Un-answerable questions...

October 13, 2007 7:11 AM

I’m the kind of person who gets a kick out of wondering about questions that I know can never (or are difficult to) be answered. Things like “How many people throughout the course of history have been killed by a sandbag falling from a hot-air balloon? I’d like to know what questions like this keep you awake at night?
posted by Rubyspicer to Grab Bag (2 answers total)

Wow. Talk about your unanswerable questions. It's so meta my head might explode.

You're new here, so it might pay to check out the FAQ:

Ask Metafilter questions need to have some possible answer or should be asking for information that will be put to some practical use. Chatty open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of Ask Metafilter and push other questions off the front page. If you want to avoid having your question flagged and possibly removed, here are some things to avoid.

- Questions where everyone's answer is equally valid along the lines of "What's your favorite X?". Maybe there is a reason you want to know? Super, just put it in your question.
- Asking the question and giving your own answer before getting the answers of others, saying some variant of "I'll go first" If you can authoritatively answer your own question, it's probably not right for AskMe.
- Questions with no problem to be solved or where the problem is some variant of "I'm curious if other people feel like I do"
- Open-ended unanswerable hypothetical questions like "What if Hitler had never been born?" or made up "what if" science questions.
- Questions that are some version of "What is the deal with X?"or "X sucks, am I right?" tend to not go well on Ask MetaFilter. Please do not rant on AskMe and pretend it is a question.
posted by veggieboy at 7:17 AM on October 13, 2007

1. how many children lost their baby teeth on exactly the same day I lost mine?
2. how did the first person who ever got drunk explain it to his friends?
3. what was the first word ever written?
4. what was the first conversation ever about? what was the second?
5. who invented the use of italics and why?
posted by mateuslee at 7:26 AM on October 13, 2007