Monroe's latest What-If book, is

What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd
....https://www.amazon.com › What-Additional-Scientific-...
What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical
Questions Hardcover – September 13, 2022 · Kindle $15.99 Read with Our
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Rating: 4.6 · ‎13 reviews · ‎$20.22 · ‎$5.99 delivery · ‎In stock
(Goodreads so far rates it at 4.5)

(Hey, the amazon site does have a 'look inside' feature for the kindal
version.)

from
https://www.wired.com/story/randall-munroe-is-back-to-answer-your-impossible-questions/

Randall Munroe Is Back to Answer Your Impossible Questions
The xkcd author and former NASA engineer tackles our questions about
science education, solvable climate issues, and his latest What If? book.

Randall Monroe
PHOTOGRAPH: ADRIANNE MATHIOWETZ

WHAT IF YOU wanted to visit the sun? That seems like a bad idea—unless
you want to melt, or at the very least, deeply damage your retinas. But
according to Randall Munroe, the brains behind the xkcd webcomic and the
What If? books and blog, it all depends on the length of time that you
decide to make a trip and where you go.

After leaving his engineering job at NASA in 2006, Munroe began working
full time on the stick figure-based xkcd, which ranges from romantic
quips to acerbic jokes about the state of scientific publishing. It has
since turned into a juggernaut of popular culture, serving as a teaching
tool in physics classrooms and a universal medium for science fair
students to giggle over. Along with xkcd, Munroe also began a blog
called What If, where he would answer questions posed by fans about
things like

how many calories a T. rex unleashed in New York City would need to
survive, or

how much force Yoda could actually output.

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COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
The blog led to the 2014 book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to
Absurd Hypothetical Questions, a collection of bizarre queries that
Munroe doggedly researched and answered. By tying together a combination
of metric conversions, expert advice, basic scientific principles, comic
illustrations, and a little bit of common sense, Munroe found that he
could provide a real answer to someone who maybe wanted to build a Lego
brick bridge connecting London and New York, or wanted to know what
would happen if you grabbed a mole (6.022 x 1023 units) of moles (the
animal).

FEATURED VIDEO
Scott Kelly Answers Astronaut Questions From Twitter

The sheer quantity of additional head-scratching questions that followed
has now led him to What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to
Absurd Hypothetical Questions, which publishes today. For Munroe, very
few questions are off-limits (there are sections titled “Weird and
Worrying”), and even seemingly simple conundrums lead to the most
fascinating of rabbit holes. WIRED sat down for an interview with Munroe
to chat about some of these rabbit holes, how to talk about science, and
why tire rubber is bad for you (and the planet). This interview has been
condensed and edited for clarity.

WIRED: How has it been, the past couple of years, writing What If? 2
with a pandemic happening—with a spotlight being shone on science in
general?

It’s definitely been tricky, because it’s one of the big science
communication problems that is suddenly very apparent to everyone: Oh
no, we have this scientific information, and then we need a whole bunch
of people to act based on it. How do we get it across to them? How do we
figure out why they’re doing what they’re doing?

It’s very similar to climate change, where you have a whole bunch of
scientists who figured out this thing and then a whole bunch of people
who are not really on the same page with them. You have to try to get
them to meet each other somehow. You can get people some of the way
there. But the mismatch between where people are and where scientists
are is still going to be frustrating, because they’re never going to be
in quite the same place.

You’ve been doing science communication work for a long time, in terms
of explaining really complex things. Have you found any strategies to
help people understand these complicated concepts?

One of the trickiest things about talking to people about something cool
that you've learned how to do, or that you've learned about—whether it's
science or something else—is that it’s hard to remember what it's like
to not know something. It’s hard to put yourself in the shoes of the
people you’re trying to talk to. It’s like a Magic Eye picture or an
optical illusion: You can look at it for a while, and you don’t see it
and you don’t see it—and then you see it. Then it’s really hard to not
see it.

Sometimes scientists will use language that’s really tricky or
specialized without realizing that not everyone knows, for example, what
an oxidizer is. You want to talk in the language that people will
understand. And that's true anywhere—whether it's to other scientists or
people who aren't scientists. But it's hard to do that without being
condescending. People really struggle with this, because they'll say,
“Okay, well, I'll really dumb this down. I'll really make this like I'm
talking to a child.” I think people can tell when they're being
condescended to.

So the way I always try to think about it is: Don't think about it as if
people aren't smart. Think about it like people are busy. They have all
this stuff going on. You have a moment of their attention on this thing.
Whatever else they're also paying attention to is also important. This
is a person who's interested, who maybe doesn't have the background, but
they’re perfectly capable of understanding whatever it is I am trying to
explain. But I only have a moment of their time. What’s the really
important thing to get across here?

Why did you decide to write a sequel to What If?

When people would send me questions I would feel really compelled to
start researching them, whether or not I was going to write an article
about it. So people would send me questions— sometimes even before I
started doing *What If?—*that I didn't have a plan to write up or
anything. But they asked the question, and I'm like, Huh, I've never
thought about that. That's really interesting. Okay, well, I think the
answer is probably this—right? And then I'm like, Wait, I'm not sure
that's right. And then I can't rest until I know whether my first
impulse was right or not.

The questions have, I think, gotten stranger overall, as people have
realized that it maybe is possible to answer some of these. I've been
just compulsively getting sucked into researching one question after
another, and I'm really excited to share some of the results.

One of the things you wrote about was what happens if you’re transported
to the surface of the sun for a nanosecond. The answer to that question
was so surprising—because you’d probably be fine. (Reader, you’ll have
to read the book to find out the rest.)

There are a lot of questions where I realize I'm not sure about the
answer, but I have a sense that there must be some reason why that's not
how it works. One simple example was someone who said: “When I put new
tires on my car, the treads are a quarter inch thick or whatever. Then,
when I took them off, they're bald. The treads seem like they’re getting
thinner—so why aren't the roads getting thicker with rubber?”

Then I'm like: Okay, well, I don't actually know the answer to that. So
I started looking into whether used tires really are that much lighter.
It turns out that yes, they are. And where all that rubber goes is
everywhere.

Everywhere? Like, the rubber disintegrates and flies everywhere?

A lot of it gets left on the road, but it gets washed off. It also gets
released as these aerosolized particles, which just drift on the wind or
land in the water. You can find concentrations of tire rubber in fish
tissues and in streams near roads. We’re not sure how bad any of it
is—we’re still figuring that out.

There's one paper from a couple years ago that linked one of the
chemicals in tire rubber to salmon die-offs in the Pacific Northwest.
Maybe it's some specific chemical that we could swap out easily if we
can figure out what it is and determine that it’s definitely causing
this problem. Or maybe it's just that most of the rubbers have these bad
consequences for water, in which case, that's a pretty big problem
because no one has figured out a good way to make tires not leave rubber
behind. It’s a problem that desperately needs current research, that we
don't have a great solution for.

There are some people who have these wild schemes involving a thing that
will capture the rubber from the tire, like a vacuum cleaner sitting
behind the tire. I know, it sounds really silly, and they’re like, “We
know this is silly, but it’s the least silly thing we could come up
with.” This seems like a really unsolvable problem. I have an
illustration of, if we put the car in a giant plastic hamster ball and
then drive it around.

On 9/15/22 9:57 AM, a425couple wrote:
> Monroe's latest What-If book, is
>
> What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers ...

(Thoughts on skimming an overview of the book)

What is the surface of a big glob or whisp of gas?

What does it mean to be 'inside' that surface or
'outside'?

Will the Earth supposedly be 'swallowed by the sun' when
the Sun might go through its red giant phases billions of years
in the future?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_nebula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliosphere#Heliopause

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfv%C3%A9n_surface

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_corona

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection_zone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_zone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_core

What is the 'surface' of the Earth? Is it the transition
zone between the Earth's inner core and it's outer core?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_inner_core

Is the surface of the ocean solid or liquid? If it is
solid, does that mean there are no waves? Can you use
this program to get an estimate of the extent of sea ice
in the Arctic and Antarctic at different times of year?
You can enter a date by clicking on earth and the icon
list referenced by the word 'Control' between Now and
the arrows, and rotate to near the north or south poles,
but it only goes a few years back. (It may not work on
some computers.)

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/ocean/primary/waves/overlay=significant_wave_height/orthographic

> ...

The what-if?

The Alien Space Bats give you the ability to input any number into this
widget program, and interchange the temperature, wind speed, and all the
other parameters of the entire Earth's gas atmosphere from 2015 to the
present with any other time from 2015 to the present. Gases mostly
enclosed by liquids or solids (animal lungs) will also not change.
Solids and liquids with a diameter of greater than one millimeter or
loosely compacted with other solids (generally the Earth itself) however
will not be interchanged. Nor with the orbit of the Earth change.

You can only do this 10 times or less.

The net effect? You will be able to change the Earth's weather to be
the same as at some other time in the year, but you will only be able to
do this for a period of time on the order of hours or days, because
the sunlight of the time of year and the heat or cold in the ice and
the ground and the ocean will over the course of hours or days or less
gradually convert the atmosphere back to the weather conditions of the
time of year before your Alien Space Bat helped temporary conversion
of the weather.

What will be the maximum change from our time line that you can produce
by being able to change the Earth's weather in this temporary fashion a
maximum of 10 times from 2015 to the present? How will your weather
changes produce these effects?

Note: You can NOT send back in time anything to influence
interpretations of what the weather changes might mean or giving any
hints about how the Alien Space Bats are doing it, but you can choose
any specific times of interchange that you want.

Will you be able to change anything by temporarily affecting the weather
in this manner? If so, what?