That seems like a good classification of virtually all what if? experiments: eyeballs in or eyeballs out. Mostly it is out though...

This is a tatic in some sci-fy novels for ships so they can do crazy meanuevurs in space/atmospheres. The most recent I've that uses this is the Skyward Series by Brandon Sanderson (book #1 is called Starsight). Pretty neat. He consulted with pilots with his ship design and had to redo the whole cockpit basically so the fights he wanted to be done could actually be done without the pilots dying/severe injury (though he still uses a technology to reduce the effect of very high impulse).

Hey Destin!

Laces out! No wait, eyeballs in!

What if we hired a driver with no eyeballs?

I laughed at that one

At least technology...

specifically all-caps... *inhales... SCIENCE*

As carcinization turns organisms into crabs, a similar process turns any "What if?" style question involving physics into a discussion of building a particle accelerator.

lol nice one

I love how quickly it was vetoed to make things more interesting.

Great phrase

👏 also 1000th like

💯

No, you're wrong. NASCAR's rules are the one thing holding the universe together.

beautiful

As soon as we went from centrifuge to tube, I knew this would be the inevitable result

Aww not again !

Nah, the most xkcd sentence is “you wouldn’t really die of anything in the traditional sense, you’d simply cease being biology and become physics.”

​@@DestructivelyPhasedthat one's a classic 😂

​@@DestructivelyPhased Oh no Mr Stark I don't feel so physics

Ah, the self-driving racecar hearse variant.

This was Elon's original plan, but then he bought twitter. Similar if slower result.@@jkid1134

Or alternatively, "driver, but not necessarily alive" as in an AI-piloted vehicle. The car can only go as fast as the sensors and computers can process what's happening and make decisions.

Gaygenate

@@trbz_8745 Well, at that point you might still be limited by the acceleration tolerance of the electronics. I believe most computer motherboards can survive 100 gees for short periods, but I'm not sure about long timeframes. Artillery fuzes and shell guidance computers can also survive peak loads of thousands of gees, but again I'm not sure about sustained loads. I would assume 100 gees sustained would probably be a reasonable upper limit for a purpose-built unit with enough processing power for a self-driving race car. The tires and engine would probably give out long before reaching that, though.

IIRC the drivers were hitting 6 Gs in the turns

Looked it up, apparently the pole in qualifying was averaged at 233mph/375kmh on a 1.5 mile/2.4 km course. Yea that sounds like it would lead to some new and interesting doctor's visits. Also minor correction, that was CART, not Indycar.

CART not Indy (Mandatory "Tony George ruined american open wheel racing") Built to the rules, Indy cars weren't as fast. People started to notice drivers walking strangely and having other obvious neurological symptoms after qualifying laps. Then after some research they realized they were hitting 5+ Gs in the turns every lap and that it was very likely someone - or multiple someones - would blackout during the race. Only race that CART ever cancelled for driver safety.

Was this the same event that cause driver's retinas to separate? or was it corneas

@@VekhGaming The modern Indycar series considers CART, ChampCar, and the Indy Racing League to be predecessors. In 1999 Juan Pablo Montoya won the CART championship and Greg Ray won the IRL championship, and today they're both considered Indycar champions.

Awesome idea! But then the structural integrity of the track would probably be a limitation, assuming you can engineer the massive machine to lift and spin a NASCAR track. If you can replace the asphalt with some kind of carbon nanotube material, is it still the same track? What if you reinforce it with an outer layer of super strong material?

I like the idea of a NASCAR track frisbee, but chatGPT says it can't exist :(@@roryschussler

Or, speed up time relative to anyone else on the track.

@@DirtyMardi "Q:It's simple, change the gravitational constant of the universe."

@@roryschussler And what if you replace a section of the track with carbon nanotube? What if over time you gradually replace the track with the nanotube? Is it still the Track of Daytona?

That's magnificent

The story goes that the inspectors found a different issue with his car, and tired of his antics, remove the fuel tank so he'd have to have it towed back to the garage. He then hops in the car, starts it right up, and drives off while yelling about there's one more issue they didn't catch.

​@@gamemeister27how do you remove a fuel tank with fuel in it??

And Robert Duvall said that in Days of Thunder! But it's a pretty boring way to cheat! The Chaparral 2J had better downforce than anything in 1970 because it had an extra snowmobile engine powering two fans which sucked it down to the ground. I had to look that up when I saw how weird the car looked in Gran Turismo LOL

@@GewelReal you're gonna have to ask someone who knows way more about mechanic stuff

The challenge is not move a car around a track, rather "get a human being around a track" not sure if yours fulfills that requirement.

cheater ;-)

It is not true that all racetracks are toplogically circles - Suzuka in Japan, for example, is a figure-8. But I think the solution works anyway.

@@Adarisayou’d have trouble getting the arm under the bridge at Suzuka I think

Oh, so it has a bridge/tunnel for the intersection, not both roads on the same level?🤔😅 Both roads on the same level would make the race much more interesting: "See you at the crossroads" (splat)😮.@@MikeyAntonakakis

True! Toughness is the area under the stress strain curve.

Yes! Words have specific meanings in a science/engineering context.

This is a safe space for pedantry.

That's one point for PumpkinsAmongUs

I'm sorry but you didn't say "Um, actually" so I can't give it to you

Channeling black hat.

“Caaaarrrrlllllll!!!!”

"What are you doing up honey? It's 1am" "Oh just finishing putting together the barbeque" "What's this part for?" "Oh that's the capacitor for the electromagnet, it'll accelerate the- god damnit"

I feel like his voice sounds exactly like I expected haha

Yeah, the lack of restrictions on preventing the competition from moving quickly is a significant oversight that the video fails to address. That sort of thing could end up being a serious issue when training AIs on how to perform tasks. The rules that humans claim they are following are always a small subset of the ones that they actually are following.

I really hope so

So far these are all from the books, so no, the running gag is ending life on earth or worse.

@@mrptr9013 Why not both!

It's like the way that all efforts to perfect transportation end up reinventing the passenger train.

That or "oops we accidently made a black hole" or "oops, we accidently made a particle accelerator followed by a black hole"

That's a funny way of spelling "squishy meatbag."

In other words, their balls were too heavy to go this fast

g-suit might not be the answer because it's not the same as fighter jet that pull you 9-10G downward. F1 are pulling 5-6G sideway. I think g-suit is just squeeze your legs and let less blood flow down when it got pulled. All the sideway protections are mostly there now. And the main thing is, they don't want to make it faster than this, it's very dangerous already at this speed. It probably capped at 7G,370 km/hr forever. Still, both are amazing enough that somehow, we as human can train to endure it hundreds of times per flight/race.

I think they should drive them remotely, and eliminate all those annoying safety rules. It'd make for far more interesting races. You might want to avoid being in the audience, however, due to the increased risk of taking a F1 car to the face.

CART (now IndyCar) actually had to cancel a race at Texas Motor Speedway in 2001 because of this

Given how Randall follows the vocal conventions as the rest of Neptune studios productions, whether or not he pitched it, they're definitely the driving force behind it.

@@punkdigerati KZfaq videos are just a medium for the delivery of content. It's the content that matters. And the content is made by Randall Munroe.

@@Li-Nuss you can read the same video description as I did to see the people and corporation behind this.

What's crazy is that minutephysics was inspired by xkcd and they now get to work together

that is awesome@@adityakhanna113

There is only a slight divergence between the force and the desired "down" direction. So that should not be a problem. Instead the rotation will add a centripetal force adding to the G-force. This reduces the max G-force the vehicle can experience to keep the driver safe.

I was about to say the same thing. One could probably calculate an acceleration profile which minimizes jerk or snap around the track, and simply take a couple integrals to find the time. But since that acceleration profile is periodic, I personally think a clever punch line would be to treat it as a wavefunction, put it through a Fourier transformation, and riff on the solution's units & dimensionality. Kinda like the previous "What If?" answer on fuel efficiency as a unit of area corresponding to the cross-section of a hypothetical ribbon of fuel along a highway.

I do appreciate that he went for the re-orientation sphere, though.

As far as I'm concerned this might as well be in a foreign language.

@@Frisbieinstein sorry, English is not my native language, and I tend to ramble...

"Here comes the juice!"

Also racing ships have gyroscopes in them to orient the pilots into the safest position.

ooh and they also had these really cool pilot seats that would swivel against the g-forces just like the ball thingy in the video

yeah, that's a huge problem for any hard-scifi witer that want human crews in space battles the following is a rant saying that drones would be great in space battles : (edit : disregard that, I fucked up my maths, you only need a 1-2 Gs to juke a laser at 5 light-seconds, the argument do not stand) (at least if you have the tech to make laser weapons effective at those ranges, but if you have torch-drives, I assume that you have at least hard-UV lasers) (unmmaned crafts still make sense in space because they are much more resilient to thing that would kill us, but g-forces are not one of them) (at least not in space battles) (edit edit : I also fucked up the earth-moon distance, it's 1 light-second, not 8) Given the fact that you can't dodge light-speed weapons (i.e. lasers, maser, xraser, etc) (and, realistically, close to light-speed, like particle beams and macrons accelerators) because you literally cannot see them coming, you have to randomly juke so that the enemy cannot know where you are due to light-lag, which mean you have to move fast enough that your ship isn't in the same place at all in a whatever your light-time distance is. So if you are engaging an enemy at 5 light-second, which is an enormous distance (for reference, the moon is at roughly 1 light-seconds from Earth), you have 5 second to move before they return fire with perfect accuracy. Having battle like that would be hell on any human crew, so the solution would be to have battle at 20-30 light-seconds or, much more practical, use unmanned ships ! You could even use highly mobile drones swarms with very fast, very small ships bouncing and refocusing a laser generated by a bigger ship much further away to engage enemies at maybe half to a third of a light-second ! (yeah, "close-quarter" has a different meaning is space) Or you could go the other way and say "fuck light-speed weapons" and use missiles and coil-guns instead. They have the same problems but at much, much closer range. But that's boring.

I love The Expanse, but I'm skeptical that drugs or chemicals could increase a human's g tolerance without killing them. G forces kill because they cause tissue to physically crush itself, so what could you inject that would counteract that? Something like embalming fluid??

Also time attack. Google "KERS Kels" and that's not even close to the craziest one...

Super Modifieds. They race short ovals. I don't know if they have rules today but the whole series was built on an anything goes basis. Just had to have 4 tires and an engine that powers it.

@@thejman3489 those are the ones with the gigantic rear wings, right?

@alimanski7941 Yes. The wings were originally on Sprint Cars and Sprint Cars still use it. The super modifieds took the wing a step further and made it lift up going down the straights, reducing drag, and goes down in the corners, increasing down force.

my first reaction for what a car that was reasonably expected to race an oval track without a rulebook or budget would end up being a hybrid of an unlimited hillclimber, a supermodified, and a Group-C sportscar, likely with a turbine engine for speedways and high-displacement piston for short-tracks.

4 likes in a month? That was fast...

Also This is conCENing

Not really going around the track anymore, though, are they?

@@abraveastronaut No, but they’re still alive.

The person in question would still have to contend with hard radiation from small particles that happen to be nearby, and from the gamma/x-ray radiation from the "spectator lights". So, yes, you could race "particles" this way, but for humans, the limit would be how much radiation do you agree to take to your balls.

Isn't an orbit by definition a constant acceleration towards the centre? Just because we don't feel significant g-forces in freefall around the earth, doesn't mean we wouldn't while orbiting on the scale of 1-2km circumference

@@dielaughing73 the point of the OP is to compensate for the human-squashing acceleration by entering an orbit of a small black hole. so, in principle, if you set things just right, you could be orbiting a tiny black hole and doing just 3G inwards and that would be faster than doing a zero-G orbit around the same gravity well. You would still have to contend with the radiation though.

@@dielaughing73 As long as every bit of your body is being accelerated at the same rate it might as well be standing still. It's when some parts of the body are accelerated more than others and they bang into each to balance things out that you turn into goo.

@@Wick9876 that's making my head hurt a bit but I can't find a way to refute it. I imagine you'd get a bit dizzy or disoriented still from spinning around so fast..

Miniature? It's 27 km long

@@galoomba5559 On the other hand, the "cars" are very small.

@@galoomba5559 my bad. I mean the cars are miniature, the track is humongous.

What other books are there? I only knowing these 2

@@foximacentauri7891 Thing Explainer is great fun.

@@foximacentauri7891 there is how to and i think there is also a why if however it may have just been a parody inside the book

You'd want the event horizon to be 2/3 the track radius. That way the track lines up with the photon sphere, the radius at which light orbits in a circle. Any lower than that and the light would plunge into the black hole.

Drone car racing would be an amazing sport

such a sport would be required to make power-ups _mandatory_. Nascar with banana peels and turtle shells is something I might actually watch!

They already race RC cars. Look at multirotor FPV racing, 3D heli aerobatics and pan car racing to get an idea. If you look at top level video gaming, the reaction times needed are superhuman.

or even better - allow ai. at first it will be the same driving aids used in road cars but over time better ai will be developed that can completely replace the human driver.

Yeah. I think he could write a book or two as well. Hey I have a brilliant idea! He should name it "What if" just like his youtube channel!

ahah, now that's thinking with portals hell, let's go a step further. Change the laws to recognize a fertilized egg as a human. Think how much we could improve the record!

"It's a stretch of the definition of human and alive" Religious lunatics disagree

MinutePhysics used to collab with xkcd a couple of times. Also, if you checked the credits/the about page on the channel... These videos are also produced by the MinutePhysics guys ;)