Lose weight the slow and incredibly difficult way
I hate all these click-bait articles. Losing weight is simple, it's just CICO. Calories In, Crust of the earth Out
Edit: I feel like a lot of people are arguing about something that should be considered totally uncontroversial, basic physics. Before you get all worked up over this, please look up Yuri Gagarin. His weight loss journey absolutely proved that it is possible to lose 100% of your body weight through simple orbital mechanics and hundreds of people have followed in his footsteps and experienced similar results. There is not room for debate, this is a proven weight loss method and what the I'm suggesting is essentially a very similar thing, but one that could help a lot more people at once.
Kind of a meta comment, it's always interesting to see / hear that when a somewhat well-known author writes a new book, you see interviews with them cropping up on "all the usual" places, other outlets write about it etc.
It's nice with something like "What if? 2", because Randall is an interesting podcast guest, and there are just so many different things to talk about.
It's a bit more annoying in other cases, where within two month you hear the same author on 5 different podcasts, and the author says the same thing on each of them. Time to use the skip button.
I guess that's simply how it works nowadays in publishing: writing the book is work, but then you also need to spend quite some time promoting it, in the hopes not only that it boosts sales, but also that the boosted sales put the book in some bestseller lists, boosting sales even further.
I'm glad to hear there's a follow up book to What If? (How To was also good, of course) – it's one of the more entertaining, yet educational, audiobooks I've listened to (and it really does work well in audio form unlike much non-fiction, plus Wil Wheaton is the narrator).
So I wondered if I could lose some weight if I teleported on top of Everest and started searching for formulas. Apparently, this question is already answered and the answer is yes - I could lose half a pound.
https://www.quora.com/On-top-of-Mount-Everest-is-the-force-o...
So yeah, if you have resources to shave off that much of Earth surface, then you have resources to construct a high enough building to lose those 10 pounds which would have been a lot easier.
This whole thread has taught me more about group-outrage and psychology than physics and weight-loss by a long shot.
Could you build a giant space straw that sucks out the molten core instead of peeling away layers, and otherwise leave the crust alone so you don't make volcanos everywhere?
He just needs to learn the Soleus Pushup.
I thoroughly enjoyed What If 2. I was, however, quite disappointed he chose to mock the "balloon one atom thick" question instead of answering it.
What about adding very low density material to the crust, in other words - go up?
When you see that art style, you know it's going to be good.
About 15 years ago I weighed about 235 pounds when I stop getting on scales.
I was 200 at 18 and tried going to the gym to lose weight but I stopped because I bulked up with muscle I increased my weight rapidly. So I went back to being a lazy nerd.
I started losing weight by buying a bike to get to work and doing yoga so that I could go hiking in the mountains. I started eating better, tried being vegan and other fad diets and slowly got down to 185-190 and was stuck, but was in pretty good shape with extra padding.
I eventually realized I had an issue with gluten and when I cut that out, I dropped done to about 170, and am probably a perfect body fat.
I’ve since lost about 10 pounds in the last year from food prices rising faster than my income and am frequently hungry and lightheaded.
It took nutritional experience and exercise, but I feel physically and mentally so much better it’s like being a different person(to yourself and others).
I thought the question was how many kilograms of dirt would you have to physically carry into outer space (eg. up a really tall ladder) in order to burn 20 lbs (70,000 calories).
If my calculations are correct: 1 (kilo)calorie is 4184 joules. So you need to burn 70,000 * 4184 = 292,880,000 joules. It takes 9.8 joules to lift 1kg by 1m. Using an "outer space" definition of 100km (100,000) meters, it takes 980,000 joules to lift 1kg of dirt to space.
Dividing 292,888,000 joules (the amount of energy we want to burn) by 980,000 (the energy it takes to carry 1kg to space), we get about 299 kilos. You'd have to carry about 300 kg up a ladder to outer space to lose 20 lbs. (Subtract your body weight, of course!)
(Accounting for the fat burned along the way is left as an exercise to the reader ;)
> You didn’t actually need to remove mass from the Earth, you just needed to go under it. You could’ve avoided all that work with a comparatively simple tunnel.
Or a really tall ladder.
His humor goes over my head sometimes but he does such a good job of making it just digestible enough for the lay-person like me. Well done!
I contest that our own bodies are part of Earth’s crust and thus a more efficient way to do this would be removing mass from our own bodies exclusively.
Depending on your constitution, the simplest way to achieve this is cutting one or two of your legs off.
Weird to see this on Nautilus instead of Randall's site where he's put hundreds of other "What-If"s
Anyone can lose weight without giving up any of the things they love! _Here's how:_
1. Live a full life 2. Get in a wooden box 3. Slough away all your soft tissue - you might like to use it for a worm farm 4. Welcome to the new-look you!
Ehhh too much work, suck out the nucleus with a long straw and spit it far enough
You'd lose about 10% if you ascended to the ISS. Sounds MUCH easier.
If gravity increases for the initial part of going down, wouldn't it take a lot less energy to go up? Once you're up in the stratosphere, you would weigh noticeably less.
If you change the mass of the earth then you have a new orbit problem to contend with too.
Clever to print one chapter in the Nautilus magazine.
It’s basically free advertisement for his new book.
That was.... highly unexpected.
> You could’ve avoided all that work with a comparatively simple tunnel.
Having just dug several holes 3' deep and 8" wide for a small project, that's definitely still work XD
I'd actually be interested to read a What If on digging a tunnel to the other side of the earth. Oh... https://what-if.xkcd.com/135/
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I'm a little sad that this isn't (re)posted on https://what-if.xkcd.com/