Impossible Task: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|''Ask him to find me an acre of land''
''Between the salt water and the sea-strand,''
''Plough it with a lamb's horn,''
''Sow it all over with one peppercorn,''
''Reap it with a sickle of leather,''
''And gather it up with a rope made of heather,''
''Then he'll be the true love of mine.''
|'''Scarborough Fair''', [[Child Ballad|Child # 2]]}}
The '''Impossible Task''' is a favorite theme in myths and legends, folklore and [[Fairy Tale]]s the world over, and is [[Older Than Feudalism]]. The task might be undertaken to win a boon, or [[Engagement Challenge|a bride]], to gain land, to break a [[Curse]], [[Famed in Story|because everyone will know about it if you do it]], to prove your worth to Baba Yaga (who may agree to be your mentor if you succeed), or because your [[Evil Uncle]] wants you—the rightful heir—out of the way. Some creators try to set up one as the [[Fantastic Fragility]] flaw.
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Related to [[No Man of Woman Born]], [[We Do the Impossible]] and [[Cutting the Knot]]. The [[Engagement Challenge]] is often an '''Impossible Task'''. The [[Snipe Hunt]] can be a comic form of it.
{{examples}}▼
Not to be confused with the [[Impossible Mission]], which is an entire plot with its own set of tropes.
▲{{examples}}
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* ''[[Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple]]'' has Takeda tried to convince James Shiba to [[Training
* Since [[Chessmaster|Mikado]] of ''[[Hayate the Combat Butler]]'' wants others to think that there's a possibility of gaining his inheritance from the rightful inheritor, he's set up several 'Impossible Tasks' for them.
** The first, make Nagi cry and apologize
** After that, it was to steal a [[Mineral MacGuffin]] her [[Battle Butler]] carried. {{spoiler|Nagi herself destroyed the stone when it was revealed (to Hayate) that it was the connection a great spirit would be able to use to permanently inhabit the butler's first love interest}}. Now she's having to learn to live without the backing of the inheritance.
* In ''[[AKB49: Ren'ai
== [[Child Ballad|Ballads]] ==
* The classic song "Scarborough Fair" ([[Child Ballad|Child # 2]] and [[Refrain From Assuming|also known as "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme"]]), which provides the page quote, is a lovely, melodious piece about a girl blowing off a guy who's courting her by telling him the only way she'll love him is if he can do a half-dozen or so impossible things.
== [[
* In ''[[Preacher (Comic Book)|Preacher]],'' Jesse Custer punishes one of the [[Big Bad]]'s flunkies by compelling him to go sit on a beach and count three million grains of sand. {{spoiler|He does it. The hard way.}} As far as Custer's punishments go, this is getting off ''lightly.''
* ''[[Erstwhile]]'' has this in paradox form, while telling "The Farmer's Clever Daughter".
{{quote|'''King:''' Come to me, not dressed, not naked, not on a horse, not by carriage, not on the road, not off the road, and if you do, I'll marry you.}}
:* Answer: show up stripped to the waist, on a mule, that's halfway off the shoulder of the road.
* In ''[[The Smurfs]]'' story "The Astrosmurf", the title character's first attempt at finding a way to travel to the stars is to ask Papa Smurf for advice. Papa Smurf has something in his spellbook called, "How to Travel Through the Macrocosm", a multi-part, complicated (to say the least) ritual:
{{quote|'''Papa Smurf:''' Firstly, each morning, drink a pint of dew collected from a web woven by a male tarantula.<ref>This alone is impossible, as tarantulas do not spin webs.</ref> Secondly, find a moonstone at the precise moment the sun is in eclipse. Thirdly, crush the moonstone delicately with your little finger while uttering cries of joy. Fourthly, wait for the powdered moonstone to turn to salt (this may take a hundred years). Fifthly, drop a pinch of this salt on a comet's tail. Sixthly, at the same time, get a tomcat to holler three times, 'SECAKEJUKEUACEHEPAOZREUPAUR". Seventhly, [[Lampshade Hanging|do not be discouraged]], Eightly... ''(There's more to it, but the protagonist leaves before he can finish.)''}}
== [[Fairy Tale]]s ==
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* [[Child Ballad]] #2 ("The Elfin Knight"), and its folk-processed descendant "Scarborough Fair." See page quote.
* The horde of chores heaped upon Cinderella by her [[Wicked Stepmother]] were of this nature. Not impossible in and of themselves, but all heaped together they make an insurmountable task.
** In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130824062133/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/cinderella/stories/german.html Aschenputtel]'' (the German version of Cinderella), the [[Wicked Stepmother]] set such a task to let her go to the ball:
{{quote|''"I have emptied a dish of lentils into the ashes for thee, if thou hast picked them out again in two hours, thou shalt go with us."''}}
* The Russian fairy tale of [[Vasilisa The Beautiful]] involves many of these. Vasilisa's [[Wicked Stepmother]] sends her to fetch fire from Baba Yaga, expecting the girl to be eaten alive. Baba Yaga instead sets her to work on tasks that include threshing a roomful of wheat, stripping 10,000 ears of corn, and picking out a wagonload of poppy seeds from black flour dust, each in a single night. With the help of her magic doll she completes all the tasks and retrieves the magic fire, and when she brings it home, its light burns her wicked stepmother and stepsisters to ashes.
* A Jewish Fairy Tale: the king told some guy to tell him the number of hairs on his head, the number of stars in the sky, and the center of the earth. The guy plucks a hair from the king's head and says "one fewer than there were before", the number of stars in the sky is equal to the number of hairs in his donkey's tail, and the center of the earth is where his donkey stamps its foot. When the king gets upset with those answers, the guy basically says "if you're so smart, then you tell me." He gets to go free.
* The stepmother in ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130906231232/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/frogking/stories/wellworld.html The Well At the World's End]'' sends her stepdaughter to the title well with a sieve.
* The stepmother sends her stepdaughter into the winter woods to get strawberries in ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20140324190359/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/13threemenforest.html The Three Little Men In the Wood].''
* One story of the peasant's clever daughter is Grimms' ''[
* In ''[http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/116.htm The Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen]'' the stepmother plays a game of cards with her stepsons so she can force them on an impossible quest.
* In the Russian [[Fairy Tale]] ''Go To I Know Not Where, Bring Back I Know Not What'', the command in the title was used to get rid of a husband. (Fortunately, his wife could turn into a bird and fly off.)
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* From the [[Arabian Nights]]: Aladdin gives the sultan a bunch of large jewels in exchange for the sultan's daughter's hand in marriage. The sultan tells Aladdin to bring 40 slaves carrying 40 trays all filled with those kinds of jewels and then he will consider. The sultan considers this impossible. Aladdin of course has a genie, so problem solved.
* [[wikipedia:The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter|Princess Kaguya's impossible tasks]]
* In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20131104152714/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/cinderella/stories/birch.html The Wonderful Birch]'', the [[Wicked Witch]] takes her daughter to the feast, and orders her [[Wicked Stepmother|stepdaughter]] to pick barleycorns from the cinders while she's gone.
* In [https://web.archive.org/web/20171112142905/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/jacobs/english/fishring.html The Fish and the Ring], [https://web.archive.org/web/20130326131857/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/russian/russianwondertales/vasiliiunlucky.html Vasilii the Unlucky], [https://web.archive.org/web/20131217180139/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/29devilgoldhairs.html The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs], [http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/260.htm The King Who Would Be Stronger Than Fate], and many other fairy tales, a man who discovers finds his child [[Self Fulfilling Prophecies|doomed]] to marry a poor child tries to kill them with many tasks, before and after the wedding; in the end, he fails.
* In ''[http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/038.htm The Grateful Beasts]'', Ferko is cut all the corn in a single night, gather it all into barns the next night, and summon all the wolves in the land. It stops with the wolves because, well, they're [[Big Badass Wolf|wolves]].
* The fairy tale type Kind and Unkind Girls often features this.
** In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20140324190359/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/13threemenforest.html The Three Little Men in the Wood]'', the stepdaughter is sent out to gather strawberries in the snow. She meets and is polite to the title men, and they send her to a place with strawberries and give her more blessings. So the [[Wicked Stepmother]] sends her own daughter, who is rude and so finds nothing
** In ''[
** In ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20130718151010/http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/diamondstoads/stories/caskets.html The Two Caskets]'', the [[Wicked Stepmother]] sets a spinning competition between her daughter and her stepdaughter, with the first getting good flax and the second coarse stuff that no one would spin.
* [[Seen It a Million Times|Many, many]] folktales of both European and Chinese origin feature a number of brothers with improbable talents given impossible tasks for fame, fortune, the Emperor's service or the [[Standard Hero Reward|hand of a princess]]. Sometimes they resemble each other closely enough to pass for the same person capable of a wide range of miracles.
* The third classic example is from a Swedish saga, in which the full list of conditions is that the heroine cannot visit the king by foot, by horse, in a wagon, nor in a boat. She could not visit him either dressed or undressed. It could not be day or night, a month or a year, and the moon couldn't be waxing or waning. As described above, she wore a fishing-net, balanced one foot on a sledge and the other on a goat, and went at dusk. She also went on the third day of Yule, which was considered to lie outside the normal count of the year.
* [[Celtic Mythology|Prince Conn-Eda]] loses a chess game with his evil stepmother, and her geas (her binding condition on Conn-Eda that is her right after she's won) is that he go to the land of the [[The Fair Folk|fairies]] and take the [[Cool Horse|black steed]] and [[Hell Hound|supernatural dog]] of the king of the fairies, and return to her with them within a year and a day.
* In some versions of [[The Brothers Grimm (creator)| "The Golden Goose"]], a King offers Simpleton - the protagonist - his daughter's hand in marriage if he can complete three Impossible Tasks: find someone who can eat a mountain of bread, find someone who can drink all the wine in the kingdom, and build a boat that can sail on land ''and'' water. Fortunately Simpleton has befriended a [[The Fair Folk| "little grey man"]] who is able to complete all three tasks with ease.
== [[Film]] ==
* From ''[[Monty Python and the Holy Grail]]'': "Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest... [[With This Herring|with... a herring!]]" *
** Also used in the "Happy Valley" sketch on ''Monty Python's Previous Record''. To quickly get rid of any suitors who go after his daughter, King Otto sets them the task, "Tomorrow at dawn, armed only with your sword, you must climb to the highest tower in the castle, and jump out of the window." When the queen gets sick of this, he is forced to change the task to something a bit easier - going into town and buying some tobacco.
* For a modern film version, Chandler Jarrell (Eddie Murphy) in ''[[The Golden Child]]'' is given a glass of water. He is told he must retrieve an item from across a cavern without spilling one drop of the water in the glass. He somehow manages to keep the glass of water after passing through all of the obstacles until he's standing in front of the hollow holding the Ajanti Dagger. When he reaches for the dagger the fire flares up, foiling him. He drinks the water and the flames die down, allowing him to grab the dagger.
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* In ''[[The Phantom Tollbooth]]'', shortly after arriving in the Mountains of Ignorance, the protagonists meet [[The Blank|a gentleman with no face]] who asks them to complete some impossible tasks: one of them is to carve a hole through a rock with a needle, one is to move a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers, and one is to empty one well into another with a dropper. After Milo uses a magic math-solving pencil he received from the Mathemagician to realize it would take thousands of years to finish the tasks, the man reveals himself to be the Terrible Trivium, one of the Demons of Ignorance and the anthropomorphic personification of wasting time.
* In ''[[Stardust (novel)|Stardust]]'' by [[Neil Gaiman]] the protagonist is challenged by a crush to bring back a fallen star from the magical land outside their town in exchange for her hand. Subverted in that she didn't actually expect him to try, much less succeed, and they didn't get married when he did.
* In ''[[Land of Oz|The Marvelous Land of Oz]]'', the heroes discover Dr. Nikidik's Famous Wishing Pills in a hidden compartment at the bottom of his canister of Powder of Life; each pill grants one wish to whoever takes it. There is a small problem: To use one, you are required to count to count to seventeen by twos. At first, even [[The Smart Guy|the highly educated Woggle-Bug]] is at a loss on how to do that, until the Saw Horse [[Dumbass Has a Point| suggests starting at half of one.]] The Wobble-Bug then deduces that this is true, because twice of a half of one is one, and the instructions never said you had to start at one. They try it, and that works.
* In ''[[The Silmarillion]]'', Beren is told to return to Doriath with a Silmaril in his hand if he's to be allowed to marry Luthien. Part just-that-[[Badass]], part [[Exact Words]]; with [[Magic Music|Luthien's help]] (and by "help" we mean she did most of it) he gets further than he could possibly have been expected to get, but he ''is'' called "Beren One-Hand" for a reason... {{spoiler|A giant wolf bites off Beren's hand and swallows it, including the Silmaril. Beren returns to Doriath anyway, pointing out that the Silmaril is in his hand (and the hand in the wolf's belly).}}
* In ''[[Magic: The Gathering|The Brothers' War]]'', the King of Argive decrees that any suitor for his daughter must move a huge boulder across the town square. Urza builds a machine to lift and transport the stone, declaring that he had moved it with his mind.
* The title story from ''The Practical Princess (and other liberated fairytales)'' features the titular princess trying to get rid of her unwanted suitor by sending him on these. (The two tasks, a fire-proof cloak and a jeweled branch, are reminiscent of those used by Kaguya-hime in the Japanese legend, and like Kaguya the princess sees through the fakes offered.)
* In ''[[Inheritance Cycle]]'', dragon riders were given impossible tasks to get them really frustrated so they'd learn to use magic. It never mentioned whether or not they actually solved the tasks.
* In the ''[[Mr. Men]]'' books, doing this is [[Meaningful Name|Mr. Impossible's]] specialty. When asked if he can climb the largest tree in the forest without help, he ''walks'' up the tree. When asked if he can stand on one hand, he stands on ''no hands''. (No ''feet'' either.) He solves a complex multi-part math problem at a schoolhouse in seconds (in his head), and reads a book to the class while holding it upside-down; in short, if told something is impossible, he can do it.
* In [[Robert Silverberg]]'s story "Double Dare", a team of Earth engineers and a team of alien engineers are engaged in a challenge where each is to duplicate some feat of the other's technology. Both sides cheat by presenting a rigged demo of a device they can't actually build. Both teams, [[Achievements in Ignorance|not knowing that what they're trying to do is supposed to be impossible, succeed.]]
* In the story "''The King of Katoren''", [[The Chosen One|a young Stach]] is given seven tasks, each one ''imposibler'' than the last, to complete if he wants to become the titular King of Katoren. Those tasks are selected among the worst creatures, aberrations and ''illnesses'' that plague the people of the country. To make it impossible [[Up to Eleven]], the last task is to sit on a monument cursed so that only {{spoiler|the King of Katoren}} can rest on it. Needless to say, all of them are solved.
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* The [[Card-Carrying Villain|Duke]] in ''[[The 13 Clocks]]'' sets impossible tasks to suitors who wish to marry his niece, the Princess Saralinda:
{{quote|"If you can slay the thorny Boar of Borythorn, she is yours," grinned a traveler. "But there is no thorny Boar of Borythorn, which makes it hard."}}
** That one just begs for [[Loophole Abuse]] in the form of designating any random boar in Borythorn, the 'thorny Boar', even if you have to pay several locals to publicly proclaim it as such, and then shooting it. After all, its incredibly easy to fill a vacant position.
* In ''[[Gor|Marauders of Gor]]'' by John Norman, the Viking warleader Ivar Forkbeard is set an absurdly high wergild, one utterly out of proportion to his original offense, by Jarl Svein Blue Tooth. Specifically, one hundred stone of gold, the weight of a grown man in the sapphires of Schendi, and the daughter of Ivar (and Svein's) enemy Thorgard of Scagnar, the only man in the North who owns a larger army than Svein Blue Tooth. However, the Jarl overlooked that while finding that much gold in one place to loot in the North is nigh-impossible several cities in the South offer such prime targets, the city of Tyros had already offered his weight in precious gems to anyone who could rescue their ruler from the dungeons of their greatest enemy, and Thorgard of Scagnar had gone so long without being attacked that the men guarding his stronghold had grown ''very'' complacent. Sure enough, Ivar Forkbeard shows up several years later with everything his Jarl had asked for, leaving Svein Blue Tooth eating his own beard.
** And then he trolls the Jarl by pointing out that while he had everything necessary to pay him with, he'd decided to ignore being legally reinstated instead and just use the loot to make himself richer and more powerful than the Jarl ever was. The situation is eventually resolved when both men forgive each other and make an alliance against the attack of a much worse enemy.
== [[Live
* From ''[[The Tenth Kingdom]]'':
{{quote|'''Tony''': What is it with you people? What kind of twisted upbringing did you have? You know, why can't you just say, 'Oh, that'll be 100 gold coins'? Why does it always have to be, 'No! Not unless you lay a magic egg, or count the hairs on that giant's ass!'?}}
==
* In one ''[[Peanuts]]'' story, Snoopy wants to read ''[[War and Peace]]'' at the rate of a word a day; given the novel's notorious length, this would have taken him roughly 1,610 years.
== [[Oral Tradition]], [[Folklore]], Myths and Legends ==
* The labors of Hercules are a classic example.
* In ''[[Journey to the West]]'', The Buddha asks Sun Wukong to jump out from his palm. It turns out to be impossible because The Buddha's palm engulfs the entire universe.
* Psyche is given several of these tasks by a jealous Venus in the myth of Cupid and Psyche.
* There's a certain African myth... a man gave his boys the task to see who would inherit his farm. He told each boy to go out and buy objects so that he could fill a room. The first two boys tried to do it with grain and feathers (if memory serves). They failed. The third son took out a candle and match, and filled the room with light.
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== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* In certain editions the [[Dungeon Master]] is expected to provide challenges like this should ''[[Dungeons
* ''[[Paranoia]]'' missions tend to be this, especially after secret society goals and personal agendas are figured in. The game's stance varies from [[Failure Is the Only Option|"literally impossible"]] to "we have no idea how to succeed, but acknowledge that sufficiently devious PCs will come up with ''something''" to "the PCs ''could'' succeed by doing X and Y and Z, it's just ludicrously unlikely that they'll be lucky and virtuous enough to actually pull all that off".
== [[
* [[The Merchant of Venice|Shylock]]'s "pound of flesh nearest the heart" is related; in this case, it's the villain who is forced into either doing an impossible task, or giving up what is due him.
* Skillfully subverted with ''[[Cyrano De Bergerac]]'':
{{quote|'''Cyrano:''' Come now, bethink you!. . .The fond hope to be
Beloved, e'en by some poor graceless lady,
Is, by this nose of mine for aye bereft me;
[[The Grotesque|—This lengthy nose which, go where'er I will,]]
[[The Grotesque|Pokes yet a quarter-mile ahead of me;]]
But I may love — and who? 'Tis Fate's decree
I love the fairest - how were't otherwise? }}
== [[Video Games]] ==
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* The manual of ''[[Microsoft Flight Simulator]]'' claimed it was impossible to fly under the Golden Gate bridge. It was possible.
* In ''[[Etrian Odyssey]] III: The Drowned City'', the ninja Kirikaze is sent to complete these so that her master might earn the right to marry Princess Kaguya.
* In ''[[Turgor]]'' the player is given such tasks by Mantid and Warden.
* From ''[[Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney]]'' game. Okay, here’s the situation. You are a defense attorney. Your client is a man named Miles Edgeworth (your rival and - it pains you to admit it - friend), who is charged with murder-one. Edgeworth and the victim are known enemies; Edgeworth has a clear motive, the victim being the one who acquitted (via insanity plea) a killer who murdered Edgeworth's father, a crime Edgeworth was forced to witness. Edgeworth has publicly expressed hatred of the victim multiple times. There is photographic evidence showing Edgeworth and the victim on a boat in the middle of a lake, less than an hour before the victim’s body was found in the same lake. Shot twice. With a gun found in Edgeworth’s possession, recently used, missing two of its six bullets. While the prosecution doesn’t have an actual confession, Edgeworth won’t deny he is the killer either. So with such a strong case for the prosecution, how can Edgeworth ''not'' be guilty, and how can you possibly defend him? Well, [[The Hero|Mr. Wright]], ''you're'' supposed to be the genius here, and you - via the player - has to figure that out.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Subverted and played straight [http://aldus.comicgenesis.com/d/20061103.html here]{{Dead link}} in ''The Curious Adventures of Aldus Maycombe'' - the faerie king is [[Genre Savvy]], but it doesn't help him much.
* Keith, from [[Twokinds]] is expected to bring the [[Knights Templar|High Templar Trace Legacy]] back with him so that the conditions of his exile will be revoked, more or less "You can come home if you're bringing George Bush with you for dinner."
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== [[Western Animation]] ==
* In ''[[Futurama]]'', the Robot Devil challenges Leela in a violin contest, with her having to use a [[Made of Temptation|solid gold fiddle]]. Fry does point out that a solid gold fiddle "would weigh like a hundred pounds and sounds really cruddy." The Robot Devil admits to this, stated that it's "mostly for show". Leela does beat him though - over the head with the extremely heavy fiddle.
** In the episode "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back", Number 1.0 (the head honcho at the Central Bureaucracy) orders Hermes to file and sort the Master In-Pile, a literal mountain of thousands of backlogged files, stating Hermes will be fired unless he completes this task before closing time, which is in only four minutes. (At 1PM, one of many reasons the Central Bureaucracy is an inefficient mess.) Hermes not only succeeds, he manages to do a musical number while doing so; unfortunately, since he manages this with 2 seconds to spare (and a good bureaucrat ''never'' finishes his task early) Number 1.0 demotes him one rank.
* A modern parody may be the ''[[South Park]]'' episode "The Wacky Molestation Adventure." Kyle's mom tells him he can't go to a concert unless he cleans out the garage, shovels the snow out of the driveway, and brings democracy to Cuba. Of course he succeeds at all three.
** He still doesn't get to go, being told specifically that they never expected him to be able to pull off that last one. Kyle decides this is unfair and applies some [[Cutting the Knot|lateral thinking]]: calling child services and telling them his parents molested him so they'll get arrested and he therefore won't need their permission. It works.
* Some of the Grimorum Arcanorum's spells in ''[[Gargoyles]]'' seemed to have this as spell conditions, until modern technology [[Prophecy Twist|made the impossible possible, so to speak]].
** The most obvious is the one that woke up the sleeping gargoyles: the castle had to be lifted above the clouds. Xanatos literally does that, moving it brick by brick to the top of a tall building.
* The terms of Zuko's banishment in ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]].'' [[Snipe Hunt|"Find a nigh-all powerful person, catch him, and bring him back, and
* In a US Acres segment of ''[[Garfield and Friends]]'', Orson and Wade set up a restaurant that's guaranteed to serve any food you order - if they can't make it, you get free food for a month. Roy attempts to take advantage of this with several attempts at Impossible Orders... and then gets served exactly what he orders, to his own shock. He eventually wins with "an elephant foot sandwich with mustard". Even though Orson and Wade had found an elephant, it wasn't theirs to kill and put in a sandwich, so to screw with Roy, they just showed him the elephant and pretended that they were out of mustard.
* Played for laughs in the ''[[Rick and Morty]]'' episode "The Whirly Dirly Conspiracy", where Rick says (under the influence of sedative drugs) that the two things he desires most are cookies and a 90-minute cut of ''[[Avatar]]''. Sadly, while cookies are easy to obtain, it seems unlikely [[James Cameron]] would ever fulfill the later.
== [[Other Media]] ==
* An [[Urban Legends|Urban Legend]] about the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web “deep web”] - part of the internet only accessible with special software and rumored to have sites where human traffickers, drug dealers, [[Professional Killers]], and people who sell illegal pornography (possibly even [[Snuff Film]]s) - is that it has an even deeper section called [https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-18-the-myth-of-marianas-web-the-darkest-corner-of-the-internet.html Marianas Web], that contains humanity’s darkest secrets, like the [[Religious Horror|Vatican's secret archive]], the location of [[Atlantis]] or information on [[Alien Invasion]]s, and the files of government intelligence agencies. Some even claim it is run by a [[A.I. Is a Crapshoot|sentient AI]] that is at the risk of evolving into [[The Terminator|Skynet]]. But even if the Marianas Web is real (and it probably isn’t) accessing it requires an algorithm called the [https://web.archive.org/web/20211106161328/https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Polymeric_falcighol_derivation Polymeric falcighol derivation] (warning link is NSFW due to language) which requires a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing quantum computer] to do. Since nobody even seems to know what the Polymeric falcighol derivation ''is'', let alone if it’s real, and quantum computers require massive support systems are thus are still relegated to research labs) it's likely impossible to discover whatever it is hiding.
== [[Real Life]] ==
* The University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt traditionally has an impossible task or two among the list of things to find, make, or do. One year it was "build a working nuclear reactor in a shed on the Quad", which, in best Impossible Task fashion, turned out to be not ''quite'' as impossible as the organizers had expected (or hoped).
* "[[wikipedia:How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?|How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?]]" This question is impossible to answer, as it was intended to have no answer.<ref>However, it does have at least one answer:{{quote|Baptist angels can't dance.|Dave Broadfoot|''[[Royal Canadian Air Farce]]''}}</ref> In fact, in modern times, it is often used as a metaphor for wasting time debating topics that are of no value.
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