Dumb Questions I've Had For Science

Dumb Questions I’ve Had For Science

by John Wenz

• Do astronomers ever refuse to classify rocks in space as asteroids out of spite?

• If Jupiter’s radiation is so tough why don’t we just wear thick lead spacesuits?

• Why do we only send crazy-looking robots with wheels to other planets? Why don’t we send probes that can walk?

• I wonder how many people would be beheaded by their own invention if that invention were a poorly made hovercraft.

• If Venus is so hot, why hasn’t it melted itself?

• Which is more underrated, Uranus or Neptune?

• How many multiverse mes can there be anyway? I doubt the same sperm hit the same egg in that many universes.

• If it weren’t for Watergate, would we have a moonbase by now?

• If you could bring a cup of water back from Europa, would it be too radioactive from proximity to Jupiter to drink?

• If you drilled a hole nearly to the core of the earth, and did it in the ocean, what would happen? Would the ocean start draining into the hole, and could you go deep enough to rid the earth of the ocean once and for all?

• If smoke detectors are partially radioactive, do the people who work in the factories have to wear protective gear in assembling? Should there be a health warning for the guy at Ace Hardware who has to put them on the shelf?

• Say, we build an immeasurably fast, nigh impossible craft that takes us to the edge of the universe. What do scientists think would happen if we touched it?

• When will scientists engineer a cow that doesn’t fart? It would end global warming.

• So Saturn is pretty undense right? How deep does its lack of density go? Could you send a probe from one end to the other and just pass right through the planet?

• Have NASA interplanetary crafts been properly sterilized prior to launch to ensure that extremophile bacteria doesn’t potentially adapt to climates on other planets and moons and begin to thrive?

• What is the chemical composition of the odor of a banana, and how does it give off this odor?

• Would it radically alter the sun’s chemistry if we gathered up all our garbage and rocketed it into the sun?

• If you give the octopus a longer life span, how long will it take to organize a war against humanity?

• If I put my brain in a robot body, would my brain eventually start to decompose and screw up the robot?

• Could nanotechnology just gradually replace all my brain cells instead, but I’d still have sentient control over them?

• What would be the easiest way to give this robotic body immortality that doesn’t involve eating people?

• Could we just put a really big magnet in space to collect all the space junk?

• If I find a dinosaur in my backyard, can I legally keep it?

• Could a shark survive long enough inside a whale to bite its way out of the whale’s stomach?

• If our atoms are the same atoms as other things on Earth just sort of recollected and rearranged, how many atoms that used to be part of people have we eaten?

• If faster than light travel becomes possible, does it break through space-time distortion or does time go on the same outside the craft?

• So we’re in a craft going near the speed of light, and we send a message from our craft to Earth. Is the message sped up when it gets to Earth? That is to say, because time inside is different than time outside, do we sound like the Chipmunks?

• If I got in a car going 100 miles an hour around the Earth non-stop for the rest of my life, how much time distortion would I actually experience? Would it qualify me as a time traveller?

• How many cubic feet of water are in the ocean?

• If our universe hit another universe, which one would win?

John Wenz got a D in astronomy in college, but that doesn’t stop him from trying. 1984 NASA/Dennis M. Davidson concept drawing of a lunar base via Wikipedia.