Illustrations: Zara Le Cornu @zlc_art
Realities not worth taking the red pill for*
Would you take the red or the blue pill? When I posed the question to the gallery office, all but one said they’d take the former and escape the simulation, even if they didn’t know what was waiting for them on the other side. But what would people do if they did know? Are there any realities so bad that everyone would choose to stay in the Matrix?
For example, would you still take the red pill if it was 100% guaranteed you’d be the only one on the other side? Or what if you were allowed to take someone with you, but it had to be the person of your most regretted situationship? What if the real world was solely inhabited by 8 billion clones of Donald Trump, that never, ever, stopped talking?
What if you spawned in the real world only to find out that you were stuck floating in an infinite river of baked beans? Or that there was just one windowless underground room, starkly lit by an insufferable flickering light? What if the real world actually existed in 2D, and you were forced to side step your way through life, constantly stubbing your toe on unpassable objects you can’t turn your head to see?
The thing is, there’s a non-zero possibility that in the real world the air feels like sandpaper, or the atmosphere sounds like nails on a chalkboard, or you’re trapped in an infinite network of air vents. You actually have no idea what’s waiting for you out there, so are you 100% sure you’d definitely choose the red pill?
*If this sounds confusing, go and watch The Matrix. Only the first one though, the follow-ups are poor imitations. Then read the above.
Red Bull Rocket
Everyone’s heard that Red Bull gives you wings, but could they take you all the way to space? NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) is the only rocket that can send the Orion spacecraft, astronauts and cargo directly to the moon in a single launch. Fully fueled, this rocket has a mass of approximately 2.6 million kilograms, needing around 202.5 gigajoules to make it to space.
Seeing as there is only 195 kilojoules in one standard can of Red Bull, this means you’d need an estimated 1,038,790 cans to power the SLS. This takes into account energy wasted by heat, gravity and atmospheric drag (if not for these factors, you’d only need 405,128 cans). This may seem like a lot, until you consider that Red Bull sold over 12.1 billion cans in just 2023. For context, this is enough to launch around 11,650 SLS rockets into space.
Babybel Moon
On April Fools Day back in 2002, NASA confirmed that the moon actually is made of cheese. But what kind of cheese? Is it possible to turn the moon into one ginormous Babybel?
Working with the respective surface areas of both objects, you’d need the wax from around 753.5 billion Babybels to properly encase the moon. If purchased at wholesale prices, this would cost around £339 billion, which is enough to buy Jersey’s economy 51.5x over, or end world hunger for more than 11 years. This is without touching any of the leftover cheese, which weighs in at 166,118 tonnes, enough to give everyone on earth around 100 Babybels each.
Vodka Cranberry Swimming Pools
According to the most recent Alcohol Profile published by Jersey’s Public Health Intelligence, the average alcohol consumption per Jersey citizen (aged fifteen plus) is 12 litres of pure alcohol per year. But what is this, per week, in vodka cranberry?
To stay on par with the rest of the island, you’d have to commit to 23 vodka cranberries a week. Working on the assumption of a 6oz glass, this equates to around 4 litres per person every seven days. Bring everyone’s total amount together, and you get around 365,000 litres of vodka cranberry a week, or 18,982,600 litres a year – enough to fill around seven and a half olympic swimming pools.
