2049: Unfulfilling Toys

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Explanation

Weather forecasting is an extremely difficult task, even if it is only for five days. In numerical models, extremely small errors in initial values double roughly every five days for variables such as temperature and wind velocity. So most meteorologists provide us with only a five-day forecast.

In this comic Randall takes this to the extreme by first showing a Five-Day Forecast and then progressing to five-month, year, million, billion and finally trillion-year forecasts, leading to weather patterns that we don't regularly see.

Since the first weather symbol is the same in all six rows, we can assume it indicates the weather today and not tomorrow, in a trillion years, etc. It is only in the second panel of each row that time has passed per the row's label. Consequently, the last column gives the predictions for four days, four months, ..., four trillion years from today.

When moving past the five-day prediction, the forecast is just a qualified guess based on the time of year. In a month it is Christmas as shown in the second panel of the second row. Then it is January and February so snow is likely, but certainly not something that happens on all days of a winter month.

Looking at the five-year forecast, guesses are made as to what the weather will be like at the same time of year. For these first three predictions the weather symbols are all of the same three types: Sun, clouds and some kind of precipitation, rain or snow, with the temperature ranging from 21 to 44 °F (-6.1 to 6.6 °C) - winter temperatures.

Then we go into the far future, jumping a million years from panel to panel. But still the weather symbols stay the same. In 3 million years, however, aliens (or advanced humans) attack with energy beams from flying saucers. They are gone a million years later. The temperature range remains the same across the panels except that it rises to 52 °F (11 °C), a possible reference to global warming, in one panel, and while the attack is going on it rises to 275 °F (135 °C).

Once we get to the billion-year mark it actually becomes more meaningful to try to predict the "weather", because now we reach the times when the Sun begins to change. Although the Sun will continue to burn hydrogen for about 5 billion years yet (while in its main sequence), it will grow in diameter as it begins to exhaust its supply of fuel. The core will contract to increase the temperature, and the outer layer will then compensate by expanding slightly. This is what is indicated in panels two and three, where the color of the Sun changes towards red as the surface becomes cooler as it expands away from the center of the Sun. The temperature will rise on Earth as indicated in the panels (105 °F = 40.5 °C and 371 °F = 188 °C). The temperature will get hot enough in about a billion years that the Earth's oceans will boil away.

Once it no longer has enough hydrogen, the Sun will expand into a red giant. This should not happen until around five billion years from now, but in the forecast it is indicated to happen in only three. Maybe this is Randall taking liberties to show what happens during this phase, which would not fit into a four-billion-year forecast. Alternatively it just indicates how uncertain these kinds of forecasts are, or a statement that we may not know for certain that it will take five not three billion years.

In any case, the fourth panel shows the temperature at Earth's position inside the red giant Sun. The color of the panel indicates that we are inside the Sun. The temperature is 71,488,106 degrees Fahrenheit (39,715,597 degrees Celsius). The current temperature of the center of the Sun is "only" 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius), and although that may rise by a factor of ten during helium fusion, that will only be at the very core and not out in the solar atmosphere reaching out to Earth. Here the temperature would only be of the order of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, since the Sun's outer temperature decreases as it increases its diameter. So this panel's temperature also makes little sense. It may involve some ambiguities regarding what the forecast means; the edge of the red giant Sun is predicted to be somewhere near the current orbit of Earth, but the position of the Earth could change. The most likely prediction at the moment is for Earth to move outward, but if the planet is engulfed by the Sun, it would spiral inward, and at some point fall apart. So in some sense "here" for the forecast could become a position deep inside the Sun, where core temperatures could reach 100 million Kelvin. The temperatures shown are unreasonably precise; they probably should have only two or at most three significant figures.

The red giant phase lasts only half a million years, so a billion years after the Sun has been a red giant its outer atmosphere will definitely have disappeared, leaving only a dim, cool white dwarf to cool down. Given Randall's version of this time schedule, then it will have had about a billion years to cool down, but would still likely be the brightest object in the sky as seen from where the Earth once was. It is not shown in the last panel, where we just see other stars of the Galaxy. The temperature is down to that of the background radiation. Today this radiation has a temperature of 2.72548 kelvin = -270.4245 °C = -454.7641 °F. That is a few degrees F colder than what is shown in the comic, which states the temperature is -452 °F = 4.26 kelvin. This higher temperature may have been chosen to reflect that even the light from other stars would increase the actual temperature.

In the last panel with trillions of years, we jump right past the Sun's red giant phase to a panel looking much like the one after five billion years with only other stars. Over the next three trillion years the stars become fewer and fewer and dimmer and dimmer as they run out of fuel and fewer new stars form. After four trillion years the background temperature decreases one degree to -453 °F as the universe keeps expanding and the wavelength of the radiation does the same, thus decreasing its temperature.

The title text is a play on comments referring to fast-changing weather on a more ordinary human timescale, such as Mark Twain's quip, "If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes."

A ten-day forecast was used in 1245: 10-Day Forecast. In 1379: 4.5 Degrees, Randall looked at the weather over long periods of time as well. in 1643: Degrees he addressed Celsius vs. Fahrenheit for measuring temperature.

Image using Celsius

There is a different user-made version for the picture, using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, in this image link.

Transcript

[A grid with six rows of five columns, where each row is labeled to the left. For each of the 30 squares a temperature is given in Fahrenheit at the top left. The rest of the square represents the weather as in a weather forecast (or some other relevant items for the comic), mainly in bright colors. Below are the six labels given above each of their five weather symbols with temperature given below these symbols description.]

Your 5-day forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A grey cloud.]

41°F

[A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.]

36°F

[A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.]

40°F

[A bright yellow sun.]

44°F

Your 5-month forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A green Christmas tree with red presents beneath it.]

29°F

[A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.]

21°F

[A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.]

24°F

[A grey cloud.]

35°F

Your 5-year forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A grey cloud.]

25°F

[A bright yellow sun.]

36°F

[A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.]

37°F

[A bright yellow sun.]

41°F

Your 5-million-year forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A bright yellow sun.]

52°F

[A grey cloud.]

40°F

[Two red flying saucers (with bright domes) are shooting energy beams downwards. One of the beams seems to impact with something at the bottom of the panel, which then explodes. Two plumes of smoke rises up from below, drifting to the right.]

275°F

[A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.]

40°F

Your 5-billion-year forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A larger orange sun.]

105°F

[A very large red sun.]

371°F

[A pale yellow panel with no drawing.]

71,488,106°F

[A night sky with many bright stars.]

-452°F

Your 5-trillion-year forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A night sky with many bright stars.]

-452°F

[A night sky with many stars.]

-452°F

[A night sky with fewer not so bright stars.]

-452°F

[A night sky with few dim stars.]

-453°F

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Discussion

The no string attached yo-yo exists and works rather well for those who know how to yo-yo 108.162.229.214 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Blinking heck, my Lord. I thought you meant one of those yo-yos with a loop at the end, but I've now seen people yo-ing into the air with detached strings and catching them again by whipping the spinning beast. 162.158.155.158 16:55, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

Pondy contributed a video for: "This also exists, is rather functional, and is the only way to make fun Rubik's cube shapes such as 1x5x5. See this video for a good example of this."

But this doesn't appear to be a good example at all. Those cubes are most definitely attached and you can see the presenter has to use quite a bit of force at some points to rotate. Can someone find a better example if it exists? -boB (talk) 16:51, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

The cubes are only attached magnetically. It takes a lot of force to break a lot of magnetic connections at once. Some of the cubes they actually take apart and you can see it’s just magnets. The video might be longer than ideal, but it does demonstrate the concept. 172.68.141.94 11:17, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

It is theoretically possible to build a cube with arbitrary dimensions without using magnets, though the mechanism required for certain shapes is much more complicated than a standard cube. Probably not Douglas Hofstadter (talk) 04:40, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Isn't a wingless sky dancer just an upside down beyblade? 172.69.55.166 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I sometimes find myself smacking my wrist with a comb. I think it's stimming. There might be a market for rigid objects designed for the purpose.

Broken toys

Toys often don't have a long lifetime, in particular children tend to act not much carefully and sometimes they even destroy them deliberately as a part of their playing. Parents know what I'm talking about. It can be annoying how fast kids are able to destruct things. So literally Randall just sells toys in a state in which they always end up anyway. Worth for the explanation? --Dgbrt (talk) 13:59, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

I'm sure I still have working toys somewhere that have survived my childhood. :) I think Randall just aims to deprive of the satisfaction of playing with them for children, thus the comic name "Unfulfilling Toys". -Asdf (talk) 14:47, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

"toys ... have survived my childhood" emphases exactly that what I'm saying. Most of them didn't survive... And try to remember your own annoyance about all those broken ones, there's probably not much in your memory, you just threw them away. But your parents were annoyed about all that waste. --Dgbrt (talk) 18:33, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

"Broken" != "Unfulfilling". Over this weekend, my son and I blitzed his dump, sorry, room. There were a large number of broken toys (especially those "Hero Mashers" action figures - lifetime measured in hours...) that I was not allowed to get rid of because he still plays with them. He has some perfectly intact items that are much more unfulfilling - racetracks where the track pieces don't quite match up leading to stuck cars (when new out of the box) being the one most guaranteed to create the disappointed face. 172.68.65.6 14:01, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

Wanna nerd-snipe the next commenters? 162.158.78.130 20:41, 22 September 2018 (UTC)

Glass glow-sticks? Isn't that the principle behind Mike Thompson's blood lamp. His design, in my opinion, is less fun than the design suggested in the current explanation. 162.158.75.22 23:41, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

I think you might be able to pull this off if you market it as a prank gifts, for people to buy for their friends as a joke. Solomon (talk) 05:37, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

A disappointing Rubik's Cube could just be a solid, non-twisting Cube with an unsolved cube painted onto it. Cheesesentience (talk) 16:29, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

There is a (non-twisting, but pliable) Rubik's Cube-styled stress ball. Or possibly more than one, from the various links (mostly commercial/advertorial, so not bothering to repost here) that a quick check via an internet search engine reveals. It is(/they are) 'solved', which may not be disappointing in the same way... but it would probably frustrate me insofar as one couldn't mix it up (or do patterns, like "dot and ring" every face) and do anything more than scrunch it up and/or thrown it around the office without much more damage than knocking a few pencils off some desks. 172.69.194.139 23:31, 16 December 2024 (UTC)
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