Only one per day? https://what-if.xkcd.com/27/ explains what would happen if it were 86400 times that.
What if instead of a hand it was a giant dick and it jizzed gallons of cum onto the victim until they suffocated?
One per day? Lawn mowers are about 5 times more lethal than that.
A significant portion of the population would deny The Hands existance despite overwhelming evidence and blame all hand related crushings on the Jews or brown people.
Also, the next victim’s name is displayed on the palm. So, everyone knows you’re it, no one will help you, or let you come inside to hide, because then the building would get crushed.
Wallmaster fanfic.
It would be added to the list of things not covered by your insurance, that’s for sure!
Only 1 per day? I think that would make the hand one of the safer things on Earth
Presumably the odds of getting squished by the hand is 1 in 8 billion-ish, if it’s properly random. The odds of winning the Powerball lottery is apparently 1 in 292 million, so it’s probably not something to really worry about lol.
I wonder if it picks a truly random person, or if it sort of stays in one geographical area and sort of makes its way across continents slowly, like over the span of weeks? If its the former, it would be distinctly unsettling to see it hovering over your city like a thundercloud. If its the latter, it would be quite the spectacle to see it breaking the sound barrier as it hurtles around the world.
It wouldn’t need to break the sound barrier. Killing someone once a day should mean one death every 24 hours (assuming the hand uses its own hand time zone).
The Earth’s circumfrence is about 40,000 km, meaning the hand would need to travel at most 20,000 km in 24 hours which requires a speed of 833 km/h, whereas the speed of sound is 1235 km/h.
You are right, thank you! Unless the Hand wants to get there early so it can spend 12 hours hovering ominously over the person its going to kill.
I suppose if it’s the former it would be even safer, as you could somewhat plan to stay out of it’s way. Or like, if it’s over Europe and you’re in Africa, you know you’re 100% safe for the next little while.
For the latter, maybe it exists in a dimension above our own. By which I mean… imagine if you were a 2D circle on a piece of paper, with a 3D hand pressing it’s finger on the piece of paper. When the hand lifts it’s finger off the paper, it effectively vanishes from your field of reference, then when it presses down somewhere else on the paper it looks like it magically came from nowhere.
What if the target person is indoors or underground? Does it just smash through?
Anyone else remember an eighties or nineties cartoon like batman or something that had an episode with a flying hand like this? IIRC it looked like a mouse cursor… I can’t remember anything else about it.
Holy shit yes and Batman had to tear it open and rip out wires to… take control of how it flew? Was it in a Minotaur maze maybe and they cheated by flying on the hand instead of going through the maze properly?
Edit: found it maybe
found it maybe
No, that’s definitely it. Amazing result, thanks!
“In the Arab world, you always eat with your right hand.”
Not to shit on Bats, even Bats of the “Times” as he strikes me as a dude willing to learn and change his views.
That shit just slapped me in the face a little. It slightly shallow racism right? Crazy to think the things we heard and watched when we were kids.
it’s based on islamic values… https://islamqa.info/en/answers/82120/the-reason-why-the-right-hand-is-preferred-over-the-left
maybe culturally simplistic, but I dunno if I’d go as far as racism. it certainly paints with a wide brush…
Thank you for the link. Will check it out.
If The Hand had always been there, it’s basically like being struck by lightning. There would be people claiming to have survived, people telling the tale of having seen the squishing, but overall such a minuscule occurrence not many would really care about it
I think it would have more significance, imagine there was a single immortal entity that looks exactly like one of your body parts. I guarantee you people are chopping off each other’s hands and offering them to the “hand god”. And don’t even get me started on feminism, is it a male hand, is it a female hand? What does it mean?
Philosophy, science and even art would all be vastly different. Imagine you’re Martin Heidegger and you try to reason that mortality makes an authentic and meaningful life possible. Yeah sure Marty, then why the fuck does this giant hand squish people? This giant hand is immortal, and it’s giving all of our lives meaning. Do you not think the fucking hand knows that? Do you know why the hand is doing what it does? Do you think we’re somehow better than the hand because we die?
Or maybe you’re Frederick Nietzsche. And you are wondering about eternal recurrence. Would someone willingly live the exact life forever? I don’t know dumb ass, have you considered asking the big giant floating hand?
These are just a few examples but you are vastly underestimating the significance of the giant floating hand.
we would imprison the hand somehow, the gods must be destroyed
'Its called the hand " extremely creative naming
Yeah gotta hand it to them
People would start religions around The Hand. Obviously only sinners would get crushed by The Hand.
look, if I could see an actual giant hand crushing people, I’d sign up to that religion really fast
Right? That’s way more real than any religion i’ve ever heard of
Zeus could always use more followers, you know?
Or only the blessed get crushed by The Hand. The crushing transports you straight to the heavenly hand realm. You will get worshipped as a god for generations in your village after getting crushed.
Blasphemy! Only the wicked are punished by The Hand! Crush the heretic!
Guys, guys, it’s not about morality. It’s about appendages. Tom had a big dick. Harry had a big dick. That’s why you’re still here, Dick.
Bigby’s Smushing Hand?
One extra death a day wouldn’t even move the needle, it sounds terrifying but there’s lots more likely ways to die.
Humans are awful at probability, so yeah - there would be an entire highly-profitable industry centred on hand detection and protection products.
Yup. I just looked up car fatalities in the US. It’s 120 people per day. Source
I think it’s funny how if this was caused by a giant floating hand that only targets people in cars, people would be absolutely terrified to get on the road. But since it’s caused by cars, people are just like, “meh, that’s just the way it is.”
It’s the illusion of control. We all know logically that the best driver in the world can still be killed by a really negligent fellow driver, but people don’t really internalize that. If there were a giant hand that sometimes killed people on staircases, people would be more worried about staircases than they are now, even though plenty of people already die on them (about a tenth as many die on the stairs as occupants of cars die in accidents). We know what the risk factors are, and we can reduce our own risk by using a bannister, carefully clearing snow or ice from outdoor steps/making sure there isn’t a loose carpet on indoor steps, and arranging our homes to use stairs less frequently as we get older. Doing those things makes us feel like stairs are less dangerous, even though our statistics reflect a world in which people already know to do those things.
It’s why aneurysms are so scary to some people- we don’t really know how to diagnose what causes them until they’ve already happened, so they feel random to people
But knowing humanity it would be a spectacle
It would be the single most active gambling economy.
I suppose you would gamble on location? Country/state. Age and gender of victim? And then they read it on the nightly news like lotto numbers? “Male. 40s. Mexico.” You win the Hand Jackpot.
the size isn’t that big if its index can crush one person and nothing else around, so you’re in luck if you see it once in your lifetime I think
Does it pick one person randomly on the planet then travel there in one day? Then you’d probably see it a few times moving from person to person. Especially in high population areas. It would be a fairly common sight traveling between China and India. It would definitely be unusual to witness a crushing or to know anyone who was crushed.
