What The If?

SALT is life. Potato chips are even better life! No salt, NO LIFE.

What The IF all the salt in the world ran out???

A very special, very imaginative, spectacular episode, pulled straight out of our listener mail bag! And this is by FAR our most TASTY episode yet. Betchya can't listen to it just once!

Do YOU have an idea for a WTiF adventure? A vision that wakes you up at night, or in the middle of your nap? A hope? A fear? What The IF, send it in and we might feature it on the show just like we are THIS week. Share all your ideas, reactions, and just plain old how-do-ya's with us at:

or

WhatTheIF.com/contact

SALT is life. Potato chips are even better life! No salt, NO LIFE.

What The IF all the salt in the world ran out???

A very special, very imaginative, spectacular episode, pulled straight out of our listener mail bag! And this is by FAR our most TASTY episode yet. Betchya can't listen to it just once!

Do YOU have an idea for a WTiF adventure? A vision that wakes you up at night, or in the middle of your nap? A hope? A fear? What The IF, send it in and we might feature it on the show just like we are THIS week. Share all your ideas, reactions, and just plain old how-do-ya's with us at:

or

WhatTheIF.com/contact

TODAY WAS CRAZY because GEOLOGY suddenly sped up like craaaaaazzzzy. No more waiting eons for mountains to rise, watch 'em before your very eyes. Heck, ride that mountain as it grows, grows, grows! The continents move at wicked speed under our feet. Earthquakes, earthquakes and more earthquakes Volcanoes, volcanoes, oh boy, so many erupting volcanoes! Come with us on this hair raising, and flaming, ride, it's super, super fun, if you can stand -- literally, can you stand? -- this volcanic visit to EARTHQUAKE EARTH. Also, did we say LAVA? Lots and lots of lava! What the, what the... What The IF?

Today we solve, once and for all, one of humanity's greatest mysteries: WHY are the Aliens TEASING US??? Plan for the best, prepare for the worst, people of Earth! Professor Matt is back from ICELAND with new insights and a whole new fascinating barrel of SCIENCE and FACTS for us to hold and taste and throw in the air and dance among their glittering rays. And we try to talk to the creatures of the SEA! What The IF we survive this experiment, of which we may be the subjects??? Turn it on. Turn it up. Dive in!

PART THREE OF THE WTiF UFO CHRONICLES. Philip rubs his hands together and plots how to score an interview with one of the aliens who've abducted him. We urge ALL CITIZENS to take one for the team (EARTH!) and get some photos of your travels on a UFO. Our listener Jay, who wrote in to tell of his journeys to "the most beautiful places in the Universe" (!!!) has made us so envious we're more green than a Martian. Were the places more beautiful than, say... Paris??? Or Iceland??? Or Nabu???

PLUS more secrets from behind the scenes of what it's like when you're making a UFO documentary. How to do it, without selling your soul to the Vogons.

This is a wild, wooly and wacky episode, come along for the ride. Put on your big ol' aviator sunglasses, zip up your flight suit, shout "What The IF?!!!" and away... we... goooooooo!

Send your thoughts & ideas! [email protected]

Follow us on Twitter: @WhatTheIFshow

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Hear all episodes & learn more at WhatTheIF.com

DEAR ALIEN ABDUCTEES: Please help us out, take pictures! Also, can we get AIRLINES to pick us up at home, while we're sleeping, too??? It'd be so much more CONVENIENT. And we also have some REQUESTS for ALIENS WHO ARE ABDUCTING PEOPLE: what's a poor SKEPTIC gotta do to get picked up??? 'Cause that would be awesome, ok, thanks.

Also, PRO TIPS for potential abductees. HELP US OUT, KIDS! Sleep with your camera in your pocket! Crucial information for EVERYONE in this special holiday edition (!!!) of WTiF, with your host, Philip Shane, flying solo, without a SEATBELT but with a MARTINI. Hop aboard, let's go, up up and away... to a galaxy far far... YEP!

Send your thoughts & ideas! [email protected]

Follow us on Twitter: @WhatTheIFshow

Share a review on iTunes or your favorite pod service!

Hear all episodes & learn more at WhatTheIF.com

We watch the skies, and read the New York Times and we shout OMG! A very special What The IF?

WE DELAY THE ASTEROID that killed the dinosaurs by five minutes, and thus... the giant lizard dudes and dudettes continued to breed, and evolve. And then they got big ideas in their head. Well, they got big brains at least. And BAD ideas.

THE DINOSAURS START THINKING, like humans. What's a human? Those little creatures who won't evolve now, because Tyrannosaurus RICK is in charge of the Earth, buddy!

DO NOT WEEP FOR THEIR TINY HANDS, these guys and gals evolve opposable thumbs, and they start to use tools and we wonder.... what kind of skyscraper would a dinosaur would build? Because they definitely would do that, because they think like people. What The IF???

• Email us [email protected], let us know you're listening & share your thoughts!

FLAT EARTH: words the strike fear into the heart of every fact loving, rational thinking human. To imagine it is to fall into the depths of insanity, stupidity, comedy, tragedy. Oh, the madness! And yet (WTF?!!!!) people are all chitty chatty these days about the Flat Earth theory. Inexplicably (seriously, WTF?!!!!) basketball players are at the forefront of the Flat Earth crusade... I mean, you'd think that they'd want the world to be shaped like a basketball.

Ok, breathe, breathe, flat earth is a joke of an idea, people haven't believed the Earth was flat since Columbus sailed the ocean blue... right? Well, not right, with apologies to every grade school teacher I had, this wasn't true. Thanks to the tremendous bank of knowledge that resides in the brain of Professor Matt, our guide to all things IF, we learn the truth of how *ancient* people figured out that the Earth was round, and they probably played better basketball, too.

Flat Earth is synonymous with silliness, it has, as they say in Science, a crazy high "giggle factor". And yet, and yet...

And yet we are COMPELLED to envision it. Let's face it, it's an incredible What The IF, and baby, we go there. We go ALL THE WAY there. Don't bother fastening your seatbelts, since there's no hills we can fall down on this bizarre flat planet, but there's no shortage of completely bizarre things we discover on this Pancake Earth. I mean, seriously, I ain't kiddin', I just got back from a tour of it with Matt and trust me, it is really, really strange, and I'm not even talking about what happened when we reached the EDGE. 

Come with us, enter the WTiF Machine and we'll take you to the where the world is FLAT. You won't forget this episode, let's go!

How FAR can you stretch a thought experiment? How much can you bend your mind? How far off the cliff can we run without looking down? Today we push the concept of learning from an IF into new dimensions.

It's the exciting conclusion to our wild & wacky "Haiku In The Collider" scenario! We learn a tremendous amount of amazing REAL science in the process, as we spin out (of control!) this SciFi idea, keeping it as rooted in scientific facts as possible.

We rejoin the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider... they're transfixed by the HAIKU flashing on all the screens in mission control. They've spent months ruling out all possibilities that this is an error, or a prank, or that they're dreaming and will wake up and find normality restored. Nope! The mystery begs for explanation.

Who is sending this message? Why is it in Japanese? Why Haiku??? HOW did they do it? Where are they? So many many questions. We summon the minds of a fantastic cornucopia of scientists, and the best hard-SF writers to bring this trilogy to a conclusion.

So many questions... so many answers... so many laughs and facts and fun in this outstanding episode of What The IF!