What If? (International Edition): Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

**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.