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I love how 5 year-olds see the world.

5yo mind: The Moon is up, so if you have a fire pole, you slide down, to Earth! How long does that take?

(Years of KSP experience later...)

Oof... Up isn't really what I thought up was, and neither is down. It makes more sense now, and almost less sense at the same time if you try to explain it to anyone.

I have a 2 year old. I can't wait for this wild journey!

Absolutely a fun read!

Curiously, it doesn't answer the question.

Needs a (2018) in the title: https://web.archive.org/web/20180523010341/https://what-if.x...

Unfortunately, Randall hasn't added any posts since then.

I wonder if there just stopped being interesting questions to answer. I remember him saying somewhere that he got a lot of questions that read as if the asker was trying to create a specific answer.

Randall Munroe has (re)started those What-Ifs in a simplified form for a New York Times column called "Good Question" [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/column/good-question-randall-munroe-...

Thank you for this. I'm shocked, I had no idea! I wish he would have put a What-If blog post up pointing people to this column.

It's pretty telling that What-If has 573 subscribers on Inoreader (the RSS feed reader), but Good Question only has 3!

Earth-Moon Fire Pole