@@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.
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!🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨
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
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.
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.
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.
@@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 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
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.
@@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.
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
"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.
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
@@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).
'new' lol, this stuff is over a decade old. Minute physics started in 2011, what-if started in 2012 That said, yeah, still super happy to see it migrate to video form ❤
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.
@@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.
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!
man i loved this book so much, pretty funny, and quite educational. got gifted the first one a couple years back for my like 11th birthday cause i made a speech about the same question of "what if?"
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"
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 :)
@@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
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.
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."
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
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.)
"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.)
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 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.
I hate the idea that well produced content doesn't belong on TH-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 TH-cam videos deserve to be praised on the same level as traditional media.
Wait I didn't know you had a channel =O, instant sub I loved What If? and How to... is right above my CPU on my "I'll read it when I have time" shelf (only book there)
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
This "what if" series was basically MADE for TH-cam. It always felt like something was missing with the online text version. Putting it here as a video is just perfect.
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 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 TH-cam
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).
I don’t know, this felt pretty dry to me. I miss the framing device in the book where it was usually told almost as if some mad scientist was actually setting up the experiment.
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 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 :)
So this is actually your own voice? Nice. I've loved your comics for years. Good to see you uploading videos. I can't wait to see more videos. Good luck with the channel!
This is the first book I ever bought myself when I was 10 years old in 2014. To this day I have never re-read a book more times than Randall Munroe’s ‘what if?’- this book will live in my heart forever
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
@@globalincident694 Dark energy/matter.
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.
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
th-cam.com/video/CWP1xLJ6s-A/w-d-xo.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.
"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
@@user-uy6st6ui2vSoem Peopel use Foot as Masurement, Soem use Meater. 🤣
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
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
that last section was a wonderful extra special touch, thank you.
It's also the last page in the book :)
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
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?
This video taught me that I have absolutely no basic knowledge of what an earthquake actually is.
Wow. I really enjoyed the final animation sequence of this piece, I guess the outro. The zoom out from the table was stellar.
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
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.
i love how all sfx are done with the mouth
WTFFF I LOVED YOUR BOOK IN HIGH SCHOOL. AND YOU HAVE A TH-cam CHANNEL NOW?? YESSS
"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
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).
Good to see something ramping up, even as minutephysics fades away!
It's great that there is always new content like this!
'new' lol, this stuff is over a decade old.
Minute physics started in 2011, what-if started in 2012
That said, yeah, still super happy to see it migrate to video form ❤
@@jameshughes6078 The youtube channel looks to be new... doesn't it?
“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.
The fact that the What If? series is now a TH-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?
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
Wow; that was honestly really interesting! Really cool animations also. Thank you! Much Peace, Blessings and Love to you!
This is one of my favorite questions from What If? and it brings be great joy to see it animated.
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.
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
Wow, TH-cam recommendation has done a good job this time
It helped found your channel. And it's amazing!
man i loved this book so much, pretty funny, and quite educational. got gifted the first one a couple years back for my like 11th birthday cause i made a speech about the same question of "what if?"
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-
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
Wow! That was really informative --- Subscribed immediately!
These are soooo good keep up!
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
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"?
Thank you for the very interesting and informative video, much appreciated! We loved the - magnitude examples!
"please don't"
DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! *slams button*
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!
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.
This videos gives me more questions the answers thank you
caseoh when he jumps
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."
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 have learned so much thing in just 3.05 minutes and it was fun to watch. Thank you.
This episode is amazing! ❤
This is the happiest I’ve ever been at experiencing the creation of a TH-cam channel in real-time. Keep em coming!
what i this?
oh my god whoever did the little voice sounds in the background I love you, that's probably exactly what a sunquake sounds like
That was a nice and on point video. I appreciate that.
The music is quite nice and great mixing, props to the studio
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?
Gotta say I love that you ended your video on a more positive or lighthearted note.
1:13 lol that was great
"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.
th-cam.com/video/RV5WqRnFejI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=uD88OK6n1K3ap2mX
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
"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.)
You got me with that "opposite end of the scale" thing 😆 I wasn't expecting that!
Seeing this channel made my day
"Narrated by and based on "What If?" by Randall Munroe"
Who knew a book could have such a nice voice.
Cursed syntactic ambiguity.
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.
Please more videos, these are great
What I've learned from this video: my cat is unleashing earthquakes everyday
I have read your comics since late 2006, and I did not expect your voice to be so soothing
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.
This is my favorite channel now
You guys earned a sub!
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 TH-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 TH-cam videos deserve to be praised on the same level as traditional media.
What If has always been my favorite part of XKCD, very excited for this channel.
Wait I didn't know you had a channel =O, instant sub I loved What If? and How to... is right above my CPU on my "I'll read it when I have time" shelf (only book there)
The sound designer outdid themselves in this video lmfao. The sunquake pulsating sound absolute sent me.
For me it's the Dallas Cowboys running into my neighbor's garage
I was not prepared for this being as lovely as it was. Thank you for your work.
So glad XKCD is continuing his work decades later
This is a good video! Thanks
Excellent video!!!
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
XKCD’s humor translates amazingly well to video! Keep it up!
Loved the cat examples! Great vid!
This "what if" series was basically MADE for TH-cam. It always felt like something was missing with the online text version. Putting it here as a video is just perfect.
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!
Loved how short and informative this was
Excellent video, thank you
Magnitude -15 is the substitute teacher breaking up a fight
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 TH-cam
I already loved the article, but the narration gives it that little extra flair that makes it just that much more enjoyable.
Negative 25 earthquake:
Me tryna' sneak a cookie from my wife's baking sheet.
I have anxiety and really appreciate how you ended this video. Breathing a deep sigh of peace in my -15 magnitude earthquake state
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.
“Uhhh…why did Randall ignore the *important* part of the question?” -every New Yorker
Yo I remember reading XKCD in high school (2009-2012). Instant subscribe!
This is an example of amazingly made videos.
I was worried the humor and heart would get lost in the videos, but I love this! Can’t wait for more!
I don’t know, this felt pretty dry to me. I miss the framing device in the book where it was usually told almost as if some mad scientist was actually setting up the experiment.
@@fatcerberus eh, it’s not like you can’t read the books anymore. He’ll probably do those again too.
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 consider these fully supplementary to the book my family had the good sense to buy me in middle school. Can't wait to see the Martian portal one!
I love the way they give specific things for the bottom end of the scale
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.
So this is actually your own voice? Nice. I've loved your comics for years. Good to see you uploading videos. I can't wait to see more videos. Good luck with the channel!
"Well, given that a magnitude 25 quake would destroy the sun..."
Well that escalated quickly XD
"A penny falling from the dog" - The definition of "anything but metric system". Good job, Mmerica
Randall & Henry - a perfect combo!
This is the first book I ever bought myself when I was 10 years old in 2014. To this day I have never re-read a book more times than Randall Munroe’s ‘what if?’- this book will live in my heart forever
Right at the end I was waiting for the "....nah", followed by mushroom cloud
I have never subscribed to a youtube channel faster! More please!!!