If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered what would actually happen to your body if you tried to eat a cloud?
- What if you could shrink the planet Jupiter down to the size of a suburban house, and what would that do to your neighborhood?
- Are you curious how massive a snowball would truly become if it were rolled from the peak of Mt. Everest all the way to the bottom?
Listen to What If? 2 — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from What If? 2
- Discover how contemplating absurd, low-stakes hypothetical questions eliminates the fear of looking incompetent and builds new neural pathways to boost your overall creativity.
- Understand the mind-boggling scale and physics of space by exploring why a road trip to the edge of the universe is impossible and how a solar system filled with soup would create a deadly black hole.
- Learn why extreme temperatures behave unexpectedly, such as why touching a 0 Kelvin object is dangerous not just because of the cold, but due to the highly reactive liquid oxygen that builds up on it.
- Find out why human bodies actually contain more ancient dinosaur material through recycled water molecules than the petroleum-based plastic toy dinosaurs we manufacture.
- Explore the fascinating biological math behind a T.rex's metabolism to discover that feeding one of these massive predators in a modern city would only require about 80 fast-food burgers a day.
Learning Tools
Reinforce what you learned from What If? 2
Mind Map
What If? 2
Core Philosophy+
House-Sized Jupiter+
Galactic Real Estate+
Building Rome in a Day+
Ocean Trench Glass Tube+
Eating a Cloud+
Everest Snowball+
Quiz — Test Your Understanding
Question 1 of 7
According to the book, approximately how many calories does a Tyrannosaurus Rex need to consume daily, expressed in human terms?
Question 2 of 7
If Jupiter were shrunk to the size of a house and placed on a suburban street, what would be the immediate result?
Question 3 of 7
If national borders extended infinitely upward into space, why would Southern Hemisphere countries like Australia have a distinct real estate advantage?
Question 4 of 7
Based on civil engineering formulas and the pace of Renaissance artists, how long would it theoretically take to build Rome if all 8 billion people on Earth worked on it together?
Question 5 of 7
What is a major difference between standing at the bottom of a deep underground mine and standing at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in an indestructible glass tube?
Question 6 of 7
What is the primary biological challenge of trying to eat a piece of a cloud?
Question 7 of 7
Why wouldn't a snowball grow to a massive, mountain-sized sphere if rolled from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom?
What If? 2 — Full Chapter Overview
- 1Recommendation
- 2What would happen if Jupiter were shrunk to house size and placed on a suburban street?
- 3If Earth’s national borders extended into space, which country would own most of the galaxy?
- 4How many people would it take to build Rome in a single day?
- 5If you stood in an indestructible glass tube stretching from the ocean’s surface to its floor, what would it be like at the deepest point?
- 6Could someone eat a cloud?
- 7How large would a snowball get if rolled from the top of Mt. Everest to the bottom?
- 8Final Summary
What If? 2 Summary & Overview
What If? 2 (2022) is Randall Munroe’s follow-up to the New York Times best-selling What If? Like its predecessor, it comprises Munroe’s serious scientific answers to the absurd, funny, and whimsical questions submitted to him by readers, ranging from “How big would a snowball be if rolled from the top of Mt. Everest to the bottom?” to “Could a person eat a cloud?”
Who Should Listen to What If? 2?
- Fans of xkcd’s nerd-culture humor
- People who love science but don’t take it too seriously
- Anyone who’s ever wondered what would happen if Jupiter were shrunk to the size of a suburban house
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