Top 100 Randall Munroe Quotes
#1. It's tempting to just write a comic called 'Everyone Mail Randall Munroe Twenty Bucks' - maybe it would work, and I could just close down the 'xkcd' store and sit on a beach and draw pictures and make snarky Reddit posts for the rest of my life.
Randall Munroe
#2. Thin Burning Light Gun
If the car found life, it could try to use this gun to learn about it, but the life might not be alive when it was done.
Randall Munroe
#3. Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.
Randall Munroe
#4. Q. Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? - Rob B A. I WAS SORT OF surprised to find that the answer was yes! But to really do it right, you'll want to talk to the Russians.
Randall Munroe
#5. A magnitude 15 earthquake would involve the release of almost 1032 joules of energy, which is roughly the gravitational binding energy of the Earth. To put it another way, the Death Star caused a magnitude 15 earthquake on Alderaan.
Randall Munroe
#7. Of the 28 people killed by lightning in the US in 2012, 13 were standing under or near trees.
Randall Munroe
#8. Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.
Randall Munroe
#9. I think the comic that's gotten me the most feedback is actually the one about the stoplights. Noticing when the stoplights are in sync, or calculating the length of your strides between floor tiles - normal people notice that kind of stuff, but a certain kind of person will do some calculations.
Randall Munroe
#10. If 'other people have experiences incorrectly' is annoying to you, think how unbearable it must be to have a condescending stranger tell you they hate the way you're experiencing your life at just the moment you've found something you want to remember.
Randall Munroe
#11. A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.
Randall Munroe
#12. Maybe civilization will collapse, we'll all succumb to disease and famine, and the last of us will be eaten by cats. Maybe we'll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence. There's no way to know.
Randall Munroe
#13. The most common genetic disorder caused by inbreeding is spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). SMA causes the death of the cells in the spinal cord, and is often fatal or severely disabling.
Randall Munroe
#14. The role of gender in society is the most complicated thing I've ever spent a lot of time learning about, and I've spent a lot of time learning about quantum mechanics.
Randall Munroe
#15. If we divide up the world's land area evenly, there's enough room for each of us to have a little over 2 hectares each, with the nearest person 77 meters away.
Randall Munroe
#16. It's weird how I am constantly surprised by the passage of time when it's literally the most predictable thing in the Universe.
Randall Munroe
#17. Plumes of hot meat and bubbles of trapped gases like methane - along with the air from the lungs of the deceased moles - would periodically rise through the mole crust and erupt volcanically from the surface, a geyser of death blasting mole bodies free of the planet.
Randall Munroe
#18. The scholarly authorities on freezing to death seem to be, unsurprisingly, Canadians.
Randall Munroe
#20. Child from a parent who self-fertilized would be like a clone of the parent with severe genetic damage. The parent would have all the genes the child would, but the child wouldn't have all the genes
Randall Munroe
#21. Problem Boats
We keep extra boats stuck to these doors for people to use if there's a problem that makes them not want to be in space anymore, but no one will come get them.
Randall Munroe
#22. This means the last few years of hard-drive production - which, thanks to increasing size, represents the majority of global storage capacity - would just about fill an oil tanker. So, by that measure, the Internet is smaller than an oil tanker.
Randall Munroe
#23. So Yoda sounds like our best bet as an energy source. But with world electricity consumption pushing 2 terawatts, it would take a hundred million Yodas to meet our demands. All things considered, switching to Yoda power probably isn't worth the trouble - though it would definitely be green.
Randall Munroe
#24. The ISS moves so quickly that if you fired a rifle bullet from one end of a football field,7 the International Space Station could cross the length of the field before the bullet traveled 10 yards.8
Randall Munroe
#25. Trees make babies by dropping tiny wooden tree eggs on the ground.
Randall Munroe
#26. How many houses are burned down in the United States every year? What would be the easiest way to increase that number by a significant amount (say, at least 15%)?
Randall Munroe
#27. The thing about the Internet is that you can write something ... for a very narrow audience and make a living at it.
Randall Munroe
#28. It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles at hurricanes.
Randall Munroe
#29. If you liked it, then you should have moved a mass inside its Roche limit.
Randall Munroe
#30. Could you boil tea if you just stirred it hard enough? No. The first problem is power. The amount of power in question, 700 watts, is about a horsepower, so if you want to boil tea in two minutes, you'll need at least one horse to stir it hard enough.
Randall Munroe
#31. Q. This may be a bit gruesome, but ... if someone's DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last?
Randall Munroe
#33. THE RICHTER SCALE, WHICH has technically been replaced by the "moment magnitude"1 scale, measures the energy released by an earthquake.
Randall Munroe
#34. what year did a single typical desktop computer surpass the combined processing power of humanity? 1994.
Randall Munroe
#35. The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.
Randall Munroe
#36. They say there are no stupid questions. That's obviously wrong; I think my question about hard and soft things, for example, is pretty stupid. But it turns out that trying to thoroughly answer a stupid question can take you to some pretty interesting places.
Randall Munroe
#37. If humans escape the solar system and outlive the Sun, our descendants may someday live on one of these planets. Atoms from Times Square, cycled through the heart of the Sun, will form our new bodies. One day, either we will all be dead, or we will all be New Yorkers.
Randall Munroe
#38. A. Nearly everyone would die. Then things would get interesting.
Randall Munroe
#39. A darkened Sun would liberate us from the parsnip threat.
Randall Munroe
#40. But maybe it won't. Maybe it will take on a role like the TCP protocol, where it becomes a piece of infrastructure on which other things are built, and has the inertia of consensus.
Randall Munroe
#41. News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.
Randall Munroe
#42. Charles had an inbreeding coefficient of 0.254, making him slightly more inbred than a child of two siblings (0.250). He suffered from extensive physical and emotional disabilities, and was a strange (and largely ineffective) king.
Randall Munroe
#43. Two magnitude 9+ earthquakes this century both altered the length of the day by a tiny fraction of a second.
Randall Munroe
#44. Periodic Wall of the Elements Q. What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?
Randall Munroe
#45. What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant? - Thomas Bennett (and many others)
Randall Munroe
#46. What if every day, every human had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a turkey, and every turkey had a 1 percent chance of being turned into a human?
Randall Munroe
#47. Manhattan has been continuously inhabited for the past 3000 years, and was first settled by humans perhaps 9000 years ago.
Randall Munroe
#48. Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn't my house is mentally helpful: 'This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts,' and 'over there is the place where I do the dishes.'
Randall Munroe
#49. Introverts understand; the loneliest human in history was just happy to have a few minutes of peace and quiet.
Randall Munroe
#50. If an asteroid was very small but supermassive, could you really live on it like the Little Prince?
Randall Munroe
#51. I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite dimensions.
Randall Munroe
#52. Plausible that a professional pitcher with some time to practice could throw a golf ball faster than a baseball.
Randall Munroe
#53. Maybe we'll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence.
Randall Munroe
#54. Mutations pop up all over the place, but our redundant chromosomes help blunt this effect. By avoiding inbreeding, a population reduces the odds that rare and harmful mutations will pop up at the same place on both sides of the chromosome.
Randall Munroe
#55. If every human somehow simply disappeared from the face of the Earth, how long would it be before the last artificial light source would go out?
Randall Munroe
#56. It's not that the wind is blowing, it's what the wind is blowing.
Randall Munroe
#57. The whole process of claiming a colony (on land already occupied by other people) is awfully arbitrary in the first place. Essentially, the British built their empire by sailing around and sticking flags on random beaches.
Randall Munroe
#58. I read comics and I did science, and never really put them together until I accidentally found myself in the middle of one.
Randall Munroe
#59. To DNA, our most complex programming projects are like pocket calculators.
Randall Munroe
#60. There's no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word "NO" scrawled over and over in charred blood.
Randall Munroe
#61. As far as I know, this steak question originally came up in a lengthy 4chan thread, which quickly disintegrated into poorly informed physics tirades intermixed with homophobic slurs. There was no clear conclusion.
Randall Munroe
#62. People often wonder whether we could harvest electrical power from lightning.
Randall Munroe
#63. I mean, I guess it's just me who argues that; but I'm very vocal.
Randall Munroe
#64. If you were standing in the path of the beam, you would obviously die pretty quickly. You wouldn't really die of anything, in the traditional sense. You would just stop being biology and start being physics.
Randall Munroe
#65. By choosing the right words, you can take an idea that's happening in your head and try to make an idea like it happen in someone else's. That's what's happening right now.
Randall Munroe
#66. Given all the stress and pressure, some people would fake it. They'd want to join the club, so they'd get together with another lonely person and stage a fake soul mate encounter. They'd marry, hide their relationship problems, and struggle to present a happy face to their friends and family.
Randall Munroe
#67. In a billion years, Earth will become a second Venus.
Randall Munroe
#68. If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes? - Anonymous
Randall Munroe
#69. For starters, would your soul mate even still be alive? A hundred billion or so humans have ever lived, but only seven billion are alive now (which gives the human condition a 93 percent mortality rate). If we were all paired up at random, 90 percent of our soul mates would be long dead.
Randall Munroe
#70. Eventually, they give up, and the unexplained meteorological phenomenon is simply called a "dubstep storm," because - in the words of one researcher - "It had one hell of a drop.
Randall Munroe
#71. The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane. The
Randall Munroe
#72. The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
Randall Munroe
#73. The Mars rover Curiosity, for example, is powered by the heat from a chunk of plutonium it carries in a container on the end of a stick.
Randall Munroe
#74. X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast.
Randall Munroe
#75. But this is where it gets weird. The mole planet would be a giant sphere of meat.
Randall Munroe
#76. You don't use science to show you're right, you use science to become right.
Randall Munroe
#77. If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.
Randall Munroe
#78. Laser Pointer Q. If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
Randall Munroe
#79. A world of random soul mates would be a lonely one. Let's hope that's not what we live in.
Randall Munroe
#80. The Moon would shine as brightly as the midmorning sun, and by the end of the two minutes, the lunar regolith would be heated to a glow.
Randall Munroe
#81. As Tim Minchin put it in his song "If I Didn't Have You": Your love is one in a million; You couldn't buy it at any price. But of the 9.999 hundred thousand other loves, Statistically, some of them would be equally nice.
Randall Munroe
#82. Burning selenium can make sulfur smell like Chanel.
Randall Munroe
#83. For a small smartphone charger, if it's not warm to the touch, it's using less than a penny a year. This is true of almost any powered device.1
Randall Munroe
#84. In conclusion, if the Sun went out, we would see a variety of benefits across many areas of our lives. Are there any downsides to this scenario? We would all freeze and die.
Randall Munroe
#86. Falling from great heights is dangerous.[citation needed] A balloon could
Randall Munroe
#87. (not, as is commonly believed, because of air friction). To
Randall Munroe
#88. Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.
Randall Munroe
#89. Hans Moravec's book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind.
Randall Munroe
#90. The lesson: If the optimist says the glass is half full, and the pessimist says the glass is half empty, the physicist ducks.
Randall Munroe
#91. REENTERING SPACECRAFT HEAT UP because they're compressing the air in front of them (not, as is commonly believed, because of air friction).
Randall Munroe
#92. Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch," and would be eligible to advance to first base.
Randall Munroe
#93. Cook's The Science of Good Cooking was also helpful.
Randall Munroe
#95. Red Delicious apples, whose misleading name is a travesty.
Randall Munroe
#96. Magnitude -15 A drifting mote of dust coming to rest on a table Sometimes it's nice not to destroy the world for a change.
Randall Munroe
#97. This would be something never before seen in the history of the universe: an underground shooting star.
Randall Munroe
#98. IF YOU WANT TO transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it's generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the Internet. This isn't a new idea - it's often dubbed "SneakerNet" - and it's even how Google transfers large amounts of data internally.
Randall Munroe
#99. I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.
Randall Munroe
#100. Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to 5 feet. I don't know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase "shoot jets of blood from their eyes" in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.
Randall Munroe
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
