Just turn off your retina and stay longer, u could block the light by facing away and covering your eyes because, yk, it's the sun but if you stayed for longer than 50 nanoseconds some light should be enough to warm you. I wish he talked about if the light would penetrate through your skin when your eyes are closed like x rays from nukes because going blind would be my concern considering that even looking at the sun from here can blind you.
I'm guessing any amount of time on the surface of the sun that would be enough to heat you up would also be enough to cause irreparable damage to your DNA due to ionizing radiation.
wait, something doesnt add up. so if 1 second with a lighter is 500.000 times more energy than a nanosecond on the sun, and the center of the sun is 167 times hotter than the surface (1 million to 6 thousand degrees) then that would still be only a third of the energy of the lighter right? so how can you say you get over a million times too much energy there?
I own a book with the worst places to travel to and for some reason the middle of the sun is not listed anywhere in the book. They should make a second version where they include it
The surface is too cold, the core is too hot.. Clearly there is a perfect depth where, if there for only a nanosecond, you were warmed to a nice and toasty, say, 30c.
Probably not. Your skin would burn and experience high amounts of radiation before getting anywhere near useful amounts of energy absorbed to your body.
@@justskip4595 everything up to 30C is bearable, but I prefer 25-27C (depending how much clothes I have on). but in sauna I can withstand up to 120C (but I prefer 80-100C), and I can take trashses outside on just t-shirt even at -20C no problem
@@ilexdiapason Yea I agree that a peek feels longer. To me if I say I caught a glimpse of something it would mean I saw it so briefly that I registered that I saw something but I didn't see it long enough to gather that much information. If I say I caught a peek at something I would mean I saw it briefly but for long enough to gather a little bit of information. Like I would say "I caught a glimpse of something behind the curtain" vs "I got/took a peek behind the curtain and saw (whatever)" and to me a peek is also less about the duration and more about the visibility. For instance I would say you can take a peek through a keyhole and look around at what is visible but if I'm looking through that keyhole and something moves super fast right in front of the hole and I barely see it, I would say I peeked through the keyhole and caught a glimpse of something moving, with the peeking being longer while the glimpse would be very brief. That's just how I use those words though.
@@mathfun1296 Sure, glue from fishbones, glue from animal skin, hooves and/or bones, birch bark tar, there were a few. Wax was one of them, so it isn't that strange. (And yes, it does fit the narrative, the fact that wax melts. Rabbit skin glue weakens with water, so the story could also have been that he flew for to long, into a downpour.)
I know there isnt a comic about this, so there wont be a video either, but this raises a better question, and probably moreso the one the person was intending to ask, which is "what is the longest fraction of a second you could spend on/near the sun's surface and not have any longterm effects after you returned to earth?"
We can get a rough idea with the figures given in the video. The energy to the body is 10 microjoules per square centimetre per nanosecond. Per second that’s 10 kilojoules per square centimetre. If second degree burns start at 5j/cm^2 then using the above we know you’d reach that in 0.0005 seconds, or half a millisecond
I think the fact that he focuses on the eyeball is actually very relevant to this discussion. Our eyes are very sensitive so it's easy to imagine that you would be permanently blinded long before you warmed 1C
i graduated in 06 and had the "science, bitches" shirt as a college freshman .. i kinda feel extreme embarrassment pain looking back but also, it was a different time lol. but i was also a different person, and much less self conscious😭
If 1 nanosecond on the surface is too little, and at the core is too much, that suggests there must be a region inside the sun where spending 1 nanosecond is just right to warm up on a chilly day.
I don't believe that the 'layers' of the sun and their corresponding heat output is granular enough to find that zone? The way I think about it, the incremental shift in heat is far too vast when moving through the sun. But maybe I'm incredibly wrong. Someone correct me.. I'm interested to know if there's an answer to this question too
@@cryptosguns You could have just the front of your body in the next layer, but the back in the previous layer. You won't harm evenly, but you should be warmed.
@@cryptosguns I feel like it has to be granular due to conduction. When two objects (atoms) collide one transfers heat to the other until the temperature between the two balances out, naturally heat is lost the longer it goes as it still balancing heat with the object before it. A instantaneous durastic change in temperature would not be sustainable for very long at all unless there is a vacuum between them. I think don't quote me on that.
@@NashRespect No offense to you but I think you vastly underestimate just how big the sun is and how practically impossible that sounds. I know what you're trying to say tho, but I don't think the heat rises in increments of 1 ( we'll use fahrenheit because it's more precise and granular) for every X amount of distance moved relative to your size.
@@Adam814cool-retroI’d imagine that the amount of time to absorb any significant heat from the sun would be so much your receptors would just fucking fry before you’re able to feel warm. I don’t have any science to back this up; I wished xkcd covered this instead
If only the Game of Thrones show runners knew this before staging a S8 release date stunt by freezing the date in a giant block of ice and hitting it with torches during a live stream to melt it to reveal the date. Only it took like 6 hours and a massive amount of fuel, not the 5 minutes they thought
This is the reason why flamethrowing snow isn't a good replacement for shovelling snow. You begin by melting the ice, but after a thin liquid water film formed, you're boiling the water instead. Since boiling water takes orders of magnitude more energy than melting it, you're getting stuck rather quickly.
They always say Jupiters Red Eye is the size of earth so I always wondered: what would happen if you were to dip the earth in the clouds of Jupiter? For a second, for a minute, longer?
Not good. 1000 mph (1600 kph) winds, -200 C. I would not be sanguine about a second. A minute would probably scrub all life from the Earth. That's without analyzing the sudden influence of 3x Earth's gravity.
There are actually points in Jupiter's atmosphere where temperature & pressure are within habitable ranges for humans. The bigger issue is the fact that Jupiter has a reducing atmosphere, which would cause problems when mixed with Earth's oxidizing atmosphere.
@@AndyZach Also, the toxic composition, which varies with depth. I don't know if the molecular hydrogen would get a chance to react with Earth's oxygen. Helium is inert but would kill by suffocation. Then there are things like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide...
At 3:00 you mention heat = temperature x time. Where did you get that from? It depends on the thermal conductivity! Temperature is the average kinetic energy of particles, and Heat is the energy transferred. You can have a very high temperature plasma with little particles that wouldn't be able to transfer much heat
Fun fact! So there's no "reverse" word for "blink" because blinking is state-agnostic; whether you start with an open eye or a closes eye, the word "blink" specifically describes the action of toggling the state of openess of your eye twice, in succession -- so regardless of if the pattern is open->closed->open or closed->open->closed, it's still described as "a blink" because the term is specifically state-agnostic; so it's not that there's no reverse word for it (though, there isn't), it's more like "the concept doesn't care about the order." If we wanted to be fully pedantic, we'd actually need 2 new words to describe both types of blinking - one for the open->closed->open configuration and one for the closed->open->closed configuration.
no unfunny forced humor straight to the point adds onto the question even when he doesnt need to just out of curioisty consistently simply yet iconic artstyle pleasant voiceover god I love XKCD
I can't explain how much joy and nostalgia this video gave me I loved the book "what if" as a kid and the artistic design made me feel 9 again reading at lunch
@@RoundShades I feel like with animal testing what you actually get is an instant cooker, don't wanna wait for the oven to warm up? Don't wanna wait for the microwave to do its thing? Using this revolutionary new technology, you can teleport your food to the sun's core and have it back perfectly cooked in a nanosecond!
@@webpombo7765 Vegetables included may i suggest the surface of sun for better precision don't use this teleporter to place moon rock near the sun and shoot a portal on it okay? also don't put a portal on the moon and a portal on the surface of the earth trust me it's a bad idea to do that
Thanks for the suggestions, guys, but the requirement to have a sub-nanosecond charge-up time for the return trip is an extremely annoying technical limitation. And I can't NOT have it be teleportation to the center of the sun, that's my whole market niche. How else am I going to stand out from my competitors?
The way these are narrated, drawn and edited, especially around bits like 2:03 with all the text callouts, give me very pleasant warm reminders of the Hitchhiker's Guide graphic segments from the old BBC HHGTTG show! I don't know if that's at all on purpose, but it makes me very happy either way.
This question had been on my mind for years, and I only now discovered this video. Funny thing’s that I asked ChatGPT this question one time, and it said I would instantly be burnt alive. So, I started asking it the same question multiple times, but I reduced the time I would spend on the surface of the Sun each time (to see where it’d be perfect). Guess what? IT STILL SAID THE SAME THING! It got to the point where I reduced the time to a Gogol Plexth of a second, AND IT SAID THE SAME THING AGAIN! Seriously, no joke, Gogol Plexth of a second. That’s one followed by a Gogol zeroes, which has a hundred zeroes. Me: Hey, ChatGPT. What would happen if I teleported to the Sun for- ChatGPT: Gone. Finished. *Reduced to atoms.*
0:50 while 'glimpse' does not specifically refer to briefly opening the eyes, I think it fits well in place of your 'reverse-blink', as in 'During your glimpse of the screen', referring to a very brief instance of seeing.
I actually practice 'reverse blinking' whenever Im walking somewhere tired. I just walk with my eyes closed and flash myself my surroundings to make sure Im not walking into something.
answer to this question before watching the video: 1 nanosecond is not enough to warm even your skin, however radiation might cause some harm as particles will be able to move thru your body in 1ns. think of it as if you put food in oven at too high temp, what will happen? it will fry the outside completely, but inside is still raw. this is what happens when you try to warm / cook anything with high heat, it simply won't work as this heat has to go thru entire thing that you want to heat. microwave is different, since it only effects water/liquid molecules by vibrating them and vibration = heat. it's same thing. heat / pressure / vibration, all same if you can visualize it in your head how it works. you could cook food by using surface of sun by teleporting food there and back very fast, so it gets right amount of heat, but radiation is still issue, it can "stick" to materials aswell and carry over. like radioactive dust / particles.
@@hippo4262 not sure how you can accurately judge a simple comment like this as stolen. I mean, it is just as likely that multiple people thought of the same word. Sometimes repeating comments aren't because someone copied another comment, sometimes it is just because people can have similar thoughts while watching
I like "plink" (not my idea) or something from photography: Snap? Exposure? Shutter cycle? Flash? I don't know. I still like "plink". It's a portmanteau of peek and blink, a bit of an onomatopoeia, and it's like blink with an upsidedown "b".
contrary to what Randall said, something would happen. you earn MAJOR bragging rights for being the first to be on the sun. also, i agree with the reverse blink being called a peek. or an "un-blink".
@@ThePeriodicTableOfElements The fact that _even you_ can do it shows how common it has become. Obviously someone had to be first, but there is a difference between mounting an expedition to see if you can get there, and going there on a whim during something more important: Edmund Hillary was not the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest, he was the first to come back alive. And now it's a tourist destination. The first man to reach Antarctica was not Scott or Amundsen, but an unnamed sailor from one of their crews who helped moor the dinghy. And now it's a tourist destination, as well as housing a number of permanent research stations. The first three men on the moon were Neil Armstrong (the commander), Buzz Aldrin (who had worked out how to get there in the first place), and That Other Guy (who went there for work).
@@davidwuhrer6704 Good point. I do feel pretty bad for Michael Collins (That Other Guy) just for the fact that he doesn't really get much recognition for being with the Apollo 11 crew. That, and he was also all by himself in space for about 21 hours, lol.
There was a space movie back in 2007 or so called "Sunshine" that did a good job of conveying just how terrifying the Sun would be if it wasn't 93 million miles away.
I was discussing with a friend an interesting thought experiment after watching this: What if we could teleport a pizza really close to the sun and then back? Would there be an exact time-maybe a nanosecond or a bit more-that could cook the pizza perfectly without burning it? Would love to hear any insights from people into physics and similar.
I just saw the world "Blinkn't" in comments. I think it gave my eyes about the burn I would recieve if I blinkn't at the sun for 100 milliseconds from 100.000 km.
3:13 Narrator: "Visit briefly, and in little hops, and you can go anywhere." Cartoon cat: "Except a black hole". You can go to a black hole. You just can't come back.
you missed the most important question: where are you measuring the nanosecond? is there a teleporter on earth summoning you back after its clock measures 1 nanosecond, or is the clock on your person? how much of a difference would this make considering gravitational time dilation?
Good point. It is not that much: 1 ns on the earth would be 0.9999978776 ns on the sun's surface. Or in reverse, 1 ns measured on the sun would be measured as 1.0000021224 ns from earth.
You forgot about the gravitational force compressing your body. This is actually strong at the surface of the sun, but in the core you're dealing with the pressure bearing down on you instead.
Compression requires something to resist your acceleration due to gravity. The sun has no solid surface, and thus no such resistance. You'd be in freefall for that nanosecond and no gravitational effects would occur. Even if you were teleported onto a solid surface, one nanosecond is WAY too short a time for any meaningful compression to occur. You'd have to be on the surface of a neutron star or near a black hole for gravity to potentially matter during that span of time.
@@harbingerdawn The radiative pressure generated by the core of the sun is strong enough to balance his incredible weight so if we're talking about the center of the sun, you'll likely feel some pressure
@@Tiotic_Destiny adding the possibility to teleport out "allows" one to avoid being hit by some* of the (a very small % of) high energy short wavelength light that "would have" hit them deeper in because it penatrated, but actually won't because it did so right before teleportation which changes energy calculations "enough"... Basically, the addition of teleportation allows a loophole in how half-length is meant to fully encapsulate shielding - possibly why there was confusion about how the increase in energy per packet is associated with greater energy penetration but also with less penetration per photon. X-ray (machines)¹ are very high power but very low energy. Edit¹
It was mostly a joke though. What I pointed out is such a tiny effect it would likely run into limitations with respect to power density and how white hole exotic material physical limitations arise due to Einsteins theory of general relativity, the negative entropy and pair production that would be created by the event horizon of such power density due to the predictions of Stephen Hawking in his paper "black hole bombs" and of course the Schwartzchild solutions to Einsteins' equations for non rotating and non charged black (and in this case white) holes.
so... we just ignored the fact that surface of the sun emits not only visible light but also ultraviolet light, infrared khm khm actual heat, radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays plus "atmosphere" is a literally hot plasma ?
I remember being told when I was small that the surface of the sun was actually hotter than the interior. That never made sense to me, and I wonder where that bit of misinformation came from.
@@SeventhSwell That sounds right, especially with little kids maybe not knowing what the corona means. I could see corona/surface getting mixed up with the surface/inside. Heck, maybe I'm just the one that confused it in memory.
"Icarus. His wings didn't melt because he felw too close to the Sun, they melted because he spent too much time there" sounds like a deep philosophical quote
I think intensity comes into play, though. The joules don't equally spread across the body nor have time to disperse. I feel like those small amount of joules will be dispersed across a very thin layer of cells, enough to completely kill them, but I think a sun tan won't form, as the body can easily replace the layers of cells that thin quick enough that you might not notice. Maybe some short term itching. As for the retinas, it might permanently damage them still. The individual cells composing the retina will be killed at the outermost layer. Maybe not enough that the retina couldn't heal, but I'm not too sure, nor have the patience atm to calculate heat dispersal between cells at such short timespans etc... lol. But it's an interesting thought experiment. Every second on Earth, if you're staring directly into the sun, your retinas are absorbing 6.8 milliwatts of energy, or 6.8 picojoules of energy every nanosecond. The intensity then increases by 150,000x for a single nanosecond when teleported, and then you come back to earth. Basically, you'll absorb the same amount of energy as staring into the sun for about 1/6th of a millisecond. And that's 150,000x faster heat dispersal as it's at 150,000x lower intensity, that the cells can spread the heat to one another. That makes sense to me, but I am not a physicist.
I'm sad to admit that I have done the thing at 1:37. But with a big butane torch that fell or swung (can't quite remember) across my arm for just an instant. It left a "nice" burn trail on my forearm that isn't fully gone still, after a few months. Nothing like sweeping your finger through a candle flame, an order or magnitude or so worse I imagine. I second the notion, Don't Do That!
one question: what if we have an 2D object in our world, but with something to hold this object that it wouldn't be bad to use it somehow now, what if we use that object as an knife, What would happen if we tried to cut something, how much would we be able to cut? But, with one knife being unbreakable, and the other not
so if a nanosecond on the surface is useless, and a nanosecond in the core is deadly, there’s theoretically the perfect spot somewhere in the sun where you’d get warmed perfectly
Let’s assume that the temperature of the Sun is represented by a continuous function T(r), with T being temperature in K and r being the distance from the center in meters. Let Tp be the perfect temperature to warm a person without cooking them and R be the radius of the Sun. Given T(R) < Tp and T(0) > Tp, by the Intermediate Value Theorem there must be at least one value of r such that T(r) = Tp. QED Actually something cool would be to take this further to a function T(r, theta, phi) and construct a solid where T is within an acceptable range of Tp. This also wouldn’t require the assumption of spherical distribution of heat in the Sun. If you 3D printed that object I feel like it would be something that came in VSauce’s curiosity box lol.
3:00 Ok, I understand that “Heat = Temperature * Time” is conceptually helpful and vague on purpose, but it’s not quite right, the power of the radiation emitted is proportional to the *fourth power* of temperature
I think heat = temperature * time is referring to conductive heat according to newton's heat law: d(temp)/d(time) = -k*(temp difference) And time*d(temp)/d(time) ~= change in temp, which is proprtiortional to heat.
@@seanweb9051 Oh I feel dumb for not realizing that, still notable that radiation is relevant here (I think randall didnt show a conductive heat calculation at all, maybe its negligible here)
0:50 There are lots of comments saying "knilb", a few that suggest "peek" and even one that suggests "plink" (my favorite so far). The action, however; sounds a lot like what the shutter does in a camera. Maybe we can look to photography for an appropriate word: An exposure? A flash? A snap? A shutter cycle? I'm not a photographer...
how about.. "plick"? using a shorter vowel (i know, American dialects don't have any phonemically long vowels anymore and other English dialects only barely but bear with me) to signify that it's a short time (as opposed to a peek which isn't necessarily as constraint)
I wrote down my intuition before watching the video, and it looks to have been pretty much right: My off-the-cuff guess would be that you’d be fine. A nanosecond is a really _really_ short time! However, core vs. surface may make some difference. The core is _waaay_ hotter, and if I remember correctly, the surface is not all that dense, so it would be very ineffective at transferring heat to you, no matter how hot it is. [Afterward/hindsught me adds, “clearly _radiative_ heat transfer would be a _far bigger_ problem than _conductive_ .] 10ms in the core though: You’d be pretty much vaporized.
The german word "Augenblick" (literally "an eye's look") means 'moment', 'instant' or 'rigt now'. Since it describes the time between two blinks, the word is a good candidate for 'reverse-blink'
Okay but since 1 nanosecond does nothing, I was waiting to learn how much time it would take on the surface just for a feeling of brief warmth
Probably around 100 nanoseconds, but no more than 0.01 milliseconds
Edit: Holy Moly! That’s the most likes I got, wow.
Right, this is what I was hoping to find here
Just turn off your retina and stay longer, u could block the light by facing away and covering your eyes because, yk, it's the sun but if you stayed for longer than 50 nanoseconds some light should be enough to warm you. I wish he talked about if the light would penetrate through your skin when your eyes are closed like x rays from nukes because going blind would be my concern considering that even looking at the sun from here can blind you.
I'm guessing any amount of time on the surface of the sun that would be enough to heat you up would also be enough to cause irreparable damage to your DNA due to ionizing radiation.
Exactly, felt like the obvious conclusion to the video
Visited the sun for a nanosecond. Didn't feel much heat; don't understand what the big deal is. One star.
HAH, I see what you did there 😆
Alpha Centauri is so much better, 3 stars.
@@JannPoo Eh, I tried visiting Alpha Centauri, but I just found a bobcat instead
I know a cat named Bob. Is that the same thing?@@justineberlein5916
Booooooo🍅🍅🍅🍅
*short version*
Surface of the sun: okay
Inside the sun: cooked
So the question is, how deep do you need to be inside the sun for 1 nanosecond to get safely warmed up.
👨🍳🍳🥘⏲️🍚
cooked: 😊
cooked: 💀
There's also the solar corona, which surrounds the Sun and reaches a million degrees.
Surface of the sun: okay
Inside/outside the Sun: not okay
wait, something doesnt add up. so if 1 second with a lighter is 500.000 times more energy than a nanosecond on the sun, and the center of the sun is 167 times hotter than the surface (1 million to 6 thousand degrees) then that would still be only a third of the energy of the lighter right?
so how can you say you get over a million times too much energy there?
I own a book with the worst places to travel to and for some reason the middle of the sun is not listed anywhere in the book. They should make a second version where they include it
It probably only lists places that airlines fly to. I don't think any airline offers trips to the Sun.
@@renakunisakiYET
I think you meant "a nanosecond version".
I think middle of neutron star might be worse. Just very slightly.
@@renakunisaki not with that attitude
The surface is too cold, the core is too hot..
Clearly there is a perfect depth where, if there for only a nanosecond, you were warmed to a nice and toasty, say, 30c.
Probably not. Your skin would burn and experience high amounts of radiation before getting anywhere near useful amounts of energy absorbed to your body.
Sunhole principle
Too cold, then too hot. Just like my shower
30C sounds infernal. Greetings from Finland.
@@justskip4595 everything up to 30C is bearable, but I prefer 25-27C (depending how much clothes I have on).
but in sauna I can withstand up to 120C (but I prefer 80-100C),
and I can take trashses outside on just t-shirt even at -20C no problem
The opposite of a "blink" is a "glimpse" I would argue.
A peek seems more fitting. Glimpse feels much longer
@@GG-wk2po i disagree, i think a peek is longer than a glimpse
Glimpse you already have your eyes open
@@ilexdiapason Yea I agree that a peek feels longer. To me if I say I caught a glimpse of something it would mean I saw it so briefly that I registered that I saw something but I didn't see it long enough to gather that much information. If I say I caught a peek at something I would mean I saw it briefly but for long enough to gather a little bit of information.
Like I would say "I caught a glimpse of something behind the curtain" vs "I got/took a peek behind the curtain and saw (whatever)" and to me a peek is also less about the duration and more about the visibility.
For instance I would say you can take a peek through a keyhole and look around at what is visible but if I'm looking through that keyhole and something moves super fast right in front of the hole and I barely see it, I would say I peeked through the keyhole and caught a glimpse of something moving, with the peeking being longer while the glimpse would be very brief. That's just how I use those words though.
what about peep
My favorite quote from Randall "Ive always seen Icarus as more of a lesson of using wax as an adhesive, rather than one of hubris"
Daedalus escaped.
Why is nobody ever talking about that?
Yeah, but in those ancient times, wax _was_ one of the the adhesives of choice.
@@Hydrazine1000 Nah, in ancient times we had adhesive from fishbones
@@mathfun1296 Sure, glue from fishbones, glue from animal skin, hooves and/or bones, birch bark tar, there were a few. Wax was one of them, so it isn't that strange.
(And yes, it does fit the narrative, the fact that wax melts. Rabbit skin glue weakens with water, so the story could also have been that he flew for to long, into a downpour.)
Randall has no reading comprehension skills.
I'd maybe call that reverse blink a peek.
New SI unit just dropped.
Blinkn't
It's a Delink
A glimpse
Or maybe a knilb
“Don’t spend a nanosecond inside the sun” try and stop me stickman
And what about Plank time 10^-43 s
I know there isnt a comic about this, so there wont be a video either, but this raises a better question, and probably moreso the one the person was intending to ask, which is "what is the longest fraction of a second you could spend on/near the sun's surface and not have any longterm effects after you returned to earth?"
Replying because I had the exact same question
We can get a rough idea with the figures given in the video. The energy to the body is 10 microjoules per square centimetre per nanosecond. Per second that’s 10 kilojoules per square centimetre.
If second degree burns start at 5j/cm^2 then using the above we know you’d reach that in 0.0005 seconds, or half a millisecond
You can submit questions to him via email, I believe the address is on the what if site
Id say 10^-9 or 10^-8
I think the fact that he focuses on the eyeball is actually very relevant to this discussion. Our eyes are very sensitive so it's easy to imagine that you would be permanently blinded long before you warmed 1C
It's very easy. Just go at night, when the Sun is cooler!
💀😭
Lmao
someone is going to read that and not understand its a joke lmao
LOL(this is a joke right?)
there is no sun at night. you'd just teleport into empty space.
0:51 so you're telling me you've never heard of a knilb
Yes
That’s exactly what I’m saying
It would be pronounced as c-null-b to piss everyone off
“Don’t spend a nanosecond inside the sun” is one of the most XKCD things ever written.
Truly one of the statements ever.
Spend 2 nanosecond or even 3 as per your liking and make sure to like and subscribe the channel before your visit.
Aw, was hoping the second half of the video would cover “how many nanoseconds would it take to warm up”
You would never "warm up". The rest of your body will still be cold while your skin burns away. The heat in your body would not dissipate fast enough.
xkcd, you were my life in highschool. I looked forward to a new comic all the time. I graduated in '09.
i graduated in 06 and had the "science, bitches" shirt as a college freshman .. i kinda feel extreme embarrassment pain looking back but also, it was a different time lol. but i was also a different person, and much less self conscious😭
dam unc
i wush I was in your highschool so I could show and share my lunch
If 1 nanosecond on the surface is too little, and at the core is too much, that suggests there must be a region inside the sun where spending 1 nanosecond is just right to warm up on a chilly day.
I don't believe that the 'layers' of the sun and their corresponding heat output is granular enough to find that zone? The way I think about it, the incremental shift in heat is far too vast when moving through the sun. But maybe I'm incredibly wrong. Someone correct me.. I'm interested to know if there's an answer to this question too
@@cryptosguns You could have just the front of your body in the next layer, but the back in the previous layer.
You won't harm evenly, but you should be warmed.
@@cryptosguns I feel like it has to be granular due to conduction. When two objects (atoms) collide one transfers heat to the other until the temperature between the two balances out, naturally heat is lost the longer it goes as it still balancing heat with the object before it. A instantaneous durastic change in temperature would not be sustainable for very long at all unless there is a vacuum between them. I think don't quote me on that.
@@NashRespect No offense to you but I think you vastly underestimate just how big the sun is and how practically impossible that sounds.
I know what you're trying to say tho, but I don't think the heat rises in increments of 1 ( we'll use fahrenheit because it's more precise and granular) for every X amount of distance moved relative to your size.
smart ngl
"Looking I realize I started this sentence with 'The good news'. Not sure why I did that."
Lmao I love you Randall
At least you'll be dead from x-rays before you feel any pain from burning.
2:44 “don’t spend a nanosecond inside the sun” fuck, there go my weekend plans
Now the question is how deep you'd have to go to warm yourself perfectly.
Not possible. You know how you can get meat that is burned on the outside and frozen on the inside?
@@davidwuhrer6704 that isnt what he meant
Found stone bone in the wild
we must find the Goldilocks zone lol
@@Adam814cool-retroI’d imagine that the amount of time to absorb any significant heat from the sun would be so much your receptors would just fucking fry before you’re able to feel warm. I don’t have any science to back this up; I wished xkcd covered this instead
If only the Game of Thrones show runners knew this before staging a S8 release date stunt by freezing the date in a giant block of ice and hitting it with torches during a live stream to melt it to reveal the date. Only it took like 6 hours and a massive amount of fuel, not the 5 minutes they thought
"Like I'll ever need math in real life. I'm going into showbiz."
So, just a live trickle?
This is the reason why flamethrowing snow isn't a good replacement for shovelling snow.
You begin by melting the ice, but after a thin liquid water film formed, you're boiling the water instead. Since boiling water takes orders of magnitude more energy than melting it, you're getting stuck rather quickly.
@@Thraim.Soviet engineers mounting old jet engines to trucks to melt ice and snow off runways: hold my vodka
Yep.. there's a really good reason why we use water to put out fires.
2:44 aww man there goes my plans for the week
They always say Jupiters Red Eye is the size of earth so I always wondered: what would happen if you were to dip the earth in the clouds of Jupiter? For a second, for a minute, longer?
Not good. 1000 mph (1600 kph) winds, -200 C. I would not be sanguine about a second. A minute would probably scrub all life from the Earth. That's without analyzing the sudden influence of 3x Earth's gravity.
calamity
obviously the earth would become a candied apple
There are actually points in Jupiter's atmosphere where temperature & pressure are within habitable ranges for humans. The bigger issue is the fact that Jupiter has a reducing atmosphere, which would cause problems when mixed with Earth's oxidizing atmosphere.
@@AndyZach Also, the toxic composition, which varies with depth. I don't know if the molecular hydrogen would get a chance to react with Earth's oxygen. Helium is inert but would kill by suffocation. Then there are things like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide...
2:34 Don’t spend a nanosecond inside the Sun….got it
No problem
2:44***
I was about to comment that haha
Telling me not to do something just makes me want to do it more
There go my weekend plans :(
3:06 Wow, that's.. so philosophic :O (Cool Vid. ty~ ✨)
2:44 thanks for the advice
No problem
Don’t spend a nanosecond inside the sun; spend multiple nanoseconds.
"Visit briefly, in little hops, and you can go anywhere." Some solid family dinner advice there.
In the lightning vedio how did all the streams of lightning not repel each other so much that it spreads or something like that
@@Aarush.A.S Because they felt like they had to prove themselfs
At 3:00 you mention heat = temperature x time. Where did you get that from? It depends on the thermal conductivity! Temperature is the average kinetic energy of particles, and Heat is the energy transferred. You can have a very high temperature plasma with little particles that wouldn't be able to transfer much heat
Fun fact! So there's no "reverse" word for "blink" because blinking is state-agnostic; whether you start with an open eye or a closes eye, the word "blink" specifically describes the action of toggling the state of openess of your eye twice, in succession -- so regardless of if the pattern is open->closed->open or closed->open->closed, it's still described as "a blink" because the term is specifically state-agnostic; so it's not that there's no reverse word for it (though, there isn't), it's more like "the concept doesn't care about the order." If we wanted to be fully pedantic, we'd actually need 2 new words to describe both types of blinking - one for the open->closed->open configuration and one for the closed->open->closed configuration.
Nerd 🤓🤓
OCO and COC. I better be credited when they get in dictionary.
I feel like this state-agnosticism requires a citation
@@Fishy8192 people when people are smart: 😡😡
@@OreoIceCream. god i hate Twitter
the word for blink but in reverse is knilb
Pronounced nilb. Sorry I don’t know the ipa but
@@Slapbattler666 sounds good
I thought it was revblinkerse
An unblink
@@ImSquiggs A blunk?
0:51 yes, it's called a "glimpse"
3:15 foreshadowing?
I sure hope so! :D
Foreshadowing of what?
@@akashdeb5201the cat saying „expect a black hole“ which made me think that XKCD might publish smtg Black Hole related
@@matt_v_photo the cat said except not expect
meow
1:00 its called a glimps
Or a flash
Glimpse
Turning your head, and turning it back is also a glimpse, so too broad
👏👏👏
i love this comment
Man... Why did it have to take me so long to find this awesome channel
no unfunny forced humor
straight to the point
adds onto the question even when he doesnt need to just out of curioisty
consistently simply yet iconic artstyle
pleasant voiceover
god I love XKCD
3:28 ... except the center of the sun, right?
Just do a littler hop than a femtosecond
I mean... you can go there for a nanosecond... just only once...
Couldn't you still visit a black hole? You're teleporting at FTL after all
You can't stop me
@@VikingTeddy I think the honest answer would be - we don't know. Nobody tried, we don't really know know what's there.
I can't explain how much joy and nostalgia this video gave me I loved the book "what if" as a kid and the artistic design made me feel 9 again reading at lunch
0:50 The word "peep" does nicely
I thought of the obvious but silly "knilb".
I prefer "antiblink".
What about "glimpse"?
Strobe.
Flash
Me looking up from my "get-a-tan-in-the-center-of-the-sun teleporter project":
"Well dang it."
Just make it faster or change the coordinates slightly. Maybe extend animal testing for a little while longer on the down low.
@@RoundShades I feel like with animal testing what you actually get is an instant cooker, don't wanna wait for the oven to warm up? Don't wanna wait for the microwave to do its thing? Using this revolutionary new technology, you can teleport your food to the sun's core and have it back perfectly cooked in a nanosecond!
@@webpombo7765 Vegetables included
may i suggest the surface of sun for better precision
don't use this teleporter to place moon rock near the sun and shoot a portal on it okay?
also don't put a portal on the moon and a portal on the surface of the earth
trust me it's a bad idea to do that
You can get the tan. But you might also get crispy before you get brown...
Thanks for the suggestions, guys, but the requirement to have a sub-nanosecond charge-up time for the return trip is an extremely annoying technical limitation. And I can't NOT have it be teleportation to the center of the sun, that's my whole market niche. How else am I going to stand out from my competitors?
I hope you folks appreciate the gravity of this topic.
It's enlightening
The way these are narrated, drawn and edited, especially around bits like 2:03 with all the text callouts, give me very pleasant warm reminders of the Hitchhiker's Guide graphic segments from the old BBC HHGTTG show! I don't know if that's at all on purpose, but it makes me very happy either way.
I would need some extra context, where can I find?
01:53 Oh no. Oh nononono. I don't know why, but you just created an irrational fear of accidentaly getting teleported into the sun in me.
Your nerves would probably burn before youd feel anything tbh
@@OplifeV2 true
cringe
@@OplifeV2I still don't want that to happen
@@ryko1478 😭
okay but why is this so entertaining i can watch these all day😭😭
That's literally the most dumb and obscure question I ever asked myself and some guy made a video about it.
I feel understood.
"Visit briefly, in little hops, and you can go anywhere" - ah the PWM travelling.
2:44 was thinking of doing just that. Thanks for the warning!
0:51 “Glimpse” I think would fit just fine
Shutter makes more sense
grabby grabby
Apparently it also takes a nanosecond for the bots to spam the comment section.
This question had been on my mind for years, and I only now discovered this video. Funny thing’s that I asked ChatGPT this question one time, and it said I would instantly be burnt alive. So, I started asking it the same question multiple times, but I reduced the time I would spend on the surface of the Sun each time (to see where it’d be perfect).
Guess what? IT STILL SAID THE SAME THING! It got to the point where I reduced the time to a Gogol Plexth of a second, AND IT SAID THE SAME THING AGAIN! Seriously, no joke, Gogol Plexth of a second. That’s one followed by a Gogol zeroes, which has a hundred zeroes.
Me: Hey, ChatGPT. What would happen if I teleported to the Sun for-
ChatGPT: Gone. Finished. *Reduced to atoms.*
0:50 while 'glimpse' does not specifically refer to briefly opening the eyes, I think it fits well in place of your 'reverse-blink', as in 'During your glimpse of the screen', referring to a very brief instance of seeing.
He could’ve also said to take a peek.
peek ?
@@joshuasims5421 y’know, peek, like as in to quickly take a look at something. Not to be confused with peak, the top of a mountain.
I actually practice 'reverse blinking' whenever Im walking somewhere tired. I just walk with my eyes closed and flash myself my surroundings to make sure Im not walking into something.
Please don't drive a car that way! 😁
@@TonyHammitt I'm a European dude :D Im in my 30s and never had a driver's license :D
@@MastaDJMax americans in shock you don't need a car to live and be independent
I also do that. Thought I was alone. 😮
@@theeyeofomnipotent all I need is my trusty bicycle that costed £300 :)
answer to this question before watching the video: 1 nanosecond is not enough to warm even your skin, however radiation might cause some harm as particles will be able to move thru your body in 1ns.
think of it as if you put food in oven at too high temp, what will happen? it will fry the outside completely, but inside is still raw. this is what happens when you try to warm / cook anything with high heat, it simply won't work as this heat has to go thru entire thing that you want to heat.
microwave is different, since it only effects water/liquid molecules by vibrating them and vibration = heat. it's same thing. heat / pressure / vibration, all same if you can visualize it in your head how it works.
you could cook food by using surface of sun by teleporting food there and back very fast, so it gets right amount of heat, but radiation is still issue, it can "stick" to materials aswell and carry over. like radioactive dust / particles.
0:50 Just so you know a reverse blink could be called a "peek"
Stolen but ok
@@hippo4262 not sure how you can accurately judge a simple comment like this as stolen. I mean, it is just as likely that multiple people thought of the same word.
Sometimes repeating comments aren't because someone copied another comment, sometimes it is just because people can have similar thoughts while watching
I like "plink" (not my idea) or something from photography:
Snap? Exposure? Shutter cycle? Flash?
I don't know. I still like "plink". It's a portmanteau of peek and blink, a bit of an onomatopoeia, and it's like blink with an upsidedown "b".
contrary to what Randall said, something would happen. you earn MAJOR bragging rights for being the first to be on the sun.
also, i agree with the reverse blink being called a peek. or an "un-blink".
Bragging rights? If you can do it, it has been done before.
@@davidwuhrer6704 yes and no.
@@davidwuhrer6704 If someone has set an insane world record in a game, obviously that same exact incredibly low WR time has been reached before!
@@ThePeriodicTableOfElements The fact that _even you_ can do it shows how common it has become.
Obviously someone had to be first, but there is a difference between mounting an expedition to see if you can get there, and going there on a whim during something more important:
Edmund Hillary was not the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest, he was the first to come back alive. And now it's a tourist destination.
The first man to reach Antarctica was not Scott or Amundsen, but an unnamed sailor from one of their crews who helped moor the dinghy. And now it's a tourist destination, as well as housing a number of permanent research stations.
The first three men on the moon were Neil Armstrong (the commander), Buzz Aldrin (who had worked out how to get there in the first place), and That Other Guy (who went there for work).
@@davidwuhrer6704 Good point. I do feel pretty bad for Michael Collins (That Other Guy) just for the fact that he doesn't really get much recognition for being with the Apollo 11 crew. That, and he was also all by himself in space for about 21 hours, lol.
0:00 This is the most relatable paragraph I’ve ever read. I’ve always thought the exact same thing
I don't think you'd see a flash of light, a bright day in the snow is way brighter than a computer monitor.
0:40 POV: Everyone just blinked at their screen.
No
Yes
Do you know what POV means lol?
@@xvgm24 their POV is omniscient lol
I didn't, at least not consciously and not such that I remember it.
"What's your philosophy on drugs?"
"Visit briefly, in little hops, and you can go anywhere"
2:23 I don’t think that’s good news
It's insane how intense the sun is
It's intense how insane the sun is (:
@@thijsv948 It's tense how in the sun this video is 🙃
@@Takyodor2 It's sun how insane the intense is.
And that's not even close to a really hot or big one compared to what there is/was in space.
There was a space movie back in 2007 or so called "Sunshine" that did a good job of conveying just how terrifying the Sun would be if it wasn't 93 million miles away.
I was discussing with a friend an interesting thought experiment after watching this: What if we could teleport a pizza really close to the sun and then back? Would there be an exact time-maybe a nanosecond or a bit more-that could cook the pizza perfectly without burning it? Would love to hear any insights from people into physics and similar.
I just saw the world "Blinkn't" in comments.
I think it gave my eyes about the burn I would recieve if I blinkn't at the sun for 100 milliseconds from 100.000 km.
3:13 Narrator: "Visit briefly, and in little hops, and you can go anywhere."
Cartoon cat: "Except a black hole".
You can go to a black hole. You just can't come back.
it was talking about saftey, not just that sentence out of context.
As staying isn't safe, it's correct.
@@KeithElliott-zd8cx Good point. You're right.
Just come out a white hole
I read your book and thank god you have a youtube channel, i was wondering where i could get more of these
It might be a bit toasty
Edit: i was wrong
you missed the most important question: where are you measuring the nanosecond? is there a teleporter on earth summoning you back after its clock measures 1 nanosecond, or is the clock on your person? how much of a difference would this make considering gravitational time dilation?
Good point. It is not that much: 1 ns on the earth would be 0.9999978776 ns on the sun's surface. Or in reverse, 1 ns measured on the sun would be measured as 1.0000021224 ns from earth.
The question i've been wondering all my life has finally been answered. Thank you 🙏
You forgot about the gravitational force compressing your body. This is actually strong at the surface of the sun, but in the core you're dealing with the pressure bearing down on you instead.
gravity was proven to be a wave, so obviously the wave is less fast than the speed of light, so probably not much touches you, but it would touch
Compression requires something to resist your acceleration due to gravity. The sun has no solid surface, and thus no such resistance. You'd be in freefall for that nanosecond and no gravitational effects would occur. Even if you were teleported onto a solid surface, one nanosecond is WAY too short a time for any meaningful compression to occur. You'd have to be on the surface of a neutron star or near a black hole for gravity to potentially matter during that span of time.
It would probably be negligible
Same thing - gravity pressure on the bod is time relative.
@@harbingerdawn The radiative pressure generated by the core of the sun is strong enough to balance his incredible weight so if we're talking about the center of the sun, you'll likely feel some pressure
2:22 lmao. If the X-rays penetrate for too long/too far before you teleport out they might not interact in time. Take that half-length absolutists.
what?
I was thinking massive cancer the whole time but it seems like you get completely destroyed so no problem
@@Tiotic_Destiny adding the possibility to teleport out "allows" one to avoid being hit by some* of the (a very small % of) high energy short wavelength light that "would have" hit them deeper in because it penatrated, but actually won't because it did so right before teleportation which changes energy calculations "enough"...
Basically, the addition of teleportation allows a loophole in how half-length is meant to fully encapsulate shielding - possibly why there was confusion about how the increase in energy per packet is associated with greater energy penetration but also with less penetration per photon. X-ray (machines)¹ are very high power but very low energy.
Edit¹
It was mostly a joke though. What I pointed out is such a tiny effect it would likely run into limitations with respect to power density and how white hole exotic material physical limitations arise due to Einsteins theory of general relativity, the negative entropy and pair production that would be created by the event horizon of such power density due to the predictions of Stephen Hawking in his paper "black hole bombs" and of course the Schwartzchild solutions to Einsteins' equations for non rotating and non charged black (and in this case white) holes.
so... we just ignored the fact that surface of the sun emits not only visible light but also ultraviolet light, infrared khm khm actual heat, radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays plus "atmosphere" is a literally hot plasma ?
they just do enough to earn money on ads
I remember being told when I was small that the surface of the sun was actually hotter than the interior. That never made sense to me, and I wonder where that bit of misinformation came from.
Could it have been about the corona vs. the surface? Because the corona is much hotter than the surface.
@@SeventhSwell That sounds right, especially with little kids maybe not knowing what the corona means. I could see corona/surface getting mixed up with the surface/inside. Heck, maybe I'm just the one that confused it in memory.
Okay but the absolute genius of having the cat meow to draw our eyes to the exception
"Icarus. His wings didn't melt because he felw too close to the Sun, they melted because he spent too much time there" sounds like a deep philosophical quote
That's a relief. I'll stop worrying about this happening to me.
I think intensity comes into play, though. The joules don't equally spread across the body nor have time to disperse. I feel like those small amount of joules will be dispersed across a very thin layer of cells, enough to completely kill them, but I think a sun tan won't form, as the body can easily replace the layers of cells that thin quick enough that you might not notice. Maybe some short term itching. As for the retinas, it might permanently damage them still. The individual cells composing the retina will be killed at the outermost layer. Maybe not enough that the retina couldn't heal, but I'm not too sure, nor have the patience atm to calculate heat dispersal between cells at such short timespans etc... lol. But it's an interesting thought experiment.
Every second on Earth, if you're staring directly into the sun, your retinas are absorbing 6.8 milliwatts of energy, or 6.8 picojoules of energy every nanosecond. The intensity then increases by 150,000x for a single nanosecond when teleported, and then you come back to earth.
Basically, you'll absorb the same amount of energy as staring into the sun for about 1/6th of a millisecond. And that's 150,000x faster heat dispersal as it's at 150,000x lower intensity, that the cells can spread the heat to one another.
That makes sense to me, but I am not a physicist.
This is actually a really effect way of putting in perspective the difference in temperature of the surface of the sun and inside of it
I'm sad to admit that I have done the thing at 1:37.
But with a big butane torch that fell or swung (can't quite remember) across my arm for just an instant.
It left a "nice" burn trail on my forearm that isn't fully gone still, after a few months.
Nothing like sweeping your finger through a candle flame, an order or magnitude or so worse I imagine.
I second the notion, Don't Do That!
Babe wake up those funny stickmen are telling me funny facts again 🗣️🔥💯🥶
one question: what if we have an 2D object in our world, but with something to hold this object that it wouldn't be bad to use it somehow
now, what if we use that object as an knife, What would happen if we tried to cut something, how much would we be able to cut? But, with one knife being unbreakable, and the other not
so if a nanosecond on the surface is useless, and a nanosecond in the core is deadly, there’s theoretically the perfect spot somewhere in the sun where you’d get warmed perfectly
Let’s assume that the temperature of the Sun is represented by a continuous function T(r), with T being temperature in K and r being the distance from the center in meters. Let Tp be the perfect temperature to warm a person without cooking them and R be the radius of the Sun. Given T(R) < Tp and T(0) > Tp, by the Intermediate Value Theorem there must be at least one value of r such that T(r) = Tp. QED
Actually something cool would be to take this further to a function T(r, theta, phi) and construct a solid where T is within an acceptable range of Tp. This also wouldn’t require the assumption of spherical distribution of heat in the Sun. If you 3D printed that object I feel like it would be something that came in VSauce’s curiosity box lol.
1:58 The funny phrase!! :D
The opposite of a blink is obviously a knilb
How long would it take at the suns surface to feel warm, but not incinerated?
10,000 nanoseconds?
At the altitudes Icarus flew, his wax was more likely to freeze than melt...
Now what happens if you teleport into the elephant's foot room of Chernoblyl for a nanosecond?
insane how old this one is, that one of the panels involves an iphone from 10 generations ago...
3:00 Ok, I understand that “Heat = Temperature * Time” is conceptually helpful and vague on purpose, but it’s not quite right, the power of the radiation emitted is proportional to the *fourth power* of temperature
I think heat = temperature * time is referring to conductive heat according to newton's heat law:
d(temp)/d(time) = -k*(temp difference)
And time*d(temp)/d(time) ~= change in temp, which is proprtiortional to heat.
@@seanweb9051 Oh I feel dumb for not realizing that, still notable that radiation is relevant here (I think randall didnt show a conductive heat calculation at all, maybe its negligible here)
i work at a used book store and yours floats through every once in awhile lol really cool vids:)
But what about the amount of radiation you'd absorb in a nanosecond? The effects of the suns gravity?
You would be travelling faster than the speed of light, so there would be no gravity.
Isn't a reverse blink a glimpse?
Been reading the comic for years and years, first time hearing Randall's voice.
0:50 There are lots of comments saying "knilb", a few that suggest "peek" and even one that suggests "plink" (my favorite so far). The action, however; sounds a lot like what the shutter does in a camera.
Maybe we can look to photography for an appropriate word: An exposure? A flash? A snap? A shutter cycle? I'm not a photographer...
I bet the Germans already have a word for it.
Edit: It's "Augenblick"
It's called a shutter, but its job is to open...
how about.. "plick"? using a shorter vowel (i know, American dialects don't have any phonemically long vowels anymore and other English dialects only barely but bear with me) to signify that it's a short time (as opposed to a peek which isn't necessarily as constraint)
knilb is the only good one lol
Plink, you say...
2:00 Icarus promoting the teleporter .
I wrote down my intuition before watching the video, and it looks to have been pretty much right:
My off-the-cuff guess would be that you’d be fine. A nanosecond is a really _really_ short time!
However, core vs. surface may make some difference. The core is _waaay_ hotter, and if I remember correctly, the surface is not all that dense, so it would be very ineffective at transferring heat to you, no matter how hot it is. [Afterward/hindsught me adds, “clearly _radiative_ heat transfer would be a _far bigger_ problem than _conductive_ .]
10ms in the core though: You’d be pretty much vaporized.
The meow at the end got me
The reverse of blink knilb.
Yeah the k is silent
So what you’re saying is -
Everytime we’re blinded by something, there’s a chance we’re teleporting to the sun and back without even knowing it :0
That one unemployed friend on a Wednesday:
2:01 nukes top 5
W channel
This is what UA-cam is about. Man had question, other man made short concise video to answer. Society is healing.
The german word "Augenblick" (literally "an eye's look") means 'moment', 'instant' or 'rigt now'.
Since it describes the time between two blinks, the word is a good candidate for 'reverse-blink'