Comment on xkcd #3107: Weather Balloons

UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• ValiantDust@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “Dabei war’n dort am Horizont Nur 99 Luftballons.”

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The red ones go faster

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    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      dramatically removes sunshades
      dear god… the balloons are gay…

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• tate@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  All the fighter jets in the world couldn’t make a tiny dent in one trillion balloons.

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  • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    What about this? Image

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    • tate@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It looks like the dart took out about a half dozen lights and a dozen people in about two seconds, so let’s say 10 strikes per second. At that rate it would take 10^11 seconds to pop a trillion balloons. That’s more than 3000 years!

      Of course I did say “make a tiny dent,” but even to eliminate 0.1% of the balloons would take the dart 3 years. One trillion is a number that we use a lot, for example talking about the US national debt, but it is not an ordinary number that lends itself to intuitive understanding. Even a billion is hard to grasp intuitively.

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      • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Let’s just light the atmosphere on fire. Sounds like the quickest solution. Surely there can’t be any downsides.

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  • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’d just shoot doem down with FLAC cannons

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    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Good idea using the Free Lossless Audio Codec that will sound way better than mp3 when the balloons all pop.

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  • Deceptichum@quokk.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Not if we build it one trillion of them.

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• PodPerson@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  How about when an unhinged person in the White House starts defunding NWS and launches get cancelled (yes - happening already).

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