Concentrating All of Earth's Lightning Into the Same Place



Randall Munroe of xkcd spends an awful lot of time and brain power answering theoretical questions in his What If? series (previously at Neatorama). For example, one question is "If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time?" The answer is Australia, not because it's the largest country (it is 6th), but because it's the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, which tends to point more to the center of the Milky Way.

Dumb questions can lead to a lot of learning. In the video above, the question is "If all the lightning strikes happening in the world on any given day all happened in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?" My first thought was that everyone would avoid that place, and that is certainly one of the consequences. But to understand the implications, we must first learn a few things about lightning, which is well worth the time it takes for Munroe to get to the actual question in this video. Spoiler alert: if it happened, it would look awesome. From a distance.


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