Hypothetical: How would the world be different if...

[Rain Man]

...if raindrops were really, really big? I'm talking the size of a 55-gallon barrel.

The total volume of water in rain would be the same, but instead of a bunch of little drops we had a smaller number of barrel drops?

Let us ponder this on a cloudy Wednesday.

[BigMeatballDave]

The Roofing business would be extremely lucrative.

[T-post Tom]

I think I actually experienced that on the island of Kauai.

[Otter]

Clouds would be 100x the size they are now and we would live above ground but all our houses would be shaped in a cylindrical cone



and they would have to be up on stilts like beach houses to allow the massive and sudden water flow back to its channels.

Umbrellas wouldn't exist and the movie "Singing in the Rain" would be about a cult leader leading his group to mass suicide.

[Jilly]

I bet ponchos and galoshes would look different.

[Braincase]

Rainforests would serve as death row.

[googlegoogle]

Mythbusters.

[Demonpenz]

i would like to think that the water would rip the shirt off a petete blond next to me and splash giving me just enough jube to **** myself and not just move my hand up and down my shaft like making a hole with my hand and ****ing it

[Ultra Peanut]

and would things be different if it rained DYNAMITE instead of WATER?

[BY1401]

Originally Posted by Ultra Peanut

and would things be different if it rained DYNAMITE instead of WATER?

Well, the dynamite wouldn't run off like water does, so we'd have to do a lot of shoveling.

[Demonpenz]

U.P. always asks explosive questions

[Earthling]

Laws of physics, as we know them, would be altered, as well as our evolutionary path. I suspect we would have large, pointy, protruding, bone-horn thingys, on our heads that could help "spear" the deadly rain-drops and disperse their effect.

[Simplex3]

Originally Posted by Rain Man

Yeah, I was thinking that windows wouldn't exist. Or they'd have some sort of really big shield over them.

Would the Pacific Northwest be uninhabitable?

And I'm trying to figure out what happens when a person gets hit by a rainbarreldrop. Does it kill you? Injure you? Do you just get really wet and passersby laugh because there aren't enough rainbarreldrops to get everyone wet?

You would almost always get dead if that quantity of water would stay in one drop over that distance. That's just over 450lbs traveling at probably well over 200mph.

[tonyetony]

I'm sure there would be some idiot meteorologist breaking in during the game and tracking every raindrop by radar like they do now.

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Earthling

Laws of physics, as we know them, would be altered, as well as our evolutionary path. I suspect we would have large, pointy, protruding, bone-horn thingys, on our heads that could help "spear" the deadly rain-drops and disperse their effect.

That's a really good point (no pun intended). And if they were long enough and pointy enough, then we wouldn't be harmed at all by the rainbarreldrop. Social status might then be determined by headpoint length, under the reproductive principal that a longer headpoint would mean a greater likelihood of survival.

As a side effect of that electrical wires would be located much higher. Or maybe they'd be underground to start with since they themselves wouldn't survive a direct hit.

[CosmicPal]

If that were to occur, then there would likely be no land mass anywhere on the planet. Even the deserts would be underwater because the size of those raindrops would raise the levels of every ocean, lake, river, creek, and back-yard hot tub to levels that would most certainly sink the world in water.