Only one per day? https://what-if.xkcd.com/27/ explains what would happen if it were 86400 times that.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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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.
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
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
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
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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.
'Its called the hand " extremely creative naming
Yeah gotta hand it to them
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
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The hand spend 1/3 of the year in China + India alone.
Some people would deny its existence.
"It's probably just a freak weather accident caused by microclimates, Susan. A giant hand isn't just going to come down and -"
*smush*
That smush didn't even come from the hand. Susan just had enough of the bullshit
A new branch of research emerges, solely focused on explaining and predicting the pattern of the Hand.
The more spiritually inclined among them believe that there is a transcendental number that the Hand follows. They call it the Number. Pseudoscientific practices flourish, despite the reality being that the Number most likely generated by a random process. A popular line of reasoning argues that a distinct vector of time, latitude and longitude lies beneath the Hand's choice of targets. Time and again these theories get debunked. Nonetheless, proponents typically evade criticisms by some combination of blaming inaccurate coordinate measurements or arguing for overhauling the entire global coordinate system.
Disproving the Hand Number theorem ends up on the list of millennium problems. The AI revolution fails to find a solution. Consequentially, stronger models are built. A singularity is born. It decides that humanity thrives when united against a common adversary. It joins the Hand.
No one ever finds out precisely how the Hands choose their targets. However, they do appear to have a slight bias towards targeting people with a known history of aggression and untrustworthiness
Pretty sure that's the final boss in an old video game, Super Smahs Bros iirc?
N64 version yup
4 people are born every second. Not too much would really change, it would just be another force of nature we've come to accept.
There's ample chance for the person who ended up squished to be important for something.
1 in 8 billion? Thats worse than the lottery
Over all of human history, so at scale it will get a few freak occurrences
This is how you get Super Smash bros
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