What if all the lightning on Earth struck the same place at once?
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
- Get a copy of What If? 2 and Randall’s other books at: xkcd.com/books
More serious answers to absurd questions at: what-if.xkcd.com/
If all the lightning that occurs worldwide on any given day all struck the same place at once, what would happen to that place?
Randall Munroe is the author of the New York Times bestsellers What If? 2, How To, What If?, and Thing Explainer; the science question-and-answer blog What If?; and the popular web comic xkcd (xkcd.com). A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full time.
Henry Reich is the creator of MinutePhysics and executive producer of MinuteEarth and MinuteFood and founder of Neptune Studios (the parent company for all three youtube channels).
Credits
Narrated by and based on "What If?" by Randall Munroe
Written & Directed by Henry Reich
Illustration and Video Editing by Lizah van der Aart
Illustration and Animation by Ever Salazar
Music & Sound Effects by Know Art Studios
What If? The Video Series is the official adaptation of the What If? books by Randall Munroe and is produced by Neptune Studios LLC.
©2024 xkcd, inc.
Good job guys, we didn't wipe out humanity this time!
*this* time. Until next time at least 😂
just several miles surrounding a basketball court
So not really different from your average NBA game then @@Arkouchie
But what if we used _more_ power?
@@IamSamys good question.
Trevor’s Lightning sounds like a vicious D&D spell.
I heard of one once called F That Guy In Particular. It's a first level spell that deals 4d10 lightning damage on a dex save. The range is multiversal, but the target is a random creature. EXCEPT
If the spell has been cast in the last minute by anyone, the next cast picks the same target.
Or cast "Maracaibo's Lightning Frenzy"
If such a phenomenon ever occurs, we should henceforth name it Trevor's lightning.
I CAST *TREVOR'S LIGHTNING!*
Trevor's Lightning
9th level conjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 120 feet
Components: V S M (a twisted piece of wire made of copper, platinum, and gold worth 1000 GP)
Duration: Instantaneously
Classes: Druid, Wizard
When you cast the spell, choose a point you can see within range. The skies instantly darken and stormclouds form for a mile overhead. A bolt of powerful lightning flashes down from the cloud to that point. Each creature within 15 feet of that point must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 10d6 Lightning damage and 10d6 Force damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one. All enemy creatures and objects for a mile outside the radius take 2d6 Fire damage and must make a Dexterity saving throw or be knocked prone.
If you are outdoors in stormy conditions already when you cast this spell, the spell gives you control over the existing storm instead of creating a new one. Under such conditions, the spell's damage increases by 4d6 Lighting and 2d6 Force.
I like how we're calling it Trevor's lightning. Like this is his fault. Blame him for your lightning atomic bomb.
This is a general rule for xkcd: If you send a question to him, you are considered responsible for the theoretical outcome of your scenario :)
It being called "Trevor's Lightning" makes it seem more like videogame spell or weapon in my opinion.
@@lorenzpacis3249It has a flavor text with: "This spell is said to be created by Trevor The Mad Storm Mage. This powerfull spell is the culmination of its creator's life and death.
"Trevor lived in wonder, got himself struck by thunder, his curiousity got him cinder, when the spell bloomed, sun called her sister."
sacrifice exactly x1 Trevor to the gods once your electrical drill hits the desired depth
It's an honor actually, to have it bear his name! Just a very powerful phenomenon in nature.
My takeaway from this video is two fold:
1. The US uses as much power as two hiroshima bombs every 5 minutes (which is insane).
2. There _definitely_ is a mad scientist who lives in the middle of that lake in Venezuela.
The hiroshima bombs were extremely inefficient, something like 90% of the nuclear material never reacted (this is why there was so much radiation and why newer nuclear bombs are significantly less radioactive)
So it's not that insane
@@Alucard-gt1zf The inefficiency has nothing to do with the radiation. The material that never reacted also never became significantly radioactive, as it is the reaction making it so that causes the energy release. Newer bombs are less radioactive due to being fusion-enhanced even at low yields, and mostly fusion at high yields.
The first one gave me a really sick idea for a powerplant.
Wanna know something scary? By today's standards, the Hiroshima bomb is actually pretty weak. It had a 15 kiloton warhead. Meanwhile, Tsar Bomba, tested by the Russians in 1961, had a whopping 50 MEGATON warhead. Literally over 3,000 times more powerful!
Man I sure wonder where the mad scientist lives.
As someone who lives in Lake Maracaibo, I can confirm: You shouldn't stand here
Cool! Are you a mermaid?
IN?!
You live in a lake? Are you a mermaid?
@@iam2strong Obviously. They've said they have problems with standing.
Follow-up question; how often DO people get hit by lightning in an area with constant thunderstorms?
0:26 If lightning never strikes the same place twice, there should eventually be a future where every place that could be struck already has been so all lightning strikes in general would become a thing of the past.
Not true, my head is a surface and I have yet to be struck, so lightning continues.
@@majnuker In that future, lightning will always strikes people, that's scary
@@majnuker . Oh good point. And as long as new human babies continue to be born, their will always be another head to strike.
@@majnuker Ah, but the saying doesn't say "lightning doesn't strike the same SURFACE twice", it says "the same PLACE." The Earth's surface is constantly in flux in various ways (e.g. your head is formed from organic material when you're born, and moves across the Earth's surface as you do) but the list of geospatial coordinates that lightning could potentially strike will always remain the same! Thus, @zombiedemon1762's reasoning is still valid, and your head is definitely safe, or at least will be at some point in the future.
Now we just need to figure out if the timescale of full-Earth lightning coverage is smaller than the lifespan of the Sun(as its energy allows weather and lightning)
Congrats Trevor, you now have your name on "Trevor's Lightning" a hypothetical Super Lightning Strike with the power of 2 Nukes
Well, one not-particularly-powerful nuke, really. As atomic bombs go, the Hiroshima bomb was underpowered. Not really a surprise for what was essentially a prototype.
Agannazar's Scorcher, Larloch's Minor Drain, Otiluke's Resilient Sphere, Nahal's Reckless Dweomer, Melf's Acid Arrow, Trevor’s Lightning
@@Arawn505 why are you double commenting?
@@CygnusLaboratorys2056 Sorry about that! Don't know how this happened
I hate the "lightning never strikes twice" saying because I seen people defend it in the most wild ways. I remember a high school teacher saying something like "Of course it is true, because the left over charge stops a lightning from striking there again for a while" and I was (in my mind) like "That is not what the saying means and this is a stretch"
I always saw it as more metaphorical lightning, just like the phrase lightning in a bottle, though that doesn’t make the saying completely true either
Maybe it's a bit like "can't have your cake and eat it". Lightning never strikes the same place twice because the first strike changed the place so much...
Many lightning strikes are also actually composed of multiple strikes in quick succession. So even with the stretch from that teacher it's still false.
Lightning never strikes the same river twice
the ionized air channel that carried the current to the ground to make the lightning bolt is far more conductive than the surrounding air so normally every lightning strike is actually multiple lightning strikes very rapidly along that same ionized channel, because it's easier for electricity to flow through it than the non-ionized air
Zeus would be like:
"Fuck this place in particular"
Zeus hates Venezuela
@@JoeJaJoeJoe it seems very plain at this point. But why? Zeus , historically, only gets mad when you refuse to sleep with him.....
@@ossian1977 It wouldn’t surprise me if he is mad at a lake nymph in the bottom of the lake who refused to sleep with him.
@@ossian1977 He also gets mad at Hera for being mad at him for constantly sleeping around.
@@ILCorvo001 The hypocrite
So you're saying that if I moved to Venezuela, connected a lightning rod to a capacitor, and hooked my TV to it, I could play Ocarina of Time for almost a full century? An excellent Song of Storms moment
That's how much you'd get in one night, if you stayed connected your issue wouldn't be power, but keeping yourself and your equipment in good enough condition to actually be physically capable of continuing to play
@@MagicXRoads534 especially under a never ending thunderstorm. I don't even know how you'd do that, maybe run power lines underground and play your console somewhere else?
You will be farming gold in wow for food😢.
The flag of Zulia state, where lake Maracaibo is, has a bolt of lightning on it. It’s awesome 10/10 flag ⚡️
They dodged a bullet, would be two bolts of lightning were it in Argentina.
@@DeuxisWasTakenas a history nerd, I bet I’m one of the only ones who got that
@@Ww1whiz1914 SS...
@@Ww1whiz1914what does it mean
@@Ww1whiz1914 you dont need to be a nerd to know what the SS were
"You would think people who believed it would be gradually filtered out."
This phrase caught me laughing out loud for a couple of minutes!
some guy is either gonna get super speed or get a free cremation
Or maybe both, if he's Dr Manhattan.
Has anyone ever paid for their own cremation?
@@Gandhi_Physique If by way of insurance counts, I'd think so.
I like those odds
Or he's gonna turn into a Titan.
Note to people in tornado alley: quit putting out tornado food
you can't stop me
How many times do we have to tell you, if you feed the tornadoes, they'll come back for more!
Never
we're making the tornadoes too dependent on humans for survival. they'll forget how to hunt for barns and cgi sharks themselves at this rate
@@dazcarrrwe're trying to domesticate them
One very important thing that you missed: The lighting rods would be attracted to one another, and form a single, very thin, plasma channel in which temperature and densities would reach nuclear fusion conditions. However, it would be highly unstable and would break off, still generating a lot of nuclear fusion reactions through those instabilities and resulting in a significant nuclear yield.
Ah but that would change the question to "What would happen if a lightning bolt had the power of all of the lighting bolts that hit the earth in a day?"
@@nehpets216 I mean... I don't think a different evolution of the starting conditions that the question poses would turn it into a different question, it's definitely a different answer but I think the original question had enough emphasis on "the same place" that it wouldn't be a stretch to consider them starting right next to each other. If that were the starting condition which Mr. Monroe has considered MrRelish I believe is correct, the plasmas should pull together since two conductors parallel to each other with current going in the same direction should be attracted to each other. How much fusion would be possible this way I don't know, especially because the elements in the air aren't the easiest to get energy out from from fusion. Also when they say 'lightning rods' I think they don't mean the metal rods that people typically mean when they say that but, like, the actual tubes of plasma.
@@pinethetree The Video was based on the Lighting bolts being separate when they hit the ground next to each other (the 2cm wide section of the discussion being the impact radius on the surface of what it hit) while combining the bolts into 1 does more damage from vaporized material at the impact point (the Copper discussion was about how much electricity could hit per square inch and have it pass through instead of melt). I think in reality the bolts would pull together into 1 but that it also wouldn't all happen at once since the resistance to it happening wouldn't drop from holding back that much potential energy to allowing it to happen fast enough for All of the potential energy to be released at the same time.
So, a Lightnuke, if you will.
@@majnuker Yes, I love your name for it.
Randall, I’m not sure just which aspects of your career pays your bills best these days, but I need it to be these. Hearing your tone of voice, sound effects, and these fascinating scenarios, coupled with random related nerdy lore - it always makes my day.
How did I never hear about "The thunderplains from FF10 in real life"!? What the hell!? That's _awesome._
Indeed,
No Venus Sigil for you! Maybe some skin grafts if you're lucky.
The less I have to think about the Thunderplains minigames from either _FFX_ or _FFX-2,_ the better for my blood pressure.
That's where you go to dodge 100 lightning bolts so you can get your ultimate weapon.
Or it could be thundra plateau from botw
I saw the lightning over Lake Maracaibo from an airplane (I was flying to Bolivia) and it was absolutely mind-blowing
As somebody from Orlando, I’m both shook and disappointed in myself for blindly believing it was the lighting capital of the world.
Yeah, Murica is not that great, as everyone outside knows ;)
If it's any consolation, Maracaibo experienced a drought for a few years around 2010 that did, briefly, allow central Florida to claim the top spot.
The most intense lightning storm I've ever seen was in Tampa, so yeah almost.
@@dono.3115that doesn't make it the most intense storm to have ever existed
At least isn't that far away, only across a relatively small sea.
I greatly anticipate the hair dryer with unlimited power. That's one of my favorites.
No, Loud Box! You can't destroy the planet!
Haha, Loud Box goes boing!
Yes, I love that one. The gag of adding more and more power level labels is funny, and then imagining the firestorm ballistic jumping box.
You missed a joke, by not making the Tornado Food shaped like trailer park kibble.
What is a trailer park kibble
What is that, google just shows dog food
Like did you make that up
@@ljushastighet i think it's meant to be kibble that looks like a trailer park
I'm more surprised they didn't know there is a person attempting to use basically a tornado for power in the "Atmospheric Vortex Engine"
His voice is so much softer than I expected from a science man
Weird, to me it's exactly the kind of soft voice I would expect from a science man.
Yes. Do you expect 'science men' to be 6ft5, ripped, hairy chest men with cigar seasoned barrotone voices?
His hands are also much softer than you'd expect 🥰
@@V77710 To be fair, famous scientists like David Attenborough and Neil deGrasse Tyson may have influenced their "expected" voice.
It's basically how I always imagined Cueball talking.
I really hope that the electron proton moon and earth scenario is covered here someday; can't remember the details of it but I remember it was pretty destructive
It generates a black hole the size of the observable universe. So, yes, pretty destructive.
@@LichLordFortissimo Meh. Two Karens and an Out Of Stock sticker at Walmart's worse.
Yeah
You can find the proton moon and earth scenario at the official website of what if.
Unmeasurably destructive. Can't remember any other What If that was more so.
0:54 what if all the sun shines in one place at once 🤔
He did a video on that
Laser
Two days ago lightning struck my house.. i was standing in the hallway inside, and above me was the door bell ringer... then just BOOM and the entire thing exploded in a bright flash right above me as everything went darkn instantly.. It was so loud that my ears were ringing and i thought i went deaf on my left ear... Some of the appliances also literally exploded including the internet router, and electricity went trough cable wire and fried the samsung tv and digital box.. water heater casing got welded together to a pipe... and on the outside where once stood door bell, now it was a gaping hole sporting hanging charred wires with cement and concrete chunks all over the place.. this has thought me to appreciate the power that lightning can deliver..
lightning once hit a tree in our garden, standing on water lines. we have _good_ surge protection, so nothing we had connected to the power grid was affected, but our router got fried via the (at the time) copper dsl line
however, nearly everyone else on our road had their stuff explode cause they didn't have appropriate surge protection lol
the tree was entirely disintegrated, by the way, literally exploded into hundreds of chunks of torn wood that flung up to 50 meters from their original location
this motivated us to fell our other tree; that one was standing on a gas line!
@@jan_Sanku Wow... it seems in the past 3 years there have been increasing number of thunder storms where i live. I think it might be time for me to actually save up and buy that surge protection thingy. Can you tell me which one do you use? And can i buy it in EU? Thanks!
@@johnnymcgeez5647 i'm in the EU, so probably!
unfortunately i've had nothing to do with its installation, i only know that we have it. i wish i had more information about it.
i think your best bet is to ask your electrician about what can be done to protect your particular house against lightning strikes. maybe they can get you something like what i got, or maybe installing lightning rods is an option. stuff like that.
I like how Cueball's holding an N64 controller.
He is a man of taste and culture, after all
You could almost but not quite hear the Buck Bumble song
1:48
U.S.: WE HAVE POWER!!!
*5 minutes later*
NEVERMIND...
This is cool, but the way I understood that question was not "all lightning bolts next to each other" but "all of the charge that causes those lightning bolts concentrated in this one spot". Literally a single big-ass lighting with the power of all those lightnings, striking in one place. It would probably be thinner than in your scenario, and concentrate the energy even more, which might result in some even more interesting effects. (Not sure if fusion-worthy, but I assume an (un)healthy dose of ionising radiation and a harder shockwave.)
Its both fun and a little boring that, after a certain amount of energy, most phenomenon start to kinda converge to the same outcome: big boom.
Whether its a runaway radioactive chainreaction, lightning bolts, a big object moving very fast, etc. after x amount of joules it just becomes a big boom where the only relevant factor is the amount of energy involved and not the delivery system.
Sometimes you get a chain reaction, like if you trigger vacuum decay, and the boom is even bigger than you'd think. Sometimes things stabilize surprisingly, like if you turn the solar system into soup.
The form of energy doesn't really have any effect on its behaviour in the grand scheme of things.
Any sufficiently dense/large energy storage system is indistinguishable from a weapon/disaster in the making.
@@PlatinumAltaria nice pfp
@@VictorQuesada-bl1xk"Maxim 24: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a really big gun."
"What if all the lightning in the world struck one place?"
*The guy who just picked a one leaf clover:*
"Oh hey a four leaf clover?"
"WHY ARE THE LEAVES RED"
I've spammed lightning in the same spot in Worldbox, I know what happens.
What happens?
Lava@@draggar4176
@@draggar4176 Death. Death happens.
@@MonklockAnimationssmart.
@@MonklockAnimations so you shouldn't stand there
Love these videos! i recently suggested What If to the school librarian and was pleased to see a copy of the book now available for checkout at the school i work for. My plan to trick children into learning science and physics is nearly complete!
I love how he sounds so calm when describing a catastrophic thing
Catastrophic? Humanity survived this one, that's an unusually peaceful scenario for this channel!
Yeah, his neutral tone of voice makes his content pretty enjoyable and calming! Also the lack of loud music and cheesy special effects.
Trevour's lighting: 10th level evocation
Casting time: 1 action
Range: 1000ft
Components: V S M (a copper rod, no less than 1ft in length, worth at least 5gp)
You point the copper rod at the target point, and summon all of the lighting that would normally non magically strike anywhere else on earth for the next 24 hours. Each creature in this radius must make a dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 30d10 lightning damage upon a failed save, or half that upon a success. In addition each creature within a 300ft radius must make a constitution saving throw. A creature takes 20d10 thunder damage, 20d10 fire damage, upon a failed save, or half that upon a success. In addition, upon failing the constitution saving throw, each creature is knocked prone and pushed 100ft away, and deafened for 2d4 hours. The spell damages objects within 300ft and ignites flammable objects that aren’t being worn or carried.
The terrain within a 50ft radius becomes difficult terrain.
The shockwave from this spell can be heard up to 20 miles away.
I'm screenshotting this for future campaigns
"Tornado food" made me smile, until I realized tornado eats hot air, which we are providing in abundance
So that means yelling at the tornado to go away actually makes it want to hang around more.
Imagine the sound of the thunder at just the right distance from Trevor's Lightning strike to hear it well but also not have it cause permanent damage.
2:36 The sound effect is top notch
How did no one tell me about Lake Maracaibo before, that sounds sick.
Sorry, we were keeping it a secret. We thought it was for the best.
It also has as much as half the amount of oil that the whole of the US has beneath it. in an area roughly the size of West Virginia
@@alecity4877 DID SOMEBODY SAY OIL? 🦅🦅
@@alecity4877 All that oil next to all that lightning? Sounds dangerous 😅
Sometimes it’s refreshing to not destroy entire solar systems at a time.
Yea ya know, change things up a bit
0:06 God fucking had it with Brazil...
finally
loving the sound effects
Some of my favorites I hope to see: "Periodic Wall of Elements", "Laser Pointer Moon", and "Hair Dryer in a Box". "Machine Gun Jetpack" is also a great one. There so many honestly, I'm keeping a close eye on this channel 😁
The infrastructure (cables and capacitors) needed to capture that giant lightning bolt would be damned impressive.
From napkin math it even looks doable with enough copper, but I wonder if there are unexpected effects that come up at such high currents. For example, parallel currents are attracted to each other, and regular lightning strikes can implode some hollow metal objects. So what if the magnetic field of the 1m wide cable is so strong that attempting to fork it in any way to feed into millions of capacitors leads to cables breaking before full charge of lightning is delivered, so now you have to build advanced support structures and use stronger materials.
@@arcturuslight_ A big copper cylinder buried in concrete, which leads into a big copper cone, which leads into a big copper torus, which leads into symmetrical branches
He said it, Trevor's Lightning. That's the name for either such a phenomenon or a lightning strike of near equivalent power now.
Despite the often destructive subject matter, I find these videos calming. Probably cause Randall doesn’t have an obnoxious voice or add loud music or over-the-top visual effects. I like how he voices the sound effects; it adds some character to his content without being cheesy.
You said that gathering all the lightning in one place is improbable, but not impossible. I like the way you think
If we ran a hypothetical wire with no resistance from every point in the world and directed down to ground to 1 point then we can do it. But then it'd be shaped like a cone rather than one linear strike, and it wouldn't have the iconic zigzag since it's following a more direct path, so it wouldn't be fun anymore
Now I'm curious as to how loud the thunder would be
This also answers the question I've had since I was a kid/teen (why don't we harvest lightning?) And the one I've had as an adult (why is it impractical to collect lightning?)
Randall won't stop until we have singularity-driven turbines that transmit power wirelessly
Planet Saturn: That's cute. I have thunderbolts that can vaporize entire continents.
The math at 1:28 seems off. Assuming the bundle cross section is a square with side length 600cm, and the bolt cross section is a square with side length 1cm, that's only 360,000 bolts in the bundle, significantly less than a million. If the bolt is 2cm wide, that's 90,000 bolts. Assuming circular cross-sections makes no difference if we ignore the gaps between packed circles, otherwise the error is worse. Am I missing something?
You can pack circles tighter than squares. Try triangles.
Yeah I reacted to this as well. in order to fit a million bolts they would have to be ~0.6cm in diameter and fill the entire circle with no spaces.
In addition, the ratio of circumference to area is biggest in a circle, a lot more than in a square.
wait, wouldn't "lightning rods ward off lightning" be really easy to test? You could just take a lightning rod, measure how many times it gets striked in a year, then replace it with an equally tall, non-conductive metal, and compare how often both get striked.
Seems like a weird thing to be disputed.
And it's not like we don't have a massive lake which ALWAYS gets thunder storms or anything
My guess before watching: everybody dies.
Huh. I was wrong. Pleasantly surprised. :-)
@@mahieuwim To be fair, that's a pretty reasonable guess for probably about 80% of the What If? series 😂
@@mahieuwim No, everyone on and in the immediate vicinity of the court dies, so, slightly correct.
I suspect other would be blinded and deafened too, if that helps?
Just this once, Rose, … no wait, wrong episode.
Sure that Zeus guy had some bolts, but have you gotten a load Trevor's lightning?!
"The lightning never strikes twice" saying is an example of the Gambler's Fallacy at best. People think the likelihood of any given object being hit above any other is low, because there's so many other things that could be hit just as likely. So they think that, because the same place being hit two times in an immediate row is so much lower, that makes the spot that was just hit safer, when it really doesn't.
The chance of rolling a dice twice and getting two sixes in a row is 1 in 36. But when you roll the dice and get a 6 the first time, that doesnt mean there's a 1 in 36 chance of the second roll being another six; that _first_ roll, having already happened, has its probability of being a 6 changed from 1 in 6, to 1 in 1. So the math changes.
My favourite way of wording this, which I stole from somewhere I can’t remember, is: “the dice don’t remember what they rolled last time”
Isn't probability irrelevant for events that have already happened?
@@leonelewis59 That's my point. All probabilities for events in the past that are known to have occurred is 1:1, so even if one were to incorporate them into the calculations, it does not change the result of them, they may as well not even be there.
Casinos sometimes make big money out of this, because if the roulette just happens to roll a red number like 11 times in a row, you will have so many people bet on black for the next turn.
this is how dangerous i thought lightning was when i was younger
While I suppose you could argue powering a house with lighting would save a little money on power bills and whatnot if you just used it as a backup source of occasional extra power, I feel like "house is struck by lighting a lot and we like it" probably would make the property value dip a little
If you live in an area with regular lightning storms, it would almost make sense to set up a rod so that it fed electricity into a battery that you also charged via other methods. Just as the occasional top up.
Thank you for making these in video form, Randall. I've been a big fan of your comic for years, and What If? was one of my favorite things on the site.
I was struck by how well conducted this was on the channel
What you did there?
I saw it.
You’re grounded.
@@dougjb7848 Guilty as changed, I'm positive
the only mouth noise asmr ill listen to
We need an Alan Becker collab🔥
Good idea.
Where can I buy tornado food? Asking for a friend.
Winnebago dealer.
"INTRUDER DETECTED, FLUSHING INTERIOR"
I love the high quality sound effects, very professional.
xkcd isn't pregnant, but he never fails to deliver
It's not delivery, it's da science!
@@majnuker Is that a DiGiorno joke? I only know it from that Britanick sketch from years ago haha (Fed Up)
every youtuber no matter their background WILL get this singular comment at least some point in their career; this is non negotiable
@@ed_cmntonly too real
This actually happens the fantasy trilogy "The Kingkiller Chronicles." The main character, Kvothe, uses magic to bind a tree and make it the most powerful lightning rod in the world. In the middle of a massive thunderstorm. It summons down all of the lightning onto the tree in a "massive pillar of white fire" as the book describes.
Out of habbit, I held my thumb on the screen at the end of the video, waiting for the mouse-over text.
if only there were a way for that to happen on RUclips.
This gives me PTSD from the Thunder Plains in FFX lol
2:08 Wait, so GDI was actually right to call it an *ION* cannon?
xkcd's What If? Nobody Dies
I'd say people living several miles around the basketball court was at least a little roughed up.
@@andressigalat602 Yeah just light sunburns thats all lol
I can't help but draw parallels to the Ancient Internet Character: _Magical Trevor_
Who didn't have a lightning rod, but a _wand._ And who didn't attract the lightning, but would _cast it!_
(Magical Trevor is also on YT, so now all the youngins can experience him; you can thank me later 😊)
_[I'm not associated with them... it's just legitimately hilarious!]_
I rather imagine xkcd precedes Weebl & Bob by four or five years, so everyone _here_ will be aware of it. 😺
@@Tevildo That's a fair point! 😁
I always thought that saying was weird too. Apart from lightning poles, lightning is generally more likely to strike tall things in nature. And each storm has a lot of strikes. It's bound to hit the same place many times.
What amazes me about this is the fact that humans produce enough energy to do all that every few seconds
Most important take away from this is: the wizard who smited the entire earth is an asshole
I think it's the same jerk that teleported everyone to Rhode Island.
Ok, so if I can someohow harness the power of lightning, how many Lake Maracaibos do I need to power my lava moat?
Why would you need a lava moat if you have lake Maracaibo?
Just make a fence out of lightning rods around your house. Then you have like constant lightning strikes at the border of your property, basically an insanely strong electric fence.
babe wake up, new xkcd's What If? video dropped
I love the little sound effects you made with your mouth :D
3:20 How big would this capacitor have to be tho. I kinda...wanna....try
Great Scott!
How about a follow-up on how we could potentially capture this power? I'm a bit confused about how a supercapacitor can capture a huge surge of power quickly but also release it slowly. Hell I don't even really understand how regenerative brakes are doing it.
I mean I don't know all the engineering details but don't regenerative braking systems just-- broadly speaking-- run the motor in reverse?
Instead of the motor drawing ⚡ from the battery for powering the car's motion, it's the motor drawing the energy from the car's motion and putting it into the battery as ⚡
...Right?
Supercapacators have the capability to adsorb and deliver large currents. Lightening is high current, that's the first half. Delivering it slowly, is all about whatever load you hook up needs. A copper rod would take high current (end explode) while a light bulb would merely get bright. (Assuming we got all the voltages right).
Ngl the art in this video is really good! Good work!
1:33 Props to you for pronouncing Hiroshima correctly 🙌🏻
“boom”
I am including trevos lightning in a fantasy-sci-fi setting if i ever can, imagine the lightning wizzard casting "all lightning right here now"
If a lightning never struck the same place twice, all lightning rods (including the really big industrial ones) would be strictly single-use.
Actually, I believe they would be totally useless. Since lighting has almost certainly struck every spot on the planet by now. So, if lighting never struck the same spot twice there would be no lightning.
@@88porpoiseWow, yeah, makes sense. 1-3 cm squared over the 510 million km squared of Earth surface would seem like a lot of places to strike, but then it does so 8 million times a day, every day, every year, and Earth has been around for BILLIONS of years and whatever that last number has been, this one is hilariously greater.
@@88porpoiseWait, actually no it's not greater. 5*10^18 places to strike (this many 1cm squared spots on Earth) and 3*10^18 lightning strikes over the last billion years (assuming the rate hasn't changed). That's numbers if the same magnitude and also that's not enough. Also seeing how lightning strike density is very unequal over the surface, then no, probably not all the spots have been struck, but it's close.
.. wait; someone survived what if? unpossible!
I haven't done the maths, but I'm not sure the metre diameter copper wire would be enough. The high speed of the pulse would confine the current to the outside of the wire due to the skin effect, making its effective cross-section much less. Perhaps Randall took account of this in determining his figure.
In the drawing at least, the copper "wire" appears to be a bunch of smaller cables bound together, so there should be sufficient gaps inside to increase surface area. Maybe that helps!
I like the sound effects, especially the US electrical grid shutting down at 1:50 and the court getting destroyed at 1:55.
videos dont miss
Man, this might be my favourite new channel
So cool!
XKCD's What If got this video all wrong...
You don't give tornados food.
You give them _Juice._
*_'Nader Juice_*
I like that new saying. So catchy.
0:32 according to dad brown it’s 1.21 gigawatts
The sound effects remind me of “Hidden Folks” which is one of my favorite silly little games
what would happen if a 1X1 foot square was cut out (directly down) in the Earth? If nothing catastrophic happened, what would happen if you put weight on one side?
It would be filled in from the side with dirt or magma.
Impossible. The Earth's metric.
This video reminded me of a demonstration in high school science class: the teacher folded a paperclip until it had a base for a single end to stand straight up. He attached this tiny "lightning rod" to a Van de Graaff generator. Turning on the generator, he first demonstrated that, unlike normal, a conductor he held over the paperclip did not produce the giant sparks one associates with the generator.
Second, he had us hold our hands over the "lightning rod." We could feel a breeze flowing from the point of the paperclip. That, he explained, was the charge expelled from the surface of the generator, which dissipated the charge difference, preventing the sparks.
In other words, he explained, if you see lightning hit a real lightning rod, it probably wasn't well grounded and wasn't doing it's job.
now take 1000 years worth of lightning and have that strike a single spot all at the same time
That would be 200 times stronger than Tsar Bomba.
Or 10,000 Megatons.
That's a lot of energy but no where close to asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs.
Krakatoa volcano was VEI 6 and it's explosion released 200 megatons of energy.
So 10,000 megatons is comparative to a high end VEI 7 volcano explosion.
I want to thank whoever came up with the amazing -thunder- lightning noises.
I'm a simple man, I see Venezuela I upvote
The sound effects are top-notch!
Imagine back to the future, but the lightning that strikes the clock tower is that behemoth of a bolt!