I'm going to hell.

I like to think of myself as a good, kind, liberal, open minded, progressive sort of guy. But that is still funny as fuck.

I have to admit that for a few months, maybe up until November or December, I was doing a lot of online research into large scale engineering and demolition. I have some professional experience in much smaller scale engineering, as in from a few 1000ths of an inch up to a few meters (I know, mixing measuring systems), and 9/11 looked way too much like a professional job. The fact is that no one had ever seen anything quite on the scale of the collapse of the Twin Towers (although close, within an order of magnitude). It was just way too perfect.

One of my design/engineering heroes is Henry Petroski, author of such wonderful books as To Engineer Is Human and The Evolution of Useful Things, both of which I highly recommend. And The Pencil. It's a great book about the history of the humble pencil, and it's absolutely fascinating. Trust me.

Anyway, one of the principles he frequently explores is the way that engineering solutions only scale up so far, before they begin to fail catastrophically. In the early days, "just do it the same way as worked before, but do it bigger this time" worked fine. At some point the growing disparity between the increase in cross section vs the increase in volume/mass (squared vs cubed) is insurmountable. Thus, no 12 foot tall humans: 4 times the bone cross section, 16 times the mass it has to support just isn't going to work.

My point being: that much mass is going to fall straight fucking down. Any moderately uniform failure perpendicular to gravity in a structure that ridiculously huge is going to result in unstoppable vertical pancaking.

I can totally understand how human minds want to see such an event as having to have been carefully planned, engineered and executed, but our human brains just are not adapted to easily think on such vast scales and masses, any more than we can think about quantum interactions with any kind of common sense.

I'm not sure exactly where I was going with this. Maybe just to say that I have some sympathy for the 9/11 Truthers. But only so far. Just like I can accept the wacky behavior of the two slits experiment, I can accept that skyscrapers can be destroyed by a couple dozen fanatics in passenger jets. We can not be experts at everything, and at some point, we have to accept the professional opinions of experts if our complex society is going to function. Of course, experts with a long track record of being correct are to be taken far more seriously than those who crawl out of the woodwork whenever there's some new mass-media event slobbering for sound bites anywhere it can find them.

It sounds like the engineering scales are like trying to convince a skeptic that a rocket's trajectory isn't going to be straight up.

Well, you'd have to deal with the whole spinning, spherical Earth thing, and it's so obviously flat.

You forgot to mention the crystal spheres that cover the earth.

Phfha! You can never get that high, because there's no air up there to push against!

With rockets you can just show them in Kerbal Space Program. Maybe we need a KSP-style sandbox conspiracy theory simulator.

Or you just do vectors. You're gonna have to give half a million tons a heck of a lateral push to make it go any direction but straight down. Once one support starts failing the others are gonna crumple as they try to take up the load, it's not like chopping down a tree where the rest of the trunk stays intact as it tips.

Exactly. That much mass, it's going nowhere but straight down, but we humans have millions of years of experience with things like trees. Part of our brain is screaming, "DOES NOT COMPUTE! DOES NOT COMPUTE!" when we see things like the Trade Centers collapse.

I have similar problems with large airplanes. They look like massive metal machines, how could they possibly fly through the insubstantial air? But really, they are not very dense, even compared to a balsa wood, rubber band-propelled, toy plane, if you calculate the volume vs mass. Imagine how thin that aluminum skin would be, and all those spars and struts, if a 747 was only 14" long. Off the top of my head, I'm guessing it can't be more than an order of magnitude denser, and it's using one of the most energy dense sources of power we have, oxidising refined fossil fuel, compared to the inefficient storage of energy in the slight deformation of polymer molecular bonds.

I wondered about posting this, except for the Unwritten Rule that we don't Post Cracked articles...

I have never read that unwritten rule...

You missed the invisible memo?

If it WAS written it would be in the form of a list.

I was heartened to see the first dozen or so comments weren't from the usual batch of crazies spouting how this was another example of the conspiracy in action.

They all failed to understand the conspiracy mindset though.

The fact that government is a shambles that can't even keep a Presidential blowjob secret is meaningless. That's what the illuminati wants you to think. The "government" are just a puppet show, put on to hide the true rulers of the world.

There is absolutely no piece of evidence that you can't turn into part of the conspriacy if you try hard enough.

Oh, I know. Anything a conspiracy theorist can't refute as false is just a part of the conspiracy and then they're demanding that people skeptical of their assertions prove a slew of negatives. It's "the God of the Gap" on steroids, where anything that's possibly unknown = conspiracy, until it's not unknown, in which case it was planted there by the conspiracy itself.

Conspiracy theorists really should have a flag with an odorous on it, or perhaps a flat Earth atop a stack of turtles vanishing into infinity with "It's Turtles All The Way Down" as its slogan.

The Illuminati already put an infinite stack of turtles on the back of a dollar bill, you just can't see it because it's behind the pyramid.

If humans were actually good enough at controlling our behavior as individuals to pull of some of these conspiracies, most of our problems would have been solved aeons ago. Unless the Illuminati really are Reptilians, then all bets are off.