Title text:
Once you add the balloons into the model, it makes forecasting easier overall–the forecast is always ‘cold and dark, with minimal solar-driven convection.’
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3107/
All the fighter jets in the world couldn’t make a tiny dent in one trillion balloons.
What about this?
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.
Let’s just light the atmosphere on fire. Sounds like the quickest solution. Surely there can’t be any downsides.
I’d just shoot doem down with FLAC cannons
Good idea using the Free Lossless Audio Codec that will sound way better than mp3 when the balloons all pop.
We need more jets right away!
Not if we build it one trillion of them.