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:
[A graph is shown. The X axis is labeled Number of Weather Balloon Launches Per Day. It’s logarithmic, with ticks in powers of 10, and values shown at 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 1 million, 1 billion, and 1 trillion. The Y axis is labeled Weather Model Accuracy, no values are shown. The plot starts above the mark for 1 balloon, at about 40% of the maximum value of the curve, it quickly rises through a point labelled “Current Rate”, at about 4000 launches per day and 85% of the maximum. The maximum value is reached at 100 million, plateaus until 10 billion, and then reduces even more rapidly down to perhaps 15% maximum accuracy above the 10 trillion mark.]
Source: https://xkcd.com/3107/
Seems like a climate change proposal to me 👍
I’m going to need someone to adjust the model for instances in which an F-22 starts shooting them down.
“Dabei war’n dort am Horizont
Nur 99 Luftballons.”The red ones go faster
dramatically removes sunshades
dear god… the balloons are gay…
How about when an unhinged person in the White House starts defunding NWS and launches get cancelled (yes - happening already).
All the fighter jets in the world couldn’t make a tiny dent in one trillion balloons.
Not if we build it one trillion of them.
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.
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.
We need more jets right away!
We launch over a thousand weather balloons per day?
It seems reasonable given that
spacethe atmosphere is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.
My first thought was “who’s launching all these leather balloons?”.
kinky scientists
