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If you throw a plastic Whiffle ball across our toy room, it’s likely that it’s going to travel in a curved path over the jumble of assorted blocks, staring toddlers, and DVDs that are NO TOUCH, and shouldn’t even be on the floor anyhow. It’ll start low, arc upward, and then fall back into a downward trajectory before plopping onto the floor and rolling to a stop.
The ball doesn’t travel in a straight line. I mean, unless you really zing it. In the backyard, where there’s more space, you can really zing it, but the eventual outcome remains the same: It’s going to lose altitude. That’s called gravity, baby.
But what if gravity said, “Screw this, man. You guys do whatever the hell you want.” Then, you could really chuck that thing, and it’d just keep going.
It would sail in a perfectly straight line, whiffing past curious peasant farmers, exotic and surprised animals, and foreign dishes that you or I might find gross. Onward it would sail, until it came back and hit you in the back of the head 30.516605 days later, assuming both that you could hurl it at 34 miles-per-hour, and remember exactly where you’d been standing.
And sure, that might be really cool, but what if everyone did it? Then we’d have to crawl around everywhere we went, or risk being pelted by multiple transcontinental Whiffle balls, and the sky would be all dark and whiffly-sounding. And maybe not everyone has access to a Whiffle ball, so people in distant lands would have to throw other stuff, like funny hats, passports, or Berlitz language tapes.
They’d have to pass a law, and get all the countries to agree: Don’t throw things around the world, just to try to hit yourself in the back of your own head, thirty days later.
You seem to know things about Whiffle Ball science the rest of us don’t know. All those holes? in a white (yellow), plastic ball? traveling in a non-vacuum environment? Definitely would NOT have the same issues with wind resistance and inertia and bumping into helicopters and condors that a regular, mortal baseball would have.
Also, impressed you actually calculated the time the ball would take to orbit the earth, knowing the earth’s circumference and the ball’s (arbitrary?) speed.
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I think you’ve just come up with the solution to the world fuel crisis! Gravity be damned! Minimum kinetic energy needed for all movement and lifting. YOU’RE BRILLIANT!!!
Lmao at whiffly-sounding!!! It’s all fun and games until people start launching bowling balls!
Of course, if these things were really travling in a straight line, then they’d leave Earth altogether. I decided not to bog myself down by thinking about it too much. Besides, if gravity can talk, then surely it can be selective about its effect on Whiffle balls.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Shaka, when the walls fell. Sokath, his eyes open. Zinda, his face black, his eyes red. Temarc. The river Temarc, in winter.
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Whiffly-sounding. I’m totally going to steal that - Should the need ever arise. Which now that I’m thinking about it - I doubt that need will ever arise.
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Yes, but is what is the airspeed velocity compared to that of an unladen swallow?
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