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1. First things first, I figured the best butter chicken recipe must be in India. Therefore, I got
on a flight there. How long is the distance between the San Francisco airport and
Mumbai, India in miles?
2. As it turns out, the plane has a new engine that uses hydrogen as fuel. State the
distance between San Francisco and Mumbai in hydrogen atom radii, instead.
3. After making it to India, I felt a little bit tired from the long flight. How many hours are
spent on airplanes every day?
4. In order to buy butter chicken, I have to convert my US dollars to rupees. How many
rupees is the GDP of the United States in 2022?
5. Finally, I also need a hotel to stay in to search for butter chicken. How much money, in
rupees, in total around the world is spent on hotels every minute?
Now that I’ve made it into India and gotten myself settled, I can start looking for the
perfect bowl of butter chicken. I’ve decided to learn a bit more about the dish. I also have
to dish out some questions.
6. India, being the culinary capital that it is, consumes a large amount of butter chicken. If
every atom of butter chicken consumed in 2022 was a full bowl of butter chicken, how
many years would the giant chicken ball feed the Earth if everyone on Earth ate only
butter chicken from that bowl? (Assume we don’t get sick of butter chicken.)
7. Butter chicken isn’t the only dish served in India. What is the proportion of all dishes
served in India that is butter chicken?
8. Garam masala is an integral part of butter chicken. However, I’ve forgotten which
ingredients are in garam masala. How many ways are there to choose a subset of spices
that belong in garam masala?
9. Similarly, I’ve forgotten the ingredients in the dish itself. Assuming that garam masala is
a single ingredient, how many ways are there to choose a subset of ingredients of butter
chicken?
10. As I journey through India, I can see a lot of cows. As I’m hungry for butter chicken, I am
wondering how much of it I can have. If all the milk from cows in India is used to make
butter for butter chicken, how many plates of butter chicken can we make in a year?
11. Restaurants tend to serve a lot of rice. If we filled the volume of an entire restaurant with
grains of uncooked basmati rice, how many grains would it take?
12. If I placed 1 grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, 2 grains on the second, 4
grains on the third, and 2^(n-1) grains on the nth square, how many grains of rice would
be on the entire chessboard?
13. Rice often comes in 25-pound bags at the supermarket. How many of these bags are
consumed daily in the world?
14. If the surface area of every planet in the Solar System was covered with rice paddies,
how much water, in liters, would be needed to irrigate them? Assume the rice is grown in
wet paddies.
15. Water is also needed to cook rice. How much water, in liters, would one need to cook all
of the rice grown on these planetary paddies of plunderous, plump perfection?
16. How many restaurants are in India?
17. If only one restaurant in India has perfect butter chicken, on average, how many
restaurants do I have to visit to have a 50% chance of finding that one?
18. If it takes an hour to review one plate of butter chicken, how many times can I visit every
restaurant in India in my lifetime? Ignore travel time.
19. In rupees, how big is the restaurant industry in India?
20. If every Fermi Questions competitor at an average invitational ate a meal of butter
chicken at an Indian restaurant once every day since the creation of the universe, how
much money in rupees would they have spent?
21. Assuming I’ve visited half of the restaurants in India on foot, how many steps have I
made? (Assume optimal solution to traveling salesman problem.)
22. How many plates of butter chicken would I need to eat to travel that distance?
23. Assuming everyone from the US drove to every restaurant in India. If we make this a
yearly tradition, how many gallons of gas will we use before the return of Halley’s comet?
(Assume everyone drives their own car.)
24. As The Proclaimers once said, “I would walk 500 miles and I would roll 500 more.” If I
rolled inside a giant hamster wheel, how many servings of butter chicken would I need to
have enough energy to travel those 500 miles?
25. If driving evenly deposited rubber over the street, how many tires would I have to drive
through to deposit a 1-meter thick layer of rubber over 500 miles?
26. How much money, in USD, is spent at Michelin-star restaurants every year?
27. What proportion of restaurants are Michelin starred?
28. Assuming you were constantly eating, how many nanoseconds would it take you to eat
everything the world eats in a year?
29. Assuming all people eat on plates, how many barns of plate surface is washed every
year? Count only the top surface that touches food.
30. If every menu in the United States was stacked on top of each other, how many cows
high would they reach?
31. What is 2023! * 20! * 23! (Very cliche question.)
32. I, being a high school student, must study for the SAT. If I were to guess on every
question in both math sections of the SAT, what is the probability that I’ll get 90% or
above? (Assume all questions are multiple-choice with 4 answers.)
33. Seeing that my chance here is dismal, what is the chance that I obtain an
above-average math score on the SAT?
34. How many vertices are on every platonic solid, combined?
35. Another cliche question: what is the 2023rd Fibonacci number?
36. How many letters are in all Goosebumps books, combined?
37. How much energy, in terms of plates of butter chicken, would it take to press down the
keys on a typewriter to write every book in the Library of Congress?
38. What fraction of the permutations of 6 arbitrary letters consist of a valid 6-letter word in
English?
39. It is often said that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” If we converted all words in the
English language into pictures, how many cartridges would it take to print them if each
picture was on a piece of 8.5’’x11’’ paper?
40. If I wrote a book every day on paper made from a tree currently on Earth, how many
nanoseconds would it take for me to use up every tree?
41. If I had an atom of Uranium-235 that formed at the birth of the Universe, what’s the
chance it’s still an atom of Uranium-235 today?
42. If I created a baseball-sized lump of alpha particles and they traveled together at their
normal speed, what would be their kinetic energy? Assume they are perfectly packed
together.
43. If I liquified a mole of moles and shaped that mole into a sphere, how many barns would
the surface area be? (Hail Randall Munroe)
44. How many nanograms of ATP will be produced if a cubic smoot of butter chicken was
metabolized perfectly?
45. How much energy, in Joules, is needed to propel a cannonball at the edge of space to
orbital velocity?
46. If Rockefeller’s fortune accrued interest in a typical bank from the beginning of the
universe, how many Chinese Yuan would it be worth now? (Note: The scoring for this
question is different. The score is 5 if your estimate n if you calculate your answer as
10^n is within a factor of 10 of the true answer, 3 if within a factor of 100, and 1 if within a
factor of 1000.)
47. How many red blood cells were shed by the soldiers killed in the Civil War?
48. Enrico Fermi, the scientist our event is named after, pioneered nuclear energy. How
many grams of uranium would remain in a 1kg block of pure U-235 created when Fermi
was born?
49. If we took every strand of hair from every human ever born and laid them end to end,
how many lightyears would that mega-hair stretch?
50. In the bible, there was a cup described that had a perimeter of 30 cubits. Convert that to
Smoots.

4
17
5
15
6

22
-2
3
7
12

9
19
8
20
17

7
7
-2
12
18

10
6
15
2
7

10
-5
25
39
5

5852
-27
-5
2
422

7
7
-4
2
28

-6
30
42
17
8

20920074
19
3
-1
0