In their never-ending quest to answer questions no sane person should ever act on, Randall Munroe of xkcd and Henry Reich of MinutePhysics tackle this extremely normal thought experiment: What if you tried to funnel all of Niagara Falls through a straw?

Spoiler: You’d break every law of physics, several international treaties, and eventually, the planet.

See, the flow rate of Niagara Falls is about 100,000 cubic feet per second. A normal straw? Only about 7mm wide. Trying to squeeze that much water through that small a tube means the water would need to accelerate to roughly a quarter of the speed of light. At that point, you’re not sipping water, you’re firing a high-energy particle beam.

Fun fact: if you could somehow pull this off, the water would behave more like a plasma jet than a liquid stream. The straw would essentially become a star-launcher, radiating more power than all the sunlight hitting Earth. So instead of getting a cool science experiment, you get oceans vaporized, temperatures skyrocketing, and a full planetary meltdown. Oops.

Also, minor legal note: you’d be violating several international water treaties, but that’s probably less of a concern once the continent is glowing.

Check out the full video here: