11 mo. ago • 98%

Well that was a short thought experiment

29 comments

The good news is we’d be pretty dead if we had no atmosphere anyway, plus there’d be no clouds.

77
- good news
  
  Ummm
  
  26
  
  great news
  
  Ftft
  
  12
- Oh.
  
  9
What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop?

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- How?! How is there an xkcd for EVERY gawdamned thing?!
  
  48
  
  XKCD is an allknowing timetravelling entity.
  
  28
  
  Confirmation bias?
  
  11
- the unexplained meteorological phenomenon is simply dubbed a “Skrillex Storm”—because, in the words of one researcher, “It had one hell of a drop.”
  
  30
- Classic
  
  3
- This is amazing.
  
  2
- tl;dr?
  
  0
  
  It would kill you.
  
  You should read it, btw. It's really entertaining.
  
  12
  
  A sphere of 600 million tons of water over a kilometer in diameter would crash into the surface of the earth at half the speed of sound, causing a super sonic jet of water to blast out from every direction, completely obliterating everything within 30 kilometers.
  
  11
If there was no air I'm pretty sure clouds wouldn't form in the first place.

38
- Also, we'd all be dead.
  
  14
- Oh, you and your facts.
  
  8
Permanently Deleted

31
Fun fact

Definitely not

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A cubic foot of water weighs just under 62 and a half pounds. Atmosphere to slow it down or not, having that land on you from altitude would hurt.

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- They mentioned a 2 in. thick sheet of rain falling, which is ~288 cubic in. per 1 foot x 1 foot area, about 10 lbs of water. Falling as a flat sheet at terminal velocity would hit you with a force of 127 newtons. What that means as far as injuries go I have no idea. I'm sure it'd cause a nasty headache at the least though.
  
  Fair warning, I'm terrible at math so I could be completely wrong
  
  4
  
  Terminal velocity is only as fast as it is because of air resistance. With no air resistance, the only limiting factor of speed is starting height.
  
  It’s like the experiment with the feather and the hammer they did on the Moon.
  
  5
  
  Energy would be better to look at than force, since at any distance the force is the same (mass and acceleration aka grsvoty are both static)
  
  2
Reminds me of that page in the Bone comic where the snow comes down all at once. I loved that scene!

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Gremonade

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