r/whowouldwin • u/ThePriestofVaranasi • Jul 09 '25

Challenge Every human on Earth vanishes, except for one random person in the US. A button is placed on the summit of Mount Everest that can be pressed to undo this change. Can humanity be restored?

Every human on Earth vanishes without a trace, except for one random survivor: Ethan from the United States. Moments after the disappearance, a mysterious device materializes before him, displaying a message:
"Humanity can be restored. To activate revival, you must press the button housed at the highest point on Earth—the summit of Mount Everest."

Ethan essentially has as much of a prep time as he wants to gather all the essentials like food, water, weapons, vehicles and everything else that has been suddenly abandoned. He can raid supermarkets, libraries, military depots, and pharmacies for supplies. Ethan can still die of old age so this prep time isn't unlimited.

Now, Ethan faces an impossible gauntlet:
He must travel to Nepal and ascend to the summit of Mount Everest without dying.

Can Ethan survive long enough to reach the button and restore humanity?

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u/ghotier Jul 09 '25

Calibration is important enough that GPS didn't work well enough for commercial use until General Relativity was figured into the calculations to account for the time dilation experienced due to Earth's gravity (which is VERY small)

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u/bigloser42 Jul 09 '25

It was general relativity, it was unencrypting the military channels that allowed extreme accuracy. But That only fixed the issue that didn’t let surveyors use it. It was good enough for almost anything else before that. It just took a while for it to get cheap enough to widespread adoption.

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u/Normal_Ad_2337 Jul 10 '25

Relatively large though.

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u/Leninlover431 Jul 10 '25

*special relativity

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u/ghotier Jul 10 '25

No, it's actually general relativity.

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u/Leninlover431 Jul 10 '25

I'm positive special relativity is a much larger factor than general reality in the context of sats

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u/ghotier Jul 10 '25

Maybe, the math is certainly doable if you want to, but they solved the General Relativity problem last. Before they solved that problem, GPS was not effective enough for its current use. And my point was to compare the small, necessary correction of GR to the calibration corrections that need to be done. A larger correction is less persuasive with respect to the size of the calibration.