MeIt’s a pretty safe bet that no one will fill the solar system with soup until Jupiter’s orbit. For one thing, it requires a lot of soup — 2 x 10 39 liters, which is 10 42 calories’ worth, or more energy than the sun has put out in its lifetime. As such, it’s unlikely that we’ll see a soupy solar system anytime soon.

But that fact didn’t stop a five-year-old girl named Amelia from asking about the possibilities on the website. xkcd.comhosted and written by Randall Munroe, 37, bestselling author of 2014 what if? and the recently released sequel what if? 2Asked by Amelia, Munroe responded, applying the opening chapters of the new book to what he calls the Superiter. and annihilates everything trapped within, cutting through a significant portion of the Milky Way.

“I liked the specificity of the questions,” Munro says. “I mean, why soup? The questions I get from little kids are always the best because they’re not put together by adults who understand a lot. It’s like we’re pushing the concept together.”

Munro makes it his mission to keep our curiosity satisfied. what if? 2, like the original, is fanciful to ask, but the answers are completely and playfully packed with informative questions. If a T. rex were released in New York City, how many humans would it have to eat in a day to stay alive? (About half a human, or equivalent to 55,000 calories.) Can eat clouds (Perhaps, but you have to squeeze out all the air first. The cloud shouldn’t be bigger than your house. Its size contains about a liter of water, so a human How long does it take to fill an Olympic-sized pool with your saliva? (Considering that the average human produces about 500 milliliters of saliva per day. , about 8,345 years.)

questions throughout what if? 2 Equal parts brilliant, gross, and amazingly silly, the answers are thorough, deeply researched, and a lot of fun. Both books flow naturally from Munro’s previous life, though they can be somewhat circumstantial.

A graduate of Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia, Munro studied physics, mathematics, and computer engineering, and spent his junior and senior years doing an internship at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. I was able to. His 3D visualization of the prototype Mars plane that Langley engineers were trying to develop, and his system of robot navigation.

“My job was to have the robot run around the lab,” says Munroe.

The work was exciting enough—in fact, more exciting than the time Munro spent in class at Christopher Newport. “I was drawing something as I listened, an invention I wanted to make, a little stickman running around and having a little fight.”

Those scribbles eventually became a series of works that Munro eventually wanted to share with the world through his website. It turns out that even the most imaginative name he could come up with had already been claimed.

“We didn’t want anything with an O in it because it could be mistaken for a zero,” he says. “And I didn’t have to use a lowercase L because it could be mistaken for a 1.” It made him completely pointless xkcd.com— the domain he claimed was quickly filled with scanned versions of his graffiti-filled notebooks. He shared it with his friends, and his friends started sharing them with their own — and the site’s next one began to grow.

Many of the drawing subjects were related to mathematics and science, and eventually people started writing questions. “They were like, ‘Me and my friends were debating whether Superman could dodge a bullet without creating a shock wave.’ It doesn’t look like a question to ask, and we agreed that you would be a good person to ask.’ Maybe I should have been insulted, but the truth is they was right, so I spent like the next six hours researching these questions. This will obviously cause confusion among the residents near his hometown of Metropolis.

Munro found himself enjoying the time spent answering such fanciful questions so much that he posted a note on the site soliciting more questions. what if? Was born. The book became a sensation and was translated into 35 languages, making him number one in New York. Times bestseller list.

what if? 2 Continuing in the same spirit, including another question about bullets. Specifically, if the bullet could somehow be placed at the exact point where it reached the apex of the arc and lost velocity, would it be possible to catch one that was fired straight through? (Answer: yes, but It gets hot to the touch, so wear a catcher’s mitt.)

Just because he’s kidding about science doesn’t mean Munro isn’t serious about it. Munro sometimes despairs of us living in an age of scientific ignorance, or at least misinformation, where all sorts of false beliefs about vaccines and climate change are prevalent. , the age of the earth, etc. Part of it, he believes, stems from a mere confusion about what is true and what is not, and that his research has created a sort of no-judgment zone for those who feel insecure about science. I would like to provide

“I don’t want to look like the one person in my class who doesn’t understand what’s going on,” he says. ’ So I think it’s very important to understand the idea that everyone is confused about scientific thinking. , I’m just trying to figure things out, and it’s okay to be confused.

When Munro is in a position to correct misconceptions, he relies on facts and presents them as neutrally as possible. “For those of you who think the earth is 6,000 years old, you can say, ‘Hey, have you seen this cool piece of paper? was underground, but now shows that it is above ground.

But taking into account such politicized third-rail topics doesn’t occupy most of the space in Munro’s mind. what if? 2For example, if the expansion of the universe had stopped by now, how long would it take to drive to the edge of the universe, assuming we observed a speed limit of 65 miles per hour? (4.8 x 10 17 multiplied years, or 35 million times the age of the universe so far, 13.8 billion years.) If you were to fly blindly across the Milky Way, what is your chance of hitting a star? (Only 1 in 10 billion — galaxies It’s an almost empty space.) How many toasters running all the time do you need to heat an average-sized house? If you decide to make , you’ll be using about 30 loaves per hour.)

Need this information?no are you happy are you really happy Have that? Almost certainly so. Science isn’t easy, but in Munro’s capable hands, it’s sure to be fun.

write destination Jeffrey Kluger (jeffrey.kluger@time.com).