What If? 2

★★★☆☆

What If? 2 by Randall Munroe (2022)

What If? 2 book cover

Alas I lost my index card bookmark of notes, so there are no direct quotes here.

I liked this book. I didn’t like it nearly as much as the first one. Was it worse or was it just because I was far older while reading book 2?

The original What if? was really magical to me. Young me, Costco, reading the back where it says you can eat the book for around 3,000 calories if you could eat books. Which, unfortunately, you cannot. I fell in love right then and there.

Meanwhile this is the second book:

  • What if the earth was covered in six feet of snow? Well, then it would be covered in six feet of snow.
  • What if you could drive a car far away? It would take a while.
  • What if dogs reproduced exponentially, and they don’t need resources? They’d cover the earth soon, because exponential growth is fast

Compare this to the magic of the first book, which had:

  • What if you only had one true love? That would be a nightmare.
  • What if everyone jumped in the same place? Nothing, but there would be a global infrastructure collapse afterward.
  • What if you tried to collect the periodic table elements? Astatine = bad, it’s blackish and there’s around one gram dispersed around the whole Earth at a given moment and you’ll have a very bad day. I don’t know why I remembered those details specifically, but I did!

And that is a book I read over a decade ago.

Was the world just more magical back when I was a teen? When I was less of a cynic and more filled with wonder, joy, curiosity, sugar, spice, and everything nice? When I couldn’t ask AI any dumb hypothetical and have it come up with a plausible-sounding answer? It would probably be wrong, but it would satisfy my curiosity, and it’s not like I was going to funnel Niagara Falls through a straw anyway.

I reiterate that I enjoyed the read. The footnotes are funny and the graphics really tie it together. I loved the short answers and “weird and worrying” pages most. Big numbers are useless for our monkey brains, so Randall uses analogies. If there were a hundred skyscrapers that were each a hundred skyscrapers tall, then a hundred again, then multiplied by ten, that’s a billion story building. A billion is a big number!

Overall it’s definitely worth a read if you find it at the library. Or buy it as a gift for a child to foster their love of The Science. xkcd.com has many comics by the What If? author, and it updates thrice weekly.

LASTLY: I just remembered one of my notes: P.50 mentions goodreads.com/book/random/ to pick a completely random book. I just checked and the link is broken now. I hate Goodreads.