3106: Farads
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 Title text: You know what they say--if you don't like the weather here in the Solar System, just wait five billion years. |
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 only provide us with 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 forecast, leading to weather patterns that we don't usually see on a regular basis.
Since the first weather symbol is the same in all six rows, we must assume this indicates the weather today (and not tomorrow or in a trillion years). It is first in the second panel that we have made the first jump according to the label. Consequently, the last column gives the predictions for four days, four months, ..., four trillion years from today.
When moving past the five days, 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. And then it is winter with 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. And the temperature range from 21 to 44 °F (-6.1 to 6.6 °C), winter temperature.
Then we go into the far future, jumping a million years from panel to panel. But still the weather symbols stay the same. However, in 3 million years time aliens (or advanced humans) attack with energy beams from something looking like flying saucers. They are gone a million years later. The temperature range is still the same (except that it rises to 52 °F or 11.1 °C, a possible reference to global warming) in one panel. But then while the attack is going on the temperature 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 still 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 less hot 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). So in two billion years the temperature is hot enough that all the earth's oceans will have boiled away… Actually this will happen already in about a billion years.
Then once there is no longer enough hydrogen the Sun will truly expand into a red giant. This should not happen until five billion years from now,[citation needed] but in the forecast it is indicated to happen already in three. Maybe this is Randall taking liberties to show what happens during this phase, which would not fit into a five-billion-years forecast. Alternatively it is just indicating 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. Disregarding this, 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 then 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 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 red giant phase only lasts half a million years, so a billion years after the Sun has been a red giant its outer atmosphere will for sure have disappeared leaving only a 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 indicated 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. So this is a few degree 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 star light from other stars would increase the actual temperature.
In the last panel with trillion 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 even 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 days 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.
Image using Celsius
A different user-made version for the picture using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit can be found here: Five day forecast in Celsius.
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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Who wrote this description? It's complete nonsense. A capacitor can't throw a stone. A 1 F capacitor is also not remotely dangerous unless it's charged to a high voltage — except that a 1 F capacitor and a 0.01 F capacitor can be charged to essentially the same maximum voltage!
Unlike other units of measure where a single unit is non-extreme, "The capacitance of the Earth's ionosphere with respect to the ground is calculated to be about 1 F." [1] Most capacitors in practical use are measured in pico, nano, or micro farads. 03:04, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
Please note that the pound, shown in panel 2, is not an SI unit. The corresponding SI unit is the kilogram; an item with a mass of one kilogram is still commonplace. Troy0 (talk) 03:11, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- I added Trivia to mention that (and another thing), sorry that I didn't read here first but I think I've covered your thoughts on the subject. 82.132.246.160 13:07, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- Kilogram is a unit of mass, while pound is a unit of force (weight is a measure of the force of gravity on a particular mass). So no, the kg is not quite the corresponding unit to the lb; that would be the Newton (N), equal to about 0.223 lb. 170.85.70.249 18:12, 10 July 2025 (UTC)
When my father was a young engineer, the old guys would haze the new kids by asking them to fetch a "one farad capacitor". But everybody in the lab said "Sorry, I ran out, go ask Fred on the top floor", "Go ask Tom in the basement", "Try Peter's Parts on Vine St", etc--- give the kid a run-around. The joke was: at the time, 1F was likely large than a large garbage can and many hundred (non-SI) pounds. But the world changed, and in recent years you can easily buy 1F @ 16V, about the size of a soup can, to smooth car sound power feeds. --PRR (talk) 03:27, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- [I used to work with a guy who'd fall for all of the gags, going off to fetch striped paint, a glass hammer (there are such things in fact), a spirit level bubble, etc. Turns out he'd just goof off, completely aware he was on a wild goose chase.] 81.109.188.229 (talk) 19:47, 27 June 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
This explanation would benefit from some elaboration on how and why supercapacitors are dangerous. 195.252.226.234 04:41, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
Funnily enough, the wikipedia page for "Farad" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farad) currently has a 1 farad supercapacitator as the title image. It looks pretty unassuming. Mouse 08:54, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
Top of the page says June 23 even though it looks like this came out on June 25. Should it be changed? 85.76.9.43 05:15, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- Randall-time, it was 24/Jun (or Jun/24, being leftpondian with potentily mixedendian dates). It's not unnown for it to be an early-hours-of-day-after (EST) release, though late-hours-of-day-after is rather unusual. I'm guessing awkward commitments took over, perhaps even the prescheduled timer (if left 'in charge', not having even been put to the test in a while) didn't work when/how it should have.
- We've also had surpisingly early releases (noon or earlier, UTC, making it very-early-on-day-of-release), but I haven't any specific memory of it being so early that it ended up preceding the scheduled day (off-schedule additions don't count), other than perhaps when he was currently on a book-tour and (e.g.) in Europe so probably doing his prefered time-of-day (or when it was most convenient for his schedule) in UTC/UTC+1/UTC+2 'mode', though it was still "yesterday" back home.
- Best suggestion is to see when 3107 comes out. If it's a Wednesday(ish)-compatible time, this was just overdue for ...reasons. But if it's Friday(ish), then we can re-examine its true position (with much arguing, I suspect) in the schedule.
- It could also be an attempt to subtly shift what number pops up when (I think a past "whole week series", or two, were conjectured to alter the numbers to reasonably engineer the landing of 404 upon April 1st), but that's probably beyond speculation until we at least can assess what has happened by the end of this week. (Then start looking for what numbers land (near) where, up to arbitrary points in the future.)
- Also something to add to Trivia, when we can rule out some of the possibilities (or be prepared to be wrong/overly-comprehensive, like here, and remove the wronger bits later). 82.132.246.160 13:07, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- The official archive at https://xkcd.com/archive/ lists it as released at 2025-6-23. We should follow that listing, as we have done before at (vary rarely) delayed comics. 2001:16B8:C731:2E00:9AC:BBD8:8775:315D 15:34, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
I agree with Troy0 that having a non-SI unit in there (1 pound) is incongruous, and it should instead be a sugar crystal weighing 1 gram. 121.98.227.79 06:52, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
"most consumer electronics use at most a nanofarad" -> nah... Several hundreds of microfarads are quite common. But so are tens-of-picofarad, mostly in HF/RF filters etc. Calculating an average over all capacitors in all consumer electronics makes no sense anyway... But I'd say "Most consumer electronics use capacitors in the picofarad to milifarad range". "To prevent static electricity from building lethal charge, unused supercapacitors are usually stored and transported with a "keeper", a steel or aluminum bar shorting the terminals." -> Static charge won't change the voltage of a 1 F capacitor much... V=q/C with small q and large C... The shorting is for high voltage capacitors that 'recharge' themselves trough dielectric absorption... Interesting, but completely different. -- Gautee (talk) 07:52, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- Even a supercapacitor is not necessarily lethal. It depends on the voltage. A project I'm working on has a 6v supercapacitor (to keep the clock running for a few days when power is disconnected). And they're not even expensive parts. For example this one is 7.5F (!) at 6v. They're not very large and only cost $9. Touching the terminals when it is charged will hurt a lot, but it will hardly kill you. Shamino (talk) 14:40, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- It really doesn't (directly) depend upon the voltage, either. It's a function of the volts and amps (but ultimately, how much energy there is, and where it manages to go).
- Personal anecdote: Physics lesson (tertiary education level), one experiment used a High Tension Power Supply to provide a high (selectable) voltage to some equipment, already set up with a rope(-like) barrier around it that one had to stay beyond when it was powered up. HTPSU's selector-switch had a screw 'stop' to limit the selection to only 'very high' voltage (already way beyond 230+V mains, with generally up to 13A fuse). During a classroom break, I thought I'd see what results a 'ludicrously high' voltage would give, unscrewed the stop, turned the dial up beyond it, and from beyond the boundary-'barrier' turned the power on. *ZAP*, I actually got shocked! (Can't now remember if it blew a fuse/RCD, or if it was part of the experiment that a discharge naturally stopped it, it was decades ago and the finer details of the encounter are well and truly blurred, including what the activity was - but a Jacob's Ladder could well have needed thousands to tens of thousands of volts running through it, if it was that, or the HTPSU was ultimately capable of running one, rather than what 'low voltage' thing I was doing.)
- Hurridly turned it all off, possibly earthed the bit you had to remember to earrh when you were leaving it for the next person's turn, dialled it back down, reinserted the limiter-screw, went off on the break that the rest of the class (and supervising tutor) had gone off to. It would have been very low ampage (lucky for me), maybe also I only got a fraction of the discharge, sharing it with nearby lab-fixtures (sink/gas-taps?), etc, and it probably did not cross my body (the most dangerous effect) but I felt it (and remember not being sure from where the shock might have actually jumped).
- Nobody the wiser (possibly the next experimenter found the fuse blown, when they tried to power up, but maybe even not that if was just temporarily RCDed at most), except maybe myself... Tended to respect 'screwstops' on dials from then on.
- And only other significant 'shock' I've ever had, apart from static ones resulting from man-made fibres in clothjng/carpets, was when I touched a plucked dandelion stalk (or similar) to an electric fence when much younger, curiosity getting the better of me in a slightly different scenario that turned out to be more shocking than I perhaps expected. Was I thinking it'd be a mere tingle, the current having to pass through a plant stem..? I think I already knew the old adage about "there are good electricians, bad electricians and dead electricians" - good ones have a current-detecting screwdriver-thingy (sufficiently high resistance), bad ones forget to bring one and have to test maybe-off wires with the back of their hand (if not off, muscles contract and contact quickly lost), dead ones grasp any mysterious wire and then can't let go until the power cuts for any other reason (high-rating household fuse, maybe, could be too late). OK, so there's some acinowledged inaccuracies (or historical assumptions) in the above, but the gist is pretty much there. 82.132.244.34 15:47, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
We now have an exact answer to the question "how tall is Cueball?"--86.13.226.126 09:16, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- Assuming that Cueball's holding the stick in a plane parallel to the comic frame. Legowerewolf (talk) 13:23, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- If the stick really is parallel, Cueball's height is 1.78 m, or 5'10" for the Americans, or 9.02×106 ħc/eV for the Proxima b-ans. MinersHavenM43 (talk) 15:19, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
- I've done the measuring, and I found a beautiful easter egg: The stick is held at a 23° angle, and when rotated to vertical is 100 px! So I get Cueball at 180 cm, or 1,8 m, as it's written in my neck of the woods. --80.71.143.166 09:38, 10 July 2025 (UTC)
In agreement with the first discussion point, this description remains low quality. It claims that after the unwarranted panic, Megan and White Hat "ask why he [Cueball] is carrying it [the 1-farad capacitor] around." This does not occur at any point in the comic or the Title Text, and should be removed. 198.147.146.254 10:21, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
I'm sure the Farad is going to drive all sorts of commentary. My nitpick with the description: a 1F 30V+ capacitor can be held in hand (e.g. Cornell Dubilier DSM105Q030W075PB, Nichicon LNR1V105MSE). I don't recall the hazard criteria for stored energy right off, so I can only say that @30V there is no shock hazard in dry environment human handling, but the energy stored still present other hazards (e.g. fire or burns from conductors) 12.171.61.178 14:39, 25 June 2025 (UTC) JourneymanWizard
Could the 1V battery be not a 1.5V alkaline battery, but a 1.1V lithium battery? Still somewhat discharged, but not nearly as much. 2600:1009:B092:310F:4D22:1073:190A:E328 17:04, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
"This litre of water is at 1 TP" 60.240.13.138 22:30, 25 June 2025 (UTC)
For different capacitors of a given physical size, what is the approximate relationship between capacitance and max voltage, all other factors also being equal? Simple inverse? Is it even a reasonable question to ask? Clearly, a gigantic capacitance and low voltage isn't dangerous; a tiny capacitance and extremely high voltage also isn't, if for no other reason than that it would discharge through the air. BunsenH (talk) 00:39, 26 June 2025 (UTC)
- Inverse square. If you want double the voltage your insulation needs to be double as thick, which halves the capacitance. However with double the insulation you can fit only half the area, which halves the capacitance again 14:20, 8 May 2026 (UTC)2A02:B027:8F06:5D6E:76F:A213:3F7B:AACE 14:20, 8 May 2026 (UTC)
- Slightly more complex, as the insulator/non-insulator division of thickness would need to be considered, which could be doubled-and-halved, but needn't be. Starting with 1/3 of available space as insulator, doubled, would become 2/3 with the remaining counterpart volume going from original 2/3 to now 1/3 (halved, yes)... But a 1/4=>2/4 doubling would be 3/4=>2/4 (two-thirdsing) on the other side of the split. 1/2 as insulator, initially, sends the counterpart from (also) half down fully to zero, and anything already greater than half for the former sends you into negative utility (if that were physicaly possible) now available to fulfil the latter aspect.
- And, even if that's balanced to handle the proportionaty change (whatever it is) equally proportionate 9n the other side (thus is proportionate-squared, as the end effect, for that specific degree of change), if you're thinning the conducting element it might no longer rate properly for the increased voltage that the insulator's thickness (and rating) has been increased in order to handle. I would presume that a given design, and size, of capacitor is probably already somewhat tuned to match the two (or more) internal ratings needed for the proposed loading, perhaps only slightly off to make its failure mode (upon being overpowered) involve the least problematic practical limit being breached... Rearranging the proportions alone, especially to try to double the performance in any way, is going to just make it significantly non-optimal overall.
- Exactly how, may depend upon what "all else being equal" base design you're working with. Might be more effective to entirely switch designs (and materials) to a trickier (and more expensive) construction of capacitor that sits in the same footprint but does a premium job that the original was never ever capable of handling. Unless you can find an 'original' that's so under-engineered that it can trivially be improved merely by doing the tweaks that should already have been done. 82.132.185.192 15:17, 8 May 2026 (UTC)
Although he threw in one pound, I think the point is that some base metric units are impracticaly large or small. The MKS system has a kilogram as a "base" unit rather the gram. The CGS system used grams but centimeters instead of meters. Nobody uses ares or bels. 2600:8800:4880:66B:809:D867:2F4C:D77A 03:41, 26 June 2025 (UTC)
I'd just like to point out that the confidence with which the explanation declares the capacitor to be low energy and therefore safe is exactly the sort of confidence that gets you electrocuted.2602:FF4D:128:D56:8114:9FE5:5A4D:499F 16:19, 26 June 2025 (UTC)
- Yes, and "low-energy" needs definition. It's easy to find caps in the ballpark of 1F, >30V rating, hundreds of milliohms ESR, under $50, and small enough to easily hold in your hand. This could have an energy around 1000 J and could supply tens of amps for a significant fraction of a second. It's not as dangerous as, say, a grenade, but enough that I would be careful to avoid accidental self-discharge, especially across the body. And this assumes that the previous user didn't charge it *above* the rated voltage! 174.126.217.139 17:46, 26 June 2025 (UTC)
All that panic about Farad ... I wonder what would they say if he was holding something creating a magnetic field of one Tesla. -- Hkmaly (talk) 18:32, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
- I tried to something similar with an item one Kelvin, thinking that people would be interested, but just ended up being given the cold shoulder. 92.23.2.228 19:27, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
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