What would a magnitude 15 earthquake be like?
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 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/
Since we usually hear about earthquakes with ratings somewhere between 3 and 9, a lot of people probably think of 10 as the top of the scale and 0 as the bottom. In fact, there is no top or bottom to the scale!
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.
©2023 xkcd, inc.
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A typical keyboard press may be Magnitude -5 or -6, but an annoying co-worker of mine regularly smashes that keyboard at Magnitude -2.
wow, they got all the way up to a cat falling of a dresser. Except with the downside that there is no cat
Lol 😆😆
damn
😂I am sorry for you, but I also love your description!😂
Bwahahahah,
My dad regularly typed at that magnitude,
We could hear the keyboard "taps" from downstairs on the opposite side of the house 🤣
We should go all-out and have complex earthquakes with measurements like 3 + 2i. Maybe that would bring back old TV shows, or something.
it would have to release a complex amount of energy. I'm not sure what a complex amount of energy would look like.
@@globalincident694 Perhaps like in electrodynamics and electrostatics, when electrical current can have a complex amplitude, when the imaginary part describes for example a phase shift.
The quake shifts it's vibrations into the past, altering events in the process. Like a butterfly effect, but in reverse.
ylfrettub effect@@QwixLF
@@globalincident694Probably we solve quantum physics over the course of this
After dealing with many world disrupting articles, it IS nice to think about the pressures of a dust mote smacking into a table
That table had it coming
@@10Neon my toes, hips, back of my head, front of my head (when I was a child), those times you lift you arm and don't estimate the distance between you and the table then smack your hand on its way up, all agree with you.
@@ND_R Maybe it's your desk saying fuck you for all the millions of times dust particles have hit it because you are too lazy to vacuum your room.
@@ND_R my friend who has a basically indestructible hand that he used to basically punch hard wooden tables has hit their hand with a table by moving it up and he said its the only thing that actually made him feel a lot of pain
@@Nicomv-eu3pd sounds like automutilation lmao
If I saw an entire football team charge headfirst into my neighbor's house, I'd be stuck wondering what on earth they did to make them so angry
I'd just assume it was some weird prank... or some viral Internet Challenge (like that thing where people would smash through fences that was a thing in the 00s)
The "Entire Football Team Running into a House" viral craze =P
ua-cam.com/video/CWP1xLJ6s-A/v-deo.htmlsi=wk47b5zgXFjapvvp
"I was like damn! What did they do to make them that mad?"
the NFL would probably use as marketing stunt
If they charged my neighbor’s windmill, I might understand.
Fun fact. A magnitude 11 earthquake is calculated to have happened when the Chixculub asteroid hit the earth. The researcher who determined this found a fossil of a sturgeon that had been washed ashore from the seiches that occurred as a direct consequence from the seismic waves travelling through the earth. This happened 3500km away from the point of impact. Another juicy factoid, he determined that the fish had been hit with micro particles of molten glass. Which had been launched into the atmosphere on impact and came down 3500km further. Insane.
poor fishy
Poor fish
Actually, you cant prove history using experiments
yummy fishy
Ew fish
If I remember correctly I think this was the last chapter in the first What If book. It's honestly a great way to end it with the words "sometimes it's nice not to destroy the world for a change" after all the global and sometimes multiplanetary destructions present in this book.
Proton Earth, Electron Moon lmao
it is
@@The360MlgNoscoperwrong book
@@jeanstipisevic1080 It was on the online site first.
Black hole bigger than the entire universe
"A coin falling from a small dog" sounds like something that's actually an imperial unit of measure. Most likely called the Terdongle or something.
Uhhhh... Yah. It's three Terdongles per Fathom if you measure from the left side of the dog, and 2.3 Terdongles per Yard if measured from the right.
I don't get why this is so difficult for metric people to understand.
terdoggle*
why does it sound like it? is there any other measurement like that?
@@gordonlekfors2708I mean some Peopel use Foot as a masurement scale so its not that far of
@@DerschneemananderwandSoem Peopel use Foot as Masurement, Soem use Meater. 🤣
"The Dallas Cowboys ran into his neighbor's garage with the force of a quadrillion dust motes landing on a table." Is my Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest entry.
Excellent
that's gonna be a really dusty table
@@searchingforentertainment...i wonder how dusty a quadrillion dust motes on a table would actually be
@@DarkShard5728gimme a few years
I like the fact it jarred loose the stars on their helmets into the air. (yeah, it's a joke folks)
"Well, given that a magnitude 25 quake would destroy the sun..."
Well that escalated quickly XD
it escalated logaritmically, you could say
@@sebastianmartinez5508
No, the scale is logarithmic. The force necessary to fulfil it is exponential.
This video taught me that I have absolutely no basic knowledge of what an earthquake actually is.
It made me think the researcher has no basic knowledge of what an earthquake actually is.
@@petermgruhn Care to explain why?
@@almabatekert_villanykorte3387I guess he doesn’t LMAO
@@petermgruhn Why not share your deep knowledge with us plebs?
My neighbors definitely register a magnitude -1.5 at 3 am every day
You live next door to two horny American football players?
NAHHH 😭💀
1.5 cats dropped from your table? Or maybe half of a footbol player hit the tree?
logarithmic scale, homeslice
They are getting a lot of action eh?
I love the end of that video where we are encouraged to think about progressively quieter and quieter things that, nevertheless, still happen.
Reminds me of the Dr. Manhattan quote "...seen events so tiny and so fast that they hardly can be said to have occurred at all"
Yeah, and a magnitude -5 earthquake being the equivalent to someone pressing one button on a keyboard this means for every single computer that's being used every day we're generating magnitude -5 earthquakes All around the world in areas that have at least one computer!🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨
this was a very fitting end in the original book
Ah yes, the Dallas Cowboys do indeed regularly collide with random objects in my lawn
@@Hell0hi15 And if I had a penny for every penny I've seen fall off a dog's back, I'd have...the...uh, wait, I confused myself.
in case anyone doesn't know, the reason it's like this is that the Richter scale is logarithmic, so increasing the number by 1 actually *multiples* the power, rather than adding a fixed amount.
Visible at 0:32.
Yes. It was an unfortunate detail to leave out
wouldn't that be an exponential function?
logarithm function climbs slower and slower the further you go
@@ChinoKawaii1021 The numbers on the scale itself increase logarithmically. If we were looking at fixed values on the scale rather than "logged" numbers, then the numbers would be insanely large pretty quickly.
@@ChinoKawaii1021each step of 1 on the scale is 32 times larger than the previous step
I caused 45 earthquakes writing this comment.
"My life got a lot better when I realised you can ignore any sentence that starts with "technically" 00:19
Well technically, the sentence started with 'the'.
@@asheep7797 Technically, asdfiou hsda figb asdiu fbasdifb sdaiouahsdf asdfioh asdfioasf doiasdf sadf
@@asheep7797☝️ignored
and ur sentence started with " well" which is used with " the" and his " techanlly so ur both wrong
The fact that the What If? series is now a UA-cam channel/series is just... Wild to say the least
Anyway love xkcd, thank you for doing this
what if it wasnt
Whats wild about it
Wait what was it before I have never heard of what if before this channel.
@@ryanclemons1 It was a series of books.
@@ThatGuyBrian oh cool was it made by this guy or did he just copy the idea of the books?
I like the fact that the energy levels of negative-magnitudes "earthquakes" make less and less sense but are actually decreasing at a comprehensible rate.
I believe in theory you could go even lower than the -15 example, but then you run into conceptual problems (e.g. "Can earthquakes can meaningfully be considered to occur on the microscopic and quantum scales?")
If you don't care about how the results look and just define it as "a transfer of energy from one object interacting with another", then the scale would end in meaningful terms with the equivalent of the smallest amount of possible available free energy (i.e. non-zero-point energy) being transferred between two objects, whatever that value might be. If you try to do anything different, then it becomes just as much an exercise in definition and philosophy as it would be science to get an answer. :3
@@gordontaylor2815fellow :3 user spotted. Wouldn't expect that from a no pfp, first and last name channel
nice pfp cutie
@@gordontaylor2815 I don't even think it's theoretical, but instead already possible.
Bacteria moving around is probably far less than a -20
@@gordontaylor2815 It wouldn't be so much about the minimum amount of energy, so much as, the minimum detectable disturbance. Eventually the quake would be indistinguishable from a measurement error (Heisenberg uncertainty) aka background noise (quantum foam).
As a geophysicist (earthquake scientist), I found this explanation extremely accurate and useful with 2 exceptions. There are no such things as "fault lines". We call them "fault zones" since a fault, especially at or near the surface, doesn't really have a definite boundary. Also, magnitude is proportional to rupture area. So a strike slip fault like the san Andreas is only about 30km deep and 800km long. While a subduction zone like Cascadia is about 1200 km long and can be several hundred kms deep. This is why large earthquakes (above 8.8) only occur here since the surface area of plate contact is much greater.
In your explanation you said that magnitude is the proportion area of rupture. How in this video relate a magnitude with the falls of things, and also with destruction of sun?
I live right on top of a fault zone then. There had been several newsworthy earthquakes with an epicenter very near my home in the south of Mexico. Is good to know there won't be any level 9 earthquakes here, I've always been worried about a very big one happening.
@@eduardoarmenta9232 If you are in southwestern Mexico, then you are located along a major subduction zone which can cause earthquakes as large as 9.0. Luckily, these only happen every 300-600 years.
also you forgot to mention that because of the way the scale works, there can't be an earthquake over 10.0, that is what the strongest earthquake could ever possible be
@@bendalton5221 There can be, but it would require an impact.
that last section was a wonderful extra special touch, thank you.
It's also the last page in the book :)
At a magnitude 2.14 billion, the earthquake resets to a magnitude -1 due to overflow error
2:01 A what truck!?
Hi verified dude, the answer is
A -semen- cement truck
I just got what you meant on literally the next youtube video I watched lol.
"You've probably seen a mixer truck before- and I'll forgive you for calling them cement trucks, even though cement is just one of the ingredients in a concrete mix."
10:52 - "Every Construction Machine Explained in 15 Minutes"
Don't expect to get a concrete answer here, Grady.
"A truck your dropppppppping off your mom"
it’s se-MENT not SEE-
Was confused and thought "How could I have missed this channel", only to discover it's new. I love your books, more content!
Same here
Same!
Same!
Indeed, this must be the fastest I've ever subscribed a channel.
I found it cuz xkcd
2:50 Nah I'm good
xD
You aren't Thanos, brother.
Sometimes I don't want peace
i love how all sfx are done with the mouth
“Let’s say New York City” that aged well
hi distro
@@IoIxD hi lol
real there was just an earthquake in New Jersey
@@juST_LuKe-fw1ckyeah it was fun lol
God has a strange sense of humor.
Every time you walk around, you produce tiny little earthquakes. And yes, they are absolutely detectable by seismometers if any are nearby and connected to the ground you're walking on. That's why seismometers are preferrably placed in remote areas, where they are shielded from seismic noise produced by things like traffic
A professor at the university I briefly studied at was doing femtosecond spectrography. That means resolving the energy states of particles in a timescale of 10 ^(-15) s.
Then, the city build a tram right next to the university, which seismically interfered with his measurements.
He worked around that by scheduling his measurements around the Tram.
that's a lot of text for something very intuitive that needs maybe one short sentence, if anything at all.
@@gordonlekfors2708 1053
@@gordonlekfors2708 Ok Mr. Genius, who considers 3 sentences a long essay. How about something less intuitive? A seismometer placed in a chamber in the middle of a mountain, sealed off from any air pressure changes, can still detect a changes in weather. Seismometers are so accurate that they will measure the tilt of the chamber as a result of the atmospheric pressure change deforming the mountain.
@@gordonlekfors2708 Okay, again, rude, and actually adds a whole sentence to the problem you imply exists, but let's take it as a challenge:
"The tiny earthquakes made by footsteps can be heard by close seismometers, so we put seismometers far from disturbance."
Hm... it's certainly a tad more concise, and has a little bit of XKCD simple-complex charm, but it loses a lot of its energy. LordAJ12345's version also parcels out the learning more clearly and attempts to speak to the reader, which may be better for learning depending on a few things. Conciseness is only useful insofar as it suits its purpose; here, the purpose is clearly to teach the passerby, which presents limitations other than simple efficiency.
It's crazy how many earthquakes are caused by house pets every day.
Yeah, I really should stop putting coins on my dog's back.
crazy how as im typing this im doing earthquakes
I was a kid in Bremerton when the Good Friday quake hit.
The epicenter was nearly 1,000 miles away in Alaska, but it broke windows in our house, tumbled our neighbor chimney.
And that was 'only' a 8.4-8.6!
Wikipedia says 9.2 tho. in the 70s or 80s almost all intensities were recalculated from Richter to Mw scale. Valdivia 1960 changed from 8.6 to 9.6
for anyone confused why it gets so powerful so quickly, the scale doesnt increase linearly, it actually multiplies by 32. for example, a magnitude 8 earthquake is 32x stronger than a magnitude 7, and a magnitude -3 earthquake is 32x weaker than a magnitude -2.
Wouldn't the difference between of 32 times the amount of power be ~1.5 difference in magnitude?
I'm not really sure how the math of it works. I see online that a difference of one magnitude seems to 31.667 times the energy released, but how come it is measured as 10 times bigger then?
I kind of conceptually don't understand I suppose.
Also, now I'm curious.. does a negative powered earthquake represent anything real?
@@wolfxlover I don't understand what you're asking.
@@wolfxlover1: 31.6 rounds to 32. A “negative powered earthquake” is just a weak vibration, think of a pen falling from your hand to the floor vs a bomb getting detonated right outside your house
@@wolfxlover exponents
"To put in another way, the death star caused a magnitude 18 on alderan"
Honestly, it was probably more extreme than that, it's just that given what we saw it was _at least_ a magnitude 18 quake.
ua-cam.com/video/RV5WqRnFejI/v-deo.htmlsi=uD88OK6n1K3ap2mX
Side note, it's believed that the strongest earthquakes that have happened on earth were due to impactors, for example it's believed that the asteroid that killed the non avian dinosaurs caused a magnitude 11 quake. And I can scarcely imagine what kind of quake Theia hitting Earth would have caused...
given that Theia caused the moon to split from the Earth - that would be around about the gravitational binding energy of the planet earth - so based on the video that would be approximately magnitude 18 :)
@@edwardlane1255 Plus, I think something like that will be called something else and not just simply 'earthquake'.
@@VitchAndVorty True, but if you consider the small side of the scale (droping a truck, having a football team run into your house etc.) its technically still an earthquake, as it makes the planet shake. Theia was just kind of an intergalatic Dallas Cowboys football player running into our houses wall :D
@@edwardlane1255hmm, could be 17/16 too
@@VitchAndVorty A "Megaquake"?
damn, randall actually narrates these, that's great
been a fan on and off for for more than a decade and I'm glad to see xkcd in this format
This was an interesting video cause I never knew the magnitude could go negative, but I suppose it makes perfect sense since it’s an exponential function.
"please don't"
DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! *slams button*
magnitude -2 earthquake survivor here 😢✊
I admittedly knew a decent amount of this given that I live in an earthquake prone area, but I didn’t know that the numbers could be negative or that pushing the upper limits would straight up just blow up the earth
Didn't know they could blow up the damn sun either.
Yeah... welcome to logarithmic scales and exponential functions. Each increase of 1 in earthquake magnitude multiples the energy release by 32 (it's a factor of 10 in shaking amplitude, but that translates to a factor of 32 in energy release.) So, while a magnitude 6 is 32 times more energy than a magnitude 5, a magnitude 15 would be around 32^10 = 1,126,000,000,000,000 times as much energy as a magnitude 5 (and, on the flip side, a magnitude -5 would be 1/1,126,000,000,000,000 times as much energy release as a 5.)
But is it really an episode of "What If?" if we DON'T blow up the earth?
1:59 "Americans will use anything to measure stuff except the metric system."
Keep these coming, Randall. The format is great, and your delivery is very pleasant.
get a room. don't stand here placating like a mild muppet 😤
@@gordonlekfors2708 Are you saying one shouldn't provide positive feedback to something one wants to see more of?
@@gordonlekfors2708"Placating"? 🤨 The only person here who requires placating is you. Chill!
Wow. I really enjoyed the final animation sequence of this piece, I guess the outro. The zoom out from the table was stellar.
With the amount of cats pushing things off other things, I'm surprised it doesn't all add up constantly to big earthquakes.
there's something so soothing hearing about some of the lower negatives. "a mote of dust, landing on a table"
"yeah... that's nice. The essence of gentleness."
1:34 “Please don’t!” I’m quite certain we can’t.
Are you sure? I think i had some spares lying around somewhere...
@@Zachyshows We dont even have enough earth to fit in Jupiter, let alone nukes
@Dunky-wq5tu i have a few spares in my storage, I'm sure if we all pitch in we can get them
We can't do that /yet/.
So you're saying that magnitude -15 quakes are happening around the world all the time? Neat!
Based on the examples in the video, that's true of any magnitude -3 or below (well, down until the point where the energy values get low enough that the quantum nature of energy prevents going lower). People drop their phones all the time. -2 to 0 are probably pretty common too, since something like a piece of furniture falling over would probably be somewhere in that range.
Oh, and about that lower limit: according to Wikipedia's "Orders of magnitude (energy)" article and the Richter Scale formula, the emission of a single AM radio photon would be around magnitude -21. I'm sure there are lower meaningful values (I suspect something like "a single electron hitting your table" would be lower, but I'd need to spend a little more time remembering the physics on collisions before calculating the true minimum meaningful value).
Just a person working in an office would be a rapid fire of magnitude -6 earthquakes. Or -5, if they have a nicer keyboard.
There's literally hundreds of magnitude 3 quakes every day! In the last 24 hours we had 19 quakes above magnitude 5.
Also half of all cat videos contain magnitude -2 earthquakes.
@@mathcookie8224 Technically, people would be creating magnitude -3 quakes with every step that they take walking.
Mag 25 would destroy the sun.
Hehe... good to know.
A penny falling off of a dog. USA will use anything but the metric system, SMH.
If you separate the components of a magnitude -1 earthquake, you get a magnitude i.
I don't think it's real. You're lying!
@@copter2000 i think you're just imagining stuff.
So cool to hear Randall's voice after years and years of reading XKCD!
ok stop trying to date Randall. this ain't your game, buddy
@@gordonlekfors2708 ok stop gatekeeping other people. this ain't your place, pal
the_candy_man_can
_So _*_that's_* why the name seems familiar!
I was thinking of Minute Physics in a couple of ways...
Yeah, now I can read his comics in a voice other than my normal reading voice which is obviously Morgan Freeman's
you don't even know what gatekeeping means, child@@irrelevant_noob
"Narrated by and based on "What If?" by Randall Munroe"
Who knew a book could have such a nice voice.
Cursed syntactic ambiguity.
caseoh when he jumps
I watched this while making food and yelled “earthquake!” As the food dropped in the bowl
Such a great, well-produced series. Should be a bumper on PBS or Discovery!
I love this idea! Not all the articles would be the best fit for general TV (looking at you, blood alcohol question...), but most of them would be fine and the snack-size format makes perfect sense.
Discovery? Please, no! That station's been ruined ever since all those 'But will they make it in time?!!!!1!' "reality" shows.
I hate the idea that well produced content doesn't belong on UA-cam and that if you want your work to be respected, it has to be tied to traditional media. I know that that's probably what you didn't mean to say and that you're just regurgitating what most people already believe. I just think that it’s a backwards way of thinking. High quality UA-cam videos deserve to be praised on the same level as traditional media.
"3.5 Earthquake Strikes Fear in Ohio Cornfield" gave me an extra chuckle, as I felt a *very* slight ~3.5 "wiggle wiggle" while sitting in my parked car yesterday.*
The good news is I checked Bluesky and saw someone's "Obligatory earthquake tweet" to 1) verify I hadn't imagined it and 2) confirm the platform has enough Californians for our ritual "Did anybody feel that?" check-in while we wait for the USGS feed to update. [4 Dec 8:09 pm Fullerton, CA, 3.3, 6.1 miles deep].
*(I realize seismic waves transmit better in Ohio, where the bedrock is mostly solid granite, not limestone and sandstone beaten to smithereens by a zillion quakes.)
Each movemont of my body causes eathquakes. Don't worry about the magnitude.
So when you go out to get the mail does it measure on the Richter scale?
My house is full of magnitude-15 earthquakes ... I really should clean those up at some point.
People often forget that a magnitude isnt a _simple_ increase, but exponential
2:30 what is he doing
watching stuffs on a laptop with 1 hand, like we all do o.o
@@billytringuyen1 nah bro the pc bro also did that too
2:22 not if its a nokia 3210.
This is the happiest I’ve ever been at experiencing the creation of a UA-cam channel in real-time. Keep em coming!
what i this?
My power is so strong I started tens of -6 magnitude earthquakes while I typed this comment!
*slowly and gently shuts door as silently as I can*
Mom: I 𝓚𝓝𝓞𝓦 YOU DON'T BE PAYIN' BILLS TO BE CAUSIN' EARTHQUAKES IN THIS DAMN HOUSE
oh my god whoever did the little voice sounds in the background I love you, that's probably exactly what a sunquake sounds like
1:03 lucky us! 😊
… I hope he was sarcastic when he said will rest easy knowing there won’t be tsunamis
The only reason we’ll be resting easy is because it’d be hard not to after we’re all dead
I thought it was an xkcd article that said magnitude 40 on the Richter scale would release an equivalent amount of energy as the Big Bang itself, so, you know, all of the energy.
Accounting for the energy of the big bang is tricky. For one, many cosmologists believe the universe has exactly 0 total energy as a result of a balance between gravitational binding (negative) energy and mass-energy etc. For another, if you want to measure a particular component of this, the answer is probably infinite in most cosmological models which model the universe as infinite. I think the best you can do to get a nonzero finite answer is ask for the mass-energy of the observable universe, which is about 10^70J, or a magnitude 43.
watching this while curled up in bed, rubbing my feet together. magnitude -4 quake
who is here after Japan's 7.6magnitude earthquake
Your mom
I have read your comics since late 2006, and I did not expect your voice to be so soothing
Knowing that earthquake magnitudes are literally measured in orders of magnitude, I knew that asking about a magnitude 15 or 25 earthquake wouldn't make much sense. But I never thought that _negative_ earthquake magnitudes were a thing! And they are cute, too!
Funnily enough, they're measured not in exact orders of magnitude, but in orders of magnitude * 1.5, i.e. +2 earthquake magnitude = +3 orders of magnitude of energy
@@mathcookie8224 If you are a nerd who refuses to use decimal, they can just be orders of magnitude.
@@Salsmachev Sure, orders of magnitude in base 10^1.5… good luck using base sqrt(1000).
@@mathcookie8224 I mean, compared to some of the wacky irrational bases people try to use, base 10^1.5 is pretty tame. At least every two digits can be compressed into an integer base, unlike phinary. And by virtue of being useful for simplifying earthquake math, it's already more practical that many large prime bases.
Never in my life did the thought ever occur to me that someone would call earthquakes "cute".
Gotta say I love that you ended your video on a more positive or lighthearted note.
What what magnitude would it be if I was sitting on a hardwood floor and farted?
Something like -2?
Ask the Dinosaurs 66 MYA what a magnitude 15 Earthquake would be like.
2:38
Man this is STILL a bigger impact on the world than I'm ever going to have.
Judging by those negative magnitudes, a footstep would most likely be a higher magnitude than a single itsy bitsy grain of sand plunking onto other itsy bitsy grains of sand, so don't give up on yourself lol
I already loved the article, but the narration gives it that little extra flair that makes it just that much more enjoyable.
Having read every comic and book that you've published, I'm very excited to see you branching out into videos! And with wonderful quality right from the start, no less.
I was in SF for the Mendocino earthquake - 7.2 - in 1992 and that was the single most terrifying moment(s) of my life. I've had a few near death experiences over the decades but none remotely as frightening as that. Everything is made of Jello. There's nowhere you can go. There's nothing you can do except cower and hope you don't get crushed like an ant, or worse. It lets you know just how fragile and mortal you really are unlike anything else.
I think a main point missed is that the Richter scale is logarithmic. A magnitude of 8 releases 10 times more than 7, but 9 is 100 times more powerful than 7.
Yep! At 15, nothing remains but oceans.
i think it is 32 time stronger
I love how in random reddit conversations someone always seems to drop a link with: "Hey, there's actually an xkcd about that".
Soon it won't just be a four panel strip anymore, but a link to this channel.
Can't wait :)
"Obligatory xkcd" also happens pretty frequently on Stack Exchange Q&As.
I was about to watch all your videos you've uploaded because i really liked the 2 videos i watched so far. Only to discover that those are the only 2 available. Please upload more
“Uhhh…why did Randall ignore the *important* part of the question?” -every New Yorker
"sometimes it's nice not to destroy the world" i mean you did also explode the sun. that was a pretty significant thing that happened. like i understand where you’re coming from here but you very much did explode the sun.
Graveler used Magnitude!
Magnitude 10!
Critical hit!
It's super effective!
So glad XKCD is continuing his work decades later
I remember when I received the what if book on Christmas. I was of course appreciative for the book but it wasn’t anything close to the video games on my list so I didn’t think much of it. At one point I was bored and decided to take the book out of my shelf where many other book say there collecting dust and boy was I hooked! I basically devoured the book in its entirety right then and there. It became my favourite book and one I’ll cherish and probably try to force onto my own kids in the future (emphasis on try… I was already hooked on video games when I was younger so who knows what else there will be in the future). In any case I want to say thank you for taking the time to solve the what if’s of our minds and thank you for bringing that magic to us again on UA-cam
I have anxiety and really appreciate how you ended this video. Breathing a deep sigh of peace in my -15 magnitude earthquake state
My back of the napkin calculations show that a supernova would register as a magnitude 27 earthquake. The Big Bang would be a 42.
I guess you can say you technically cause earthquakes every time you press a keyboard or atleast walk lol.
Curious to know the magnitude of a single photon of visible light hitting something
Assuming the thing being hit (let's say a table) completely absorbs the photon, somewhere around -15.2. (I've heard UA-cam tends to hide comments with links, so I'll put my sources in the next comment)
@@mathcookie8224 Just a heads up, we indeed do not see your next comment.
I remember one of my geology professors saying if you were to cut the Earth in half and rotate it (either half way around or all the way, I can't remember which) you'd have a magnitude 13 earthquake.
wow these stick figure illustrations are cool!
He should start a webcomic!
I caused a magnitude -4 earthquake to watch this video.
I was literally just thinking a couple days ago, i need some more xkcd , & I wondered if there were youtube videos and i thought, Nah, it's a comic thing, not videos......Silly me 😄
I am so so delighted to have been wrong.
2:06 I was expecting the Cowboys to get roasted
Randall’s on UA-cam now? Subscribed, liked, anything you need! Been reading xkcd since comic 700 or so!
XKCD’s humor translates amazingly well to video! Keep it up!
This is what I love about exponential growth. Going from -15 to 15 on the scale goes from dust particle landing on a table to the complete destruction of the sun.
sun destruction is 25
Earth destruction is 15
*earth
the video shows the sun handling up to 24 ;)
@@Xnoob545 whoops! Good catch, guys.
15 is only enough to boil ocean, but for sun it is only a coffee every its morning
a cme has enough energy to melt earth
and every second sun turn enough hydrogen into pure energy to be equivalent to magnitude 15
If caseoh fell it would be a magnitude 24 earthquake
One unfortunate loss in this format is the hover-text. I'll miss the hover-text.
2:13 "Muricans would use anything but the metric system"
Hey! I've been a fan of your comic since I got the original 'What If?' for my birthday. I then went on to get complicated things explained with simple words, and the second what of book. I love your work, and this new voiced video series is super exciting! Keep it up, and have a wonderful day!
I'm sure it's just a coincidence but thinking about negative scale earth quakes brought me a sense of peace. A mote of dust coming to rest on a window sill.. ahhh
0:41 not just 2, but 18 earthquakes in recorded history in 9.0 scale