One day, we want to take humanity into space. But why don’t we start small? Take one solar power station, 10,000 people, and 10 million tons of crumbled Moon rock...
We visit a lot of planets here on WHAT IF, but K2-141b is the most extreme one yet. Are you ready to jump on board this one-way space shuttle? If you’d rather stay...
The year is 2040. You hunker down with your fellow human survivors, listening for the sound of your enemy. The cyber-bugs have taken over. How did this happen? What...
Mountains. They’re born, they grow, they age and erode. And after a very, very long life, they turn to dust. What if all mountains collapsed at once? What are the...
This shiny metal is constantly in a liquid state. This is mercury. We normally see this metal in tiny quantities. But what would happen if we took thousands of liters...
Artificial intelligence is no longer just a concept from science fiction. Today’s AI systems are rapidly advancing, with some already matching the intelligence of famous...
When it comes to the question of which planet humanity could one day call home, the obvious choice might seem to be Mars. But surprisingly, Venus might actually be a...
If you traveled 10,000 years into the future, what would planet Earth look like? Would most of its surface be covered in volcanoes? Or would it be frozen in ice? What if...
Watch out for loose superbugs.
The Amazon rainforest stretches for millions of kilometers, hiding ancient tribes, animals and maybe something else. What if under this mysterious canopy lies an...
Our lungs might be fine in that short a time frame, but the rest of the planet? Not so much.
Every 75 years, a ball of fire streaks across the sky. But that’s no fireball. It’s Halley’s Comet. And you’re about to hitch a ride on it. Get...
With the vastness of the Universe, everything in it seems so spread out. But some objects are closer than you might realize. Every now and then, a random interstellar...
What if you found out that you had a long-lost relative? And what if that long-lost relative was from a different planet in our galaxy? And what if this faraway planet...
Where do they come from? How do we get rid of them? And how much drama is a poltergeist going to cause me? OK, so exactly what is a poltergeist? Well, a poltergeist is a...
Scroll down to watch the video. It’s the largest star that we’ve ever discovered: UY Scuti. And if it were to replace our Sun, it would change a lot more...
Right now, there are 1,500 active volcanoes on Earth. Just one of those volcanoes could do catastrophic damage. But at midnight tonight, every volcano on the planet is...
Could a black hole devour us all one day? There are millions of them out there just waiting. And if we happened to make a black hole accidentally, well, you better...
When you think of dinosaurs, images of giant, scaly reptiles like the Tyrannosaurus Rex probably come to mind. Movies, textbooks, and popular culture have shaped our...
From a bad hair day to a tragic natural disaster, wind can be extremely disruptive. Wind can be a formidable foe. But what if this powerful force just didn’t exist...
