What If? Page 4

  The second row is trickier.

  The lithium would immediately tarnish. The beryllium is pretty toxic, so you should handle it carefully and avoid getting any dust in the air.

  The oxygen and nitrogen drift around, slowly dispersing. The neon floats away.3

  The pale yellow fluorine gas would spread across the ground. Fluorine is the most reactive, corrosive element in the periodic table. Almost any substance exposed to pure fluorine will spontaneously catch fire.

  I spoke to organic chemist Derek Lowe about this scenario.4 He said that the fluorine wouldn’t react with the neon, and “would observe a sort of armed truce with the chlorine, but everything else, sheesh.” Even with the later rows, the fluorine would cause problems as it spread, and if it came in contact with any moisture, it would form corrosive hydrofluoric acid.

  If you breathed even a trace amount, it would seriously damage or destroy your nose, lungs, mouth, eyes, and eventually the rest of you. You would definitely need a gas mask. Keep in mind that fluorine eats through a lot of potential mask materials, so you would want to test it first. Have fun!

  On to the third row!

  Half of the data here is from the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and the other half is from Look Around You.

  The big troublemaker here is phosphorus. Pure phosphorus comes in several forms. Red phosphorus is reasonably safe to handle. White phosphorus spontaneously ignites on contact with air. It burns with hot, hard-to-extinguish flames and is, in addition, quite poisonous.5

  The sulfur wouldn’t be a problem under normal circumstances; at worst, it would smell bad. However, our sulfur is sandwiched between burning phosphorus on the left . . . and the fluorine and chlorine on the right. When exposed to pure fluorine gas, sulfur—like many substances—catches fire.

  The inert argon is heavier than air, so it would just spread out and cover the ground. Don’t worry about the argon. You have bigger problems.

  The fire would produce all kinds of terrifying chemicals with names like sulfur hexafluoride. If you’re doing this inside, you’d be choked by toxic smoke and your building might burn down.

  And that’s only row three. On to row four!

  “Arsenic” sounds scary. The reason it sounds scary is a good one: It’s toxic to virtually all forms of complex life.

  Sometimes this kind of panic over scary chemicals is disproportionate; there are trace amounts of natural arsenic in all our food and water, and we handle those fine. This is not one of those times.

  The burning phosphorus (now joined by burning potassium, which is similarly prone to spontaneous combustion) could ignite the arsenic, releasing large amounts of arsenic trioxide. That stuff is pretty toxic. Don’t inhale.

  This row would also produce hideous odors. The selenium and bromine would react vigorously, and Lowe says that burning selenium “can make sulfur smell like Chanel.”

  If the aluminum survived the fire, a strange thing would happen to it. The melting gallium under it would soak into the aluminum, disrupting its structure and causing it to become as soft and weak as wet paper.6

  The burning sulfur would spill into the bromine. Bromine is liquid at room temperature, a property it shares with only one other element—mercury. It’s also pretty nasty stuff. The range of toxic compounds that would be produced by this blaze is, at this point, incalculably large. However, if you did this experiment from a safe distance, you might survive.

  The fifth row contains something interesting: technetium-99, our first radioactive brick.

  Technetium is the lowest-numbered element that has no stable isotopes. The dose from a 1-liter cube of the metal wouldn’t be enough to be lethal in our experiment, but it’s still substantial. If you spent all day wearing it as a hat—or breathed it in as dust—it could definitely kill you.

  Techneteium aside, the fifth row would be a lot like the fourth.

  On to the sixth row! No matter how careful you are, the sixth row would definitely kill you.

  This version of the periodic table is a little wider than you might be used to, since we’re inserting the lanthanide and actinide elements into rows 6 and 7. (These elements are normally shown separately from the main table to avoid making it too wide.)

  The sixth row of the periodic table contains several radioactive elements, including promethium, polonium,7 astatine, and radon. Astatine is the bad one.8

  We don’t know what astatine looks like, because, as Lowe put it, “that stuff just doesn’t want to exist.” It’s so radioactive (with a half-life measured in hours) that any large piece of it would be quickly vaporized by its own heat. Chemists suspect that it has a black surface, but no one really knows.

  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.

  Our cube would, briefly, contain more astatine than has ever been synthesized. I say “briefly” because it would immediately turn into a column of superheated gas. The heat alone would give third-degree burns to anyone nearby, and the building would be demolished. The cloud of hot gas would rise rapidly into the sky, pouring out heat and radiation.

  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.

  Dust and debris coated in astatine, polonium, and other radioactive products would rain from the cloud, rendering the downwind neighborhood completely uninhabitable.

  The radiation levels would be incredibly high. Given that it takes a few hundred milliseconds to blink, you would literally get a lethal dose of radiation in the blink of an eye.

  You would die from what we might call “extremely acute radiation poisoning”—that is, you would be cooked.

  The seventh row would be much worse.

  There are a whole bunch of weird elements along the bottom of the periodic table called transuranic elements. For a long time, many of them had placeholder names like “unununium,” but gradually they’re being assigned permanent names.

  There’s no rush, though, because most of these elements are so unstable that they can be created only in particle accelerators and don’t exist for more than a few minutes. If you had 100,000 atoms of Livermorium (element 116), after a second you’d have one left—and a few hundred milliseconds later, that one would be gone, too.

  Unfortunately for our project, the transuranic elements don’t vanish quietly. They decay radioactively. And most of them decay into things that also decay. A cube of any of the highest-numbered elements would decay within seconds, releasing a tremendous amount of energy.

  The result wouldn’t be like a nuclear explosion—it would be a nuclear explosion. However, unlike a fission bomb, it wouldn’t be a chain reaction—just a reaction. It would all happen at once.

  The flood of energy would instantly turn you—and the rest of the periodic table—to plasma. The blast would be similar to that of a medium-sized nuclear detonation, but the radioactive fallout would be much, much worse—a veritable salad of everything on the periodic table turning into everything else as fast as possible.

  A mushroom cloud would rise over the city. The top of the plume would reach up through the stratosphere, buoyed by its own heat. If you were in a populated area, the immediate casualties from the blast would be staggering, but the long-term contamination from the fallout would be even worse.

  The fallout wouldn’t be normal, everyday radioactive fallout9—it would be like a nuclear bomb that kept exploding. The debris would spread around the world, releasing thousands of times more radioactivity than the Chernobyl disaster. Entire regions would be devastated; the cleanup would stretch on for centuries.

  While collecting things is certain
ly fun, when it comes to chemical elements, you do not want to collect them all.

  1Think of the elements as dangerous, radioactive, short-lived Pokémon.

  2An eighth row may be added by the time you read this. And if you’re reading this in the year 2038, the periodic table has ten rows but all mention or discussion of it is banned by the robot overlords.

  3That is, assuming that they’re in diatomic form (e.g. O2 and N2). If the cube is in the form of single atoms, they’ll instantly combine, heating to thousands of degrees as they do.

  4Lowe is the author of the great drug research blog In the Pipeline.

  5A property that has led to its controversial use in incendiary artillery shells.

  6Search YouTube for “gallium infiltration” to see how strange this is.

  7In 2006, an umbrella tipped with polonium-210 was used to murder former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko.

  8Radon is the cute one.

  9You know, the stuff we all shrug off.

  Everybody Jump

  Q. 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)

  A. This is one of the most popular questions submitted through my website. It’s been examined before, including by ScienceBlogs and The Straight Dope. They cover the kinematics pretty well. However, they don’t tell the whole story.

  Let’s take a closer look.

  At the start of the scenario, the entire Earth’s population has been magically transported together into one place.

  This crowd takes up an area the size of Rhode Island. But there’s no reason to use the vague phrase “an area the size of Rhode Island.” This is our scenario; we can be specific. They’re actually in Rhode Island.

  At the stroke of noon, everyone jumps.

  As discussed elsewhere, it doesn’t really affect the planet. Earth outweighs us by a factor of over ten trillion. On average, we humans can vertically jump maybe half a meter on a good day. Even if the Earth were rigid and responded instantly, it would be pushed down by less than an atom’s width.

  Next, everyone falls back to the ground.

  Technically, this delivers a lot of energy into the Earth, but it’s spread out over a large enough area that it doesn’t do much more than leave footprints in a lot of gardens. A slight pulse of pressure spreads through the North American continental crust and dissipates with little effect. The sound of all those feet hitting the ground creates a loud, drawn-out roar lasting many seconds.

  Eventually, the air grows quiet.

  Seconds pass. Everyone looks around.

  There are a lot of uncomfortable glances. Someone coughs.

  A cell phone comes out of a pocket. Within seconds, the rest of the world’s five billion phones follow. All of them—even those compatible with the region’s towers—are displaying some version of “NO SIGNAL.” The cell networks have all collapsed under the unprecedented load. Outside Rhode Island, abandoned machinery begins grinding to a halt.

  The T. F. Green Airport in Warwick, Rhode Island, handles a few thousand passengers a day. Assuming they got things organized (including sending out scouting missions to retrieve fuel), they could run at 500 percent capacity for years without making a dent in the crowd.

  The addition of all the nearby airports doesn’t change the equation much. Nor does the region’s light rail system. Crowds climb on board container ships in the deep-water port of Providence, but stocking sufficient food and water for a long sea voyage proves a challenge.

  Rhode Island’s half-million cars are commandeered. Moments later, I-95, I-195, and I-295 become the sites of the largest traffic jam in the history of the planet. Most of the cars are engulfed by the crowds, but a lucky few get out and begin wandering the abandoned road network.

  Some make it past New York or Boston before running out of fuel. Since the electricity is probably not on at this point, rather than find a working gas pump, it’s easier to just abandon the car and steal a new one. Who can stop you? All the cops are in Rhode Island.

  The edge of the crowd spreads outward into southern Massachusetts and Connecticut. Any two people who meet are unlikely to have a language in common, and almost nobody knows the area. The state becomes a chaotic patchwork of coalescing and collapsing social hierarchies. Violence is common. Everybody is hungry and thirsty. Grocery stores are emptied. Fresh water is hard to come by and there’s no efficient system for distributing it.

  Within weeks, Rhode Island is a graveyard of billions.

  The survivors spread out across the face of the world and struggle to build a new civilization atop the pristine ruins of the old. Our species staggers on, but our population has been greatly reduced. Earth’s orbit is completely unaffected—it spins along exactly as it did before our species-wide jump.

  But at least now we know.

  A Mole of Moles

  Q. What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?

  —Sean Rice

  A. Things get a bit gruesome.

  First, some definitions.

  A mole is a unit. It’s not a typical unit, though. It’s really just a number—like “dozen” or “billion.” If you have a mole of something, it means you have 602,214,129,000,000,000,000,000 of them (usually written 6.022 × 1023). It’s such a big number1 because it’s used for counting numbers of molecules, which there are a lot of.

  A mole is also a type of burrowing mammal. There are a handful of types of moles, and some of them are truly horrifying.2

  So what would a mole of moles—602,214,129,000,000,000,000,000 animals—look like?

  First, let’s start with wild approximations. This is an example of what might go through my head before I even pick up a calculator, when I’m just trying to get a sense of the quantities—the kind of calculation where 10, 1, and 0.1 are all close enough that we can consider them equal:

  A mole (the animal) is small enough for me to pick up and throw.[citation needed ] Anything I can throw weighs 1 pound. One pound is 1 kilogram. The number 602,214,129,000,000,000,000,000 looks about twice as long as a trillion, which means it’s about a trillion trillion. I happen to remember that a trillion trillion kilograms is how much a planet weighs.

  . . . if anyone asks, I did not tell you it was okay to do math like this.

  That’s enough to tell us that we’re talking about a pile of moles on the scale of a planet. It’s a pretty rough estimate, since it could be off by a factor of thousands in either direction.

  Let’s get some better numbers.

  An eastern mole (Scalopus aquaticus) weighs about 75 grams, which means a mole of moles weighs:

  That’s a little over half the mass of our moon.

  Mammals are largely water. A kilogram of water takes up a liter of volume, so if the moles weigh 4.52 × 1022 kilograms, they take up about 4.52 × 1022 liters of volume. You might notice that we’re ignoring the pockets of space between the moles. In a moment, you’ll see why.

  The cube root of 4.52 × 1022 liters is 3562 kilometers, which means we’re talking about a sphere with a radius of 2210 kilometers, or a cube 2213 miles on each edge.3

  If these moles were released onto the Earth’s surface, they’d fill it up to 80 kilometers deep—just about to the (former) edge of space:

  This smothering ocean of high-pressure meat would wipe out most life on the planet, which could—to reddit’s horror—threaten the integrity of the DNS system. So doing this on Earth is definitely not an option.

  Instead, let’s gather the mol
es in interplanetary space. Gravitational attraction would pull them into a sphere. Meat doesn’t compress very well, so it would undergo only a little bit of gravitational contraction, and we’d end up with a mole planet slightly larger than the Moon.

  The moles would have a surface gravity of about one-sixteenth of Earth’s—similar to that of Pluto. The planet would start off uniformly lukewarm—probably a bit over room temperature—and the gravitational contraction would heat the deep interior by a handful of degrees.

  But this is where it gets weird.

  The mole planet would be a giant sphere of meat. It would have a lot of latent energy (there are enough calories in the mole planet to support the Earth’s current population for 30 billion years). Normally, when organic matter decomposes, it releases much of that energy as heat. But throughout the majority of the planet’s interior, the pressure would be over 100 megapascals, which is high enough to kill all bacteria and sterilize the mole remains—leaving no microorganisms to break down the mole tissue.

  Closer to the surface, where the pressure would be lower, there would be another obstacle to decomposition—the interior of a mole planet would be low in oxygen. Without oxygen, the usual decomposition couldn’t happen, and the only bacteria that would be able to break down the moles would be those that don’t require oxygen. While inefficient, this anaerobic decomposition can unlock quite a bit of heat. If continued unchecked, it would heat the planet to a boil.

  But the decomposition would be self-limiting. Few bacteria can survive at temperatures above about 60°C, so as the temperature went up, the bacteria would die off, and the decomposition would slow. Throughout the planet, the mole bodies would gradually break down into kerogen, a mush of organic matter that would—if the planet were hotter—eventually form oil.