Wednesday, August 26, 2026

If We Lost All Earth's Bodies of Water



The question for the What If? series was "What would happen is all the bodies of water on Earth magically disappeared?" Yeah, you had the same thought I did, of course we'd all die. You can't survive without water, and neither can any other living thing on earth. But that's too easy of an answer. Randall Munroe and Henry Reich instead take this scenario one step at a time. First, people swimming would fall to the ground. Then boats would crash, with a possible survivor. yeah, a lot of other stuff happens, and the extinction of all human life is treated like just one more event in a series that stretches way beyond that, with lots of details. It's a good thing the word "magically" appears in the question, so we don't have to worry about this theoretical disaster. We only need to worry about the slow loss of water.  



1 comment:

  1. What if all the water just went a few hundred thousand kilometres away and formed it's own ... planet ?

    Would we find Kevin Costner floating around on a large raft wearing bodyguard clothes, throwing yellow stones into the water to see how deep it is ?

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