2993: Ingredients

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Ingredients

Title text: Add main-belt asteroids to taste.

Explanation

This comic jokes that it is possible, and perhaps intended, to use the five largest moons in the outer solar system (the Galilean moons and Titan) as ingredients to create a “better” planet that has the “coolest” features. Apparently, though, Randall couldn't actually think of anything cool that Ganymede and Callisto would contribute, so these have just been used as 'filler'. (However, Ganymede does have a magnetic field, which is kind of cool....)

Note that Earth's moon is the fifth-largest moon of the solar system overall (Europa is the sixth), so it would have been included had "outer solar system" not been specified.

Name of moon	Ingredient	Volume (billion (10⁹) km3)	Surface area (million (10⁶) km2)	Mass (sextillion (10²¹) kg)	Explanation
Io	sulfur	25.3	41.7	89.4	Io is composed of hundreds of active volcanoes which produce plumes of sulfur and sulfur dioxide.
Europa	oceans	15.9	30.9	48.0	Europa is believed to have a subsurface ocean of liquid water below its icy crust.
Titan	hydrocarbons	71.6	83.3	134.5	Titan has a dense atmosphere of nitrogen, methane and other minor components, leading to the formation of hydrocarbon clouds and heavy organonitrogen haze.
Ganymede	filler	76.6	87.2	148.2	Randall considers Ganymede and Callisto to have no special features and uses them merely as “filler” for the combined planet.
Callisto		58.7	73.0	107.6

If all of these moons were lumped together, the total volume of “Randall's planet” would be 248 billion km³, assuming no further material compaction, with a surface area of 191 million km². This is about 1½ times the volume of Mars, or roughly a 15% larger diameter. The combined mass, however, would be smaller than that of Mars.

The title text takes it further, treating asteroids as a “to-taste” ingredient in this “recipe”, more like preparing a food dish rather than making a new Mars-sized planet.

There are a number of science fiction works that posit that advanced alien civilizations left puzzles in the solar system for future humans to solve. Examples for this trope are Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds and Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys. The Arthur C. Clarke stories The Sentinel and Encounter in the Dawn (and the more well-known 2001: A Space Odyssey book and film treatments that they later helped inspire) each feature various partial treatments of this concept. Caltech Professor David Goodstein also speculated in The Mechanical Universe the possibility that Saturn is an alien message system.

Transcript

[A planet is shown with several different features like oceans and large lakes as well as and craters. It seems like the continent is fused together from five different segments, with cracks between where there is either ocean or rivers. There are four labels above the planet with lines going down to different areas of the planet, but not necessarily pointing to any particular part on the surface, but rather to the entire planet:]

Sulfur chemistry from Io

Cool oceans from Europa

Hydrocarbons from Titan

Ganymede and Callisto (filler)

[Caption beneath the panel:]

Scientists now think the five biggest outer solar system moons are actually just ingredients; we're supposed to combine them to create a single Mars-sized planet that's cooler than any of them.

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Discussion

Added a quick draft of an explanation. Is it good? 172.68.147.164 07:44, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

sign your damn comment Caliban (talk) 07:16, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Be more f'ing polite!172.70.85.138 08:59, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

How hard would this really be? I feel like we could do this by messing with different orbits and just crashing the moons into each other.Anonymouscript (talk) 20:42, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Hard if you don't want to change everything into molten lava temporarily. 172.71.166.61 08:21, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

I think 'temporarily' doesn't sound too bad... ;) 172.70.91.72 10:34, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Isn't this the plot of the first Ratchet & Clank game? 172.68.22.98 (talk) 22:26, 3 October 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I was happy to see someone reference one of my favourite game series, a game of which I played in full, then I realize it's been about 20 years, I in no way remember the plot, LOL! I remember starting out at the beginning, and I remember exploiting a money glitch with a megaphone weapon to be able to afford the best weapon. :) (What's funny is that while most of my possessions are lost in storage over multiple chaotic moves, my PS2 games managed to survive and are nice and accessible). NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:46, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

The magnetic field is caused by the iron in Earth's core, is it not? Thus making a moon with a magnetic field a filler for good reasons. --172.70.211.143 07:59, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm not a chemist, but has anyone given any thought to alternate definitions of "cool"? Could combining some of these ingredients result in a reaction that gives off heat, cooling the resultant planetoid? 172.71.131.105 (talk) 16:33, 20 November 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Voice actor speculation

Since we're rapidly approaching number 3000, let's designate voice actors to the xkcd cast.

Beret Guy could be voiced by Michael Kovach, doing the same voice as he does for N from Murder Drones.

Black Hat could be voiced by JamsDX, with the same voice he did for X in his cover of Obituary.

And so on. Caliban (talk) 07:46, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

It would help if I knew who either of those were, or even the things that they are described as doing. And I suspect my own prospective choices would be similarly unknown to you. ;) 172.70.85.62 08:35, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

here's the n voice clips and the obituary cover i was referring to, hope this helps! Caliban (talk) 13:03, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

You can do whatever you like but it is not a part of explain xkcd or xkcd... --Kynde (talk) 12:17, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but this is irrelevant isn't it? /John Cleese voice --172.70.211.143 07:59, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

Can someone explain what this voice acted XKCD is to me? I have not heard about it before now. -- Pego (talk) 17:47, 7 October 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It's seemingly just a random speculation. There are the what-if YouTube videos, but they are merely narrated, not voice-acted for characters. It's like "who would you like to play <character> if/when they film <favourite book>" as a fantasy (if not outright fantastical) casting decision that says more about the answerer (whether they think of Sam Vimes as more Clint Eastwood or Pete Postlethwaite, for example) than the source material. Or "what three people, living or dead, would you like to host a dinner party for?" (Which, in my case, would definitely involve the stipulation of absolutely not being dead, whoever I did choose.) 172.70.160.188 22:26, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Assuming optimum preparation (and the ability to put each part of each moon where you wanted it), what characteristics would this planet have? 172.71.151.32 (talk) 18:06, 7 October 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I'm putting this in my video game and giving Randall credit. He deserves some cash for this idea lol -P?sych??otic?pot??at???o (talk) 16:05, 8 October 2024 (UTC)