My head was all achey today, and I got to thinkin'. How many lemons would it take to kill a man?
Well, naturally, the thing that came to mind was perhaps the lemon's most dangerous latent ability. The power of Electricity. You see, with the proper metals stuck into it, a lemon (on average) is able to produce just about 1.5 volts. And the average electric chair will run about 2,000 volts through a guy. Meaning, if you were able to take the energy from an appropriately sized lemon battery and store it in another source, you would only need about 2666.6666666667 lemons to kill a man.
"But Sent" you're probably saying, "killing a man with an electric chair is retarded because most men don't want to be killed and you have to get him to sit in it. The amount of energy expended in forcing the man to sit in the electric chair is not accounted for in lemonpower."
And that's true. An electric chair isn't really an efficient form of murder, but if you were per chance wondering how many lemons it would take to destroy an inert person, there you go. If you want to kill an able-bodied non-consenting man with lemons, you have to get more creative.
In theory, the most powerful cannon and energy weapon in the known world is the almighty "Blitzer" electromagnetic railgun, owned and developed by the United States Navy. It fires an arm-sized solid steel projectile with pinpoint accuracy at speeds of 3 kilometers per second. It requires 25 megawatts of power to fire. The average lemon produces .000216 watts. That means with only 115,740,740,740.740(repeating) lemons, you could rip a man in half nigh-instantly from anywhere within a 3 to 6 kilometer range depending on how fast he's running away and how steady your aim is. Still think lemons aren't dangerous? Think again.
"But Sent" I can hear you saying, "115 billion lemons with today's prices (roughly $2.35/lb) would cost 50 billion dollars! In fact, 115 bilion lemons is almost 76% of the production of the entire world's lemon/lime farming industry in 2007, and no substantial breakthroughs in lemon technology have been made to increase our yearly output!"
Yes. And you should be glad that's the case. But there is a way to kill a man with lemons even more directly than that!
And for that direct method, we'll need to look into toxicity. Citric acid is not the most toxic thing in the world, but you can be poisoned by it. The symptoms include numbness in the extremities, nausea, diarrhea, and delirium (What? why are you looking at me like that?) but can you be poisoned to death by citric acid?... Well, as it turns out, for some depraved reason, there actually is data on that.
In labrat tests, it takes a median dose of 3000 milligrams of citric acid per kilogram of bodyweight to theoretically kill a mammal. Well, there's usually .25 teaspoons of citric acid in a tablespoon of lemon juice. That's about 1.23 grams. Meaning it would take roughly 2440 of those to make 3000 miligrams of lemon death. So in order to kill the average man (who weighs 62 kilograms) you would need 115,280 teaspoons of lemon acid. Which is 197 gallons. But you only need 8405 lemons for that, which lowers the lemon-to-murder ratio of the previous method significantly. BUT WE CAN DO BETTER!
A chinese water torture cell contains roundabout 15 cubic feet of space assuming it's a 5 by 3 rectangle. (You don't need to contain the entire man in the cell in order to kill him, he just needs to be secured.) You'd need about 448.8 quarts of juice to drown him in the chinese water torture cell. That's 28,723 tablespoons! Why do I know that? Because, assuming there's 6 tablespoons of juice in your average lemon, that means it would take about 4,787 lemons to kill a man. Unless you include the pulp, because then (assuming lemons contain half a cup of guts when fully squashed) you'll cut down on the necessary amount of lemons by a thousand or so and only need 3,590.4 lemons.
Yes, that means, as long as you had the necessary power storage technology, it would actually take less lemons to fry a man in the electric chair than to simply drown him in lemons. Just something to think about.
Though you could also hold his head down in a bucket, in which case you would only need about 42.67 lemons (juice alone) or 32 lemons (pulp included) which is the lowest amount of lemons so far, but requires you to do the heavy lifting. Though there is one way to increase the efficiency even further.
You could also freeze a lemon until it's completely solid and then launch it out of an acetalyne-powered potato gun at point blank range. Acetalyne combustion in potato guns actually allows for muzzle velocities of 609 miles per hour, and the comparatively lighter and smaller lemon would be travelling at even more horrifying speeds. There is a high risk for the lemon projectile bursting or fracturing, and since it's frozen solid, that means you likely have a bunch of pointy shards going toward your opponent at high speeds. Since that won't really pack the same bone-breaking crunch as a potato, you should aim for the soft parts of the body in order to cause lemon lacerations in the person's guts. The person will be in for a slow and agonizing demise as the shards thaw inside them, literally pouring lemon juice in the wound.
In short, how many lemons does it take to kill a man?... Well, without medical attention, one. (If they manage to call an ambulance, I'd say 4 or 5 more shots should probably make it so that they're beyond help when the paramedics arrive.)
