
Marcus Lehner:
And we are also in increasingly desperate straits for more questions. We can't make the show without hypothetical questions, and clearly we're running low on "would you rather" questions, even though this one was awesome. We'll take either of those, send them to us, absurdhypotheticals@gmail.com. We'd love to get your questions and then you can be immortalized forever in content creation.
Chris Yee:
Also, if you're on YouTube, you can just leave them in the comments, if that's easier. Because you can just scroll down, you don't have to look for our email or anything.
Marcus Lehner:
Oh, yeah. That's good. We're on so many platforms. It's wild. Technology is amazing.
Chris Yee:
Spotify, YouTube ... I know.
Marcus Lehner:
You know what else is amazing, Chris?
Chris Yee:
Uh ...
Marcus Lehner:
What's going to be amazing is that we're going to be back next week, with our holiday episode, for Christmas. And our Christmas question, to spread the holiday cheer, is what if everything was Christmas?
Chris Yee:
That's a lot of Christmas.