People would start religions around The Hand. Obviously only sinners would get crushed by The Hand.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
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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.
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
the size isn't that big if its index can crush one person and nothing else around, so you're in luck if you see it once in your lifetime I think
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Only 1 per day? I think that would make the hand one of the safer things on Earth
Presumably the odds of getting squished by the hand is 1 in 8 billion-ish, if it's properly random. The odds of winning the Powerball lottery is apparently 1 in 292 million, so it's probably not something to really worry about lol.
I wonder if it picks a truly random person, or if it sort of stays in one geographical area and sort of makes its way across continents slowly, like over the span of weeks? If its the former, it would be distinctly unsettling to see it hovering over your city like a thundercloud. If its the latter, it would be quite the spectacle to see it breaking the sound barrier as it hurtles around the world.
It wouldn't need to break the sound barrier. Killing someone once a day should mean one death every 24 hours (assuming the hand uses its own hand time zone).
The Earth's circumfrence is about 40,000 km, meaning the hand would need to travel at most 20,000 km in 24 hours which requires a speed of 833 km/h, whereas the speed of sound is 1235 km/h.
You are right, thank you! Unless the Hand wants to get there early so it can spend 12 hours hovering ominously over the person its going to kill.
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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
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It would be added to the list of things not covered by your insurance, that’s for sure!
We would have killed it thousands of years ago along with all the other megafauna
Damn, we’re the scary ones, aren’t we?
At least since we figured out ranged weapons, yeah. We went from being mid tier to apex overnight and have been wrecking shit ever since.
Someone played Black and White a little too much
~deeeeeaaaath...~
Soundbyte fused into memory. What a great game
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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
The hand spend 1/3 of the year in China + India alone.
What if instead of a hand it was a giant dick and it jizzed gallons of cum onto the victim until they suffocated?
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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.
historically accurate Master Hand
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.
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
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Everyone is saying it is the least probable cause of death out of all probable causes...Knowing people though, it would easily the most feared and talked about cause of death. There would be an entire lucrative industry of products to "protect" yourself even though they would all be useless scams. People would ignore learning actually valuable information and learn as much about the hand as possible.
This is basically way less lethal than cancer.
Hand insurance
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