What if your cells suddenly lost the power to divide, how long would you survive?

What if we hooked turbines to people exercising in gyms, how much power could we produce?

These are some of the big questions from the scientific world that American web comic and author Randall Munroe works out the answers to, and he talks about many powerful hypotheses in this interview with Nine to Noon host, Kathryn Ryan.

Many more are contained in his book What If?

The former NASA roboticist and programmer has become a web comic author with a cult following, his website xkcd.com is billed as a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language. It is a witty take on the world of science and geeks and attracts 600,000 to a million page hits daily.