From the creator of the wildly popular webcomic xkcd, surprising answers to important questions you probably never thought to ask

Millions of people around the world visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe’s iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions. The queries he receives range from merely odd to downright diabolical:

• What if I took a swim in a spent nuclear fuel pool?

• Could you build a jetpack using downward firing machine guns?

• What if a Richter 15 earthquake hit New York City?

• What would happen if someone’s DNA vanished?

His responses are comic gems, accurately and entertainingly explaining everything from your odds of meeting your soul mate to the many horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements.

This book features the most popular answers from the xkcd’s What If blog, but many of the questions (51 percent!) are new and answered here for the first time. What If? is an informative feast for xkcd fans and anyone who loves to ponder the hypothetical.

Table of Contents

• Global Windstorm
• Relativistic Baseball
• Spent Fuel Pool
• Weird land Worrying I Questions
• from the What If? lnbox, #1
• New York- Style Time Machine
• Soul Mates
• laser Pointer
• Periodic Wall of the Elements
• Everybody Jump
• A Mole of Moles
• Hair Dryer
• Weird (and Worrying) Questions
• from the What If? lnbox, #2
• The Last Human Light
• Machine-Gun Jetpack
• Rising Steadily
• Weird (and Worrying) Questions
• from the What If? lnbox, #3
• Orbital Submarine
• Short-Answer Section
• lightning
• Weird (and Worrying) Questions
• from the What If? lnbox, #4
• Human Computer
• little Planet
• Steak Drop
• longest Sunset
• Random Sneeze Call
• Weird (and Worrying I Questions
• from the What If? lnbox, #10
• Expanding Earth
• Weightless Arrow
• Sunless Earth
• Updating a Printed Wikipedia
• Facebook of the Dead
• Sunset on the British Empire
• Stirring Tea
• All the Lightn ing
• Lonel iest Human
• Weird (and Worrying) Questions
• from the What If? lnbox, #11
• Raind rop
• SAT Guessing
• Neutron Bullet
• Weird (and Worrying) Questions
• from the What If? lnbox, #12
• Richter 15

Review

Praise for Randall Munroe and xkcd:"By speaking the language of geeks. . . while dealing with relationships and the meaning of a computer-centric life, xkcd has become required reading for techies across the world….The Internet has also created a bond between Mr. Munroe and his readers that is exceptional. They reenact in real life the odd ideas he puts forward in his strip." —The New York Times"With his steady regimen of math jokes, physics jokes, and antisocial optimism, xkcd creator Randall Munroe, a former NASA roboticist, scores traffic numbers in NBC.com or Oprah.com territory. One key to the strip’s success may be that it doesn’t just comment on nerd culture, it embodies nerd culture." —Wired, in an issue featuring "the people who have shaped the planet’s past 20 years""Sometimes the beloved geek-chic webcomic xkcd is funny in a broadly accessible way. Sometimes it’s achingly poignant, sometimes it’s socially intelligent, and sometimes it’s esoteric humor that programmers or scientists have to explain to the rest of us. But at its most ambitious, it either packs massive amounts of interesting information into a small space, or engages in breathtaking experiments with the medium….[A]t its best [xkcd] isn’t a strip comic so much as an idea factory and a shared experience." —Onion AV Club

About the Author

Randall Munroe is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and author of xkcd: Volume 0. Randall was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, and grew up outside Richmond, Virginia. After studying physics at Christopher Newport University, he got a job building robots at NASA Langley Research Center. In 2006 he left NASA to draw comics on the internet full time, and has since been nominated for a Hugo Award three times. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him: asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth.