Today we're answering the stupidest hmm okay, wait the best and most amazing questions from you, our viewers.
At Kurzgesagt, we're experts when it comes to tackling stupid questions and, on top of our own, we get hundreds from you on an almost daily basis.
So let's very seriously and scientifically answer some of them.
Question one, how many jellyfish do you need to power Tokyo?
Tokyo is a hungry beast, gobbling up around 280 terawatt hours of electricity every year.
That's more energy than these 20 countries combined and more than all of Australia.
Can we power Tokyo with our innovative renewable energy source?
Some jelly species, like Aquaria, victoria or crystal jelly, contain fluorescent proteins and glow in the dark.
If you put one of them in front of a tiny solar panel, you'd end up with something like a microwatt-hour of energy.
To meet Tokyo's outrageous energy demands, you'd need a quintillion, 300 quadrillion glowing jellies.
Hmm, that's too many.
Can we use bigger ones?
How about Nemopiluma nomurae, the Nomura jellyfish?
Really chunky boys, weighing about as much as a piano and growing up to two meters wide.
They're armed with around a thousand spindly tentacles that grow up to four meters long and help them suck up plankton from the water.
In recent years, their numbers have been exploding, wreaking havoc on local ecosystems.
Using these fridge-sized jellies to power Tokyo will finally give them something more useful to do.
They don't glow in the dark, but jellyfish are kind of electric, aren't they?
Unfortunately, no.
If you've ever been stung by a jellyfish, you know it feels like a painful electric jolt.
But the pain actually comes from hundreds of nematocysts inside their tentacles, tiny dark guns filled with venom.
So how do we get energy from jellyfish?
We'll squeeze it out of them with the power of piezoelectricity.
Piezoelectricity is an electric charge that builds up in certain solid materials like crystals or bone when you stress and squeeze them.
For example, a quartz crystal is made up of positive and negatively charged atoms arranged in repeating pyramid shapes.
Their charges usually cancel each other out.
But if you apply enough pressure, atoms shift out of place and the pyramids become kind of wonky, positively charged on one side and negatively charged on the other, like a battery.
Together, they add up to a charge across the whole crystal.
Piezoelectricity powers, sonar times, quartz watches, and some nightclubs use it to keep the lights on, just from the stamping of dancers' feet.
So, here's the plan.
We'll create a ginormous battery from jellyfish by harnessing the hypnotic movements of Nomura's hundreds of long, thin tentacles.
First, we squeeze our jellyfish, one tentacle at a time, into a kind of wetsuit made from nylon 1111, a cutting-edge material that's been optimized for power production and has the same piezoelectric properties as quartz.
Next we watch as each twitch of a tentacle bends the tiny nylon nanofibers of the jelly suit, converting its movements into electricity.
All we need to do now is to plug our jelly into a current collector with a copper cable to be utterly disappointed.
Even with around 1000 tentacles wrapped in energy-generating nylon, the electricity generated only adds up to around 1 watt or 10 kWh per year.
Enough energy to run your laptop for 20 days.
Not bad, but we want to power Tokyo here.
We need more jellies, way more, about 29 billion.
Sounds like a lot, and it is, but right now there are 27 billion chickens alive on Earth, so it's mostly a matter of motivation on our part.
A single Nomura can produce millions of jelly babies a month and with enough plankton to eat, they can grow from the size of a grain of rice to the size of a person in less than a year.
If we want to breed a lot of them, and fast, All we need to do is basically empty the Pacific of plankton.
And of course, we'll need space to store them all.
Giving each Nomura a cube of space measuring five meters on each side sounds generous, but it barely contains the tentacles.
All those jelly cubes add up to a tank that's about seven times the total volume of Mount Fuji.
With all those tentacles and cables, our biggest issue will be short circuits.
We need to insulate all 29 billion cables.
And don't forget the tentacles themselves.
Now, even if the jellies get tangled up, we can maintain a steady power supply for the good people of Tokyo.
In reality, of course, our jellyfish power station would be pretty difficult to maintain.
Nomura would probably die constantly and need to be replaced.
And the cost of building this whole mess and killing the ocean to feed them would be like spending one million dollars to buy a single dollar bill.
We're not saying any of this is a good idea, but now we've done the maths, there's nothing to stop you from giving it a try.
Okay, bring on the next totally dumb, hmm, completely reasonable question.
Question 2.
What if it rained bananas instead of water for a whole day?
Okay, so first we tried to calculate what would happen if, for one day, every single rain droplet was now a banana.
Turns out in a storm, several million raindrops can fall on a single square meter, which stacks quickly to the equivalent of a banana asteroid smashing into the planet and killing all life.
While fun, this is a bit too much.
Instead, let's take the average volume of rain that falls on our planet in a single day about 133 trillion tons of water, a massive wobbly orb of water 14 kilometers across.
Now, let's swap this water for bananas.
Each fruit weighs about 120 grams, which will give us a daily banana fall of 111 quadrillion bananas weighing 133 trillion tons in total.
If we match average global rainfall patterns, even the Sahara Desert would receive around 15 trillion bananas.
If a medium-sized banana has about 105 calories, 15 trillion Sahara bananas alone could already feed the world's population for over two months.
For the world as a whole, the calories of all rain bananas add up to a grand total of 12 quintillion calories.
With just one day of banana rain, we could go on feeding everyone on Earth for over a hundred years.
Of course, in reality, the banana rain would be pretty catastrophic.
A banana falling from about 3000 meters the height of a mid-altitude rain cloud would reach a velocity of 240 meters per second and strike the ground with the same kinetic energy you'd get from dropping a bowling ball off a 50-meter building.
And we're dropping over 11 quadrillion of them across the planet.
One of the rainiest and therefore worst affected cities is London.
It would face a storm of 21 billion bananas or 2.5 million tons.
The shower of yellow death breaks roofs, shatters windows, and decimates national monuments.
Human bones are no match for this monsoon, so we'd need to take shelter from a banana blitz inside or underground.
All around the world, cities and infrastructure, rivers and rainforests are severely damaged and clotted with a layer of banana smoothie that's already beginning to rot.
Trillions of mashed bananas are floating in the ocean, clogging up coastlines.
Picture the aftermath of all the worst oil spills and superstorms combined, but way worse and kind of everywhere.
And our problems are just getting started.
The rotting banana mush contains 160 billion tons of methane 280 times our current annual emissions as a planet.
Methane traps around 28 times more heat than CO2.
Adding this much greenhouse gas this quickly will lead to a catastrophic and sudden spike in global temperatures.
Most ecosystems won't be able to handle it and will witness a devastating mass extinction event.
In short, banana rain is an apocalypse-level catastrophe.
Okay, hopefully your question has been properly answered.
It's time to wrap up for today.
Please keep sending us your amazing questions, even and especially if they're stupid.
We're collecting them and we'll answer more of them in the future.
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