Book Review: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

TLDR: “Very entertaining” This is a fun book. It’s utterly pointless… but, that’s kind of the point. The author created a popular web comic that gets passed around a lot in geek circles. At one time, he was a robotics engineer for NASA, so he has a scientific bent. I have no idea how it got started, but people ask him weird questions, and he works very hard to provide them with scientifically accurate answers. Some examples: When, if ever, will the bandwidth of the Internet surpass FedEx? (meaning, if Fedex ever shipped nothing but hard drives filled with data, how much data would it ship?) If two immortal people were placed on opposite sides of an uninhabited Earthlike planet, how long would it take them to find each other? If you called a random phone number and said “God bless you,” how long would it be until you found someone who had just sneezed? The book is very tongue in cheek, but the answers are real. The author does a lot of research about both the answers, and the variables…