

RASCOE: See, yeah, because my kids ask a lot of questions and often, I just tell them, you know, be quiet.

And so maybe you can try to give some kind of an answer. With this book especially, a lot of people who get asked, like, unanswerable questions by their kids would write to me and be like, hey, my kid asked me this thing, and I don't even know what to say about it. They're like, oh, I bet this is something I could ask the guy who did that book. MUNROE: Well, after I did the first book, people who read the first book would start thinking of me when, I guess, they came across some question they were wondering about. So why did you decide to do another round of this type of book? And this is a book that is full of wild and fantastical questions in which you try to answer the questions with serious answers. RASCOE: So this is a follow-up to your first "What If?" book.

Randall Munroe's latest book is "What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers To Absurd Hypothetical Questions." He's a former NASA roboticist who's now a writer and a cartoonist. That's good to know, but we don't want to have to use that information. He estimates New York could sustain a population of 350 T. rex in New York City, how many humans would it have to eat to meet its basic caloric intake each day? My next guest says just half an adult per day, or an entire 10-year-old.
