Neutronium would like a word.

Anyone else notice that a large flat rate box has the same limit and the post only counts a small flat rate box?

At what velocity are the box's dimensions and effective mass determined?

USPS GOAT. Fuck privatización.
- Milten Friedman is the reason we are where we are today.
- But sometimes I have mildly inconveniencing experiences with the postal service in my extremely rural town that require me to navigate my extremely rural town's nearly non-existent public services so we should absolutely surrender complete control to Amazon
  
  You see, this one service does all things right but one of them irks me. Meanwhile this other one does everything wrong but has one thing I agree with. I'll switch to it.
  
  Private companies love the heartland and will work out of patriotism even if rural routes are less profitable! 🤡
  
  We recently moved in a very rural area. The rural carrier for our new route gave us a form to fill out, and by the end of the week we were receiving mail. UPS and FedEX on the other hand, wouldn't deliver to us for a month. USPS will carry our packages up our driveway to our steps; UPS and FedEX throw them in the ditch by the mailbox.
  Also, did you know you can buy stamps, cards, and envelopes directly from the rural carrier? Here's a fun quote from the rural customer registration form:
  Rural carriers maintain a supply of stamps, cards, and envelopes for sale. Additionally, your carrier will accept Certified Mail™, Registered Mail™, insure packages, and prepare money orders. Generally, rural carriers can extend practically all services available at a Post Office. Please purchase a sufficient supply of stamps and affix proper postage on all outgoing mail.
  Imagine how bleak things would be if Amazon was running the show. USPS is truly the best

8 5/8" x 5 3/8" x 1 5/8"
Don't write yourself off yet, learn metric.
- For most of the rest of the world, that's about 219 mm × 137 mm × 41,3 mm
  
  For those of us that don’t use arbitrary made up units at all, that’s 1.35515609E+34 Planck Length x 8.477460474E+33 Planck Length x 2.555613997E+33 Plank Length.
  Use real measurements. A meter is how far light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second? Statements made by the utterly deranged.
- moving from Europe to America the amount of times I'm like "it's 12 3/8ths" to try to, yknow, join in, and everyone's like "call it 12 or 13"
  motherfucker that's a huge gap!
- It's only in your head you feel left out or looked down on...
  
  just try your best, try everything you can

Apparently neither of you are aware of how dense I am. ;)
- But do you fit into that box? 🤔
  
  first, ya cut a hole in that box...
  
  Nothing one of those fancy new blenders couldn't handle.

He said "physically" which is wrong because Neutronium. What he possibly meant was "practically" in which Osmium would be the only element you can practically fit in the box since it isn't possible to synthesize neutronium at that amount or handle that much safely.
- I guarantee that it is physically impossible to fill a cardboard box with pure neutronium. Is it physically possible to get over 70 lbs of the stuff in there in a stable, shippable manner? I don't know, and neither do you. It's certainly far, FAR beyond the capability of any technology on Earth, but I guess it might maybe possibly not break the laws of physics. I can't prove that though, and neither can you, so neither of us can actually prove the statement wrong.
- If mailing 70 lbs of unstable particles that can't exist outside of a lab is wrong, I don't wanna be right.
  
  It would be interesting transporting a microscopic object weighing 70lbs.
- No you mean theoretical. As neutronium is a theoretical substance. To our knowledge there's no way to find it outside of neuron stars. It is therefore physically impossible, within our current state of knowledge.
  It's highly unlikely, bordering on theoretically impossible to assume that mankind will be able to synthesize enough to fill a cardboard box with. Then the practical side says even if that was possible, there would probably no way a cardboard box could contain that (and a plethora of other practical impossibilities).
  
  Well, you wouldn't actually need to fill the box, just exceed the weight limit. And since neuronium weighing just 70 Pounds would have negligible volume, the problem becomes on of making a containment chamber that would fit inside the box.
  
  That and the neutrons would rapidly undergo beta decay producing a LOT of free energy and other particles.
- it isn't possible to synthesize neutronium at that amount or handle that much safely.
  To be clear, the neutronium you're talking about here is the one that is theorized to exist at the core of neutron stars? Could you elaborate on how much has been synthesized and could be handled safely?
  
  Wasn't neutronium practically synthesized in miniscule amounts in the Large Hydron Collider? Also I am not a quantum physicist, so I am not sure if any neutronium is currently safe to handle beyond a miniscule amount considering a sugar cube sized amount of neutronium is theoretically the weight of a large freight ship.
- I always fill them up with that stuff black holes are made of, it's pretty dense.

Imagine shipping this tiny little box and it weighs 60 pounds. Poor mailman.
- Last package of the da... Yo wtf?!?
  
  It's the 32 KG mop all over again
  Note: Above video is marketing for an exercise plan, but it's also funny to watch occasionally when he has new episodes. As far as I know, the weights are real, but they're always loaded funny in the videos. Max plates visually for the weight the dudes are lifting
- Not to be a killjoy but your basic mailman has a pretty low weight limit on the parcels they take.

Neutronium... I am having early 2000s trivia website flashbacks! Wasn't a teaspoon of that stuff several tons or something?
- On the order of a billion tons.
- I'm not sure if it's a hard weight or just guesstimate to illustrate its heavy, but I always heard that a teaspoon would weigh as much as a city
  
  A quick search just told me that it's been hypothesized that a teaspoon of it would weigh around 10 billion tons on Earth
  
  Yep. Or a mountain, something like that.

Wait until I fill that box with quark-gluon plasma.
- I'll go one better.
  A (non-spinning uncharged) black hole with diameter 1+5/8th inches (so it fits in the box) has a mass of about 2.3 earths.
  (Near as I can tell QGP filling the whole box is around a ten billionth of that.)
  Of course the box would Very quickly no longer be outside the black hole. QGP would also cause the box to no longer be a container in short order. To put it mildly.
  
  It would also reach its destination very quickly. Or rather the other way around. Free delivery.
  
  Wouldn't the box forever be outside the black hole... as in just on the surface as it would need to exceed the speed of light in order to actually enter the event horizon?...or is that our of date knowledge?

It’s because all the packages have the same domestic weight limit.
Seems silly, but makes sense in the context.
- Okay so I originally assumed this was probably due to some union rule or something like that. But I didn't find any reference to it in the NALC guidelines, anything in the USPS resources center (which is hard to use), anything in google searches, and the original employee documentation or spec.
  I did find the USPS History section and it turns out they have someone whose job title is "Postal Historian", Stephen Kochersperger.
  But, anyways, I found the address (not email of course haha) for the USPS history office so I have wrote up an letter and put it in the mailbox. I will eventually update yall
- This is the case for most "Dumb laws": there's an outlier that becomes kinda silly, but it's not really worth the effort to change.
  I saw one "It's illegal to hunt Blue Whales in Idaho". Because it's illegal to hunt endangered species in Idaho, and Blue Whales are endangered, not because legislators were super concerned about saving Idaho's whale population.
  
  I find that there's usually a good reason for seemingly stupid shit in this world.
  Was shooting the shit with a customer who was bitching about grass seed bags being full of inert materials. Had no idea! Another customer chimed in that the extra crap is to help if feed properly in a spreader.
  
  Makes for good clickbait, heh.

at a typical temperature and pressure, sure.

If you stuffed that box with neutronium then:
Funny event: it's so dense the Earth itself is basically a thin gas in comparison and it immediately falls through the floor, the ground, and the mantle to oscillate around in the core.
Funny other event: It's so massive it dominates gravity nearby and everything within a couple of meters gets turned into Cool Physics from aggregating onto an incompressible box really fast and hard. Maybe the nearby atmosphere ignites from being compressed into plasma against the box.
Real physics step in and the neutronium immediately decompresses and the mass equivalent of an inland ocean in neutrons and angry high-energy high-mass decay products sterilizes everything through to the horizon with a gamma ray burst, also triggering massive seismic events from the blast as well as killing everything on Earth since the atmosphere is now radioactive and a lot thinner
- Ugh... does this mean I have to go all the way down to post office to get my package again?
- Part two turning things into cool physics made me giggle IRL, good job
- Sweet
  Also sweet
  Yikes okay don't try that then. Though I am tempted to observe the cool physics...

Could you create a device that would compress some substance to the extent it would reach this weight or is that impossible?
- Such devices exist, namely stars. Neutron stars are theorized to have neutronium at their core, essentially a soup of neutrons so densely packed that nothing else fits between them - in order words, the densest theoretical material (osmium is the densest material found on Earth).
  
  I guess I forgot to say it needs to fit in the package lol. I know it’s possible in extreme environments but can you create such an environment in this package is the question.
- I believe that would be some form of fusion
  
  So yes, for a moment
- Good news, it's 20-30 years away!

What about a piece of neutron star in those dimensions? Would it still be lighter than 70 lbs?
- Good news, after obtaining a piece of neutron star in those dimensions, you wouldn't need to worry about it anymore.
  
  I'd like an Ai to draw a 4 panel comic of this.
- The common popsci factoid tells us that a teaspoon of a neutron star weights as much as Mount Everest, so maybe.
  
  1 tsp neutron star < your mom

Osmium isn't the densest substance known to humans it's just the densest element
- What is the densest substance we can fill the box with?
  
  Your mom (geez guys, did I really have to do that?)
  
  A black hole.
- Would densest substance on earth be accurate or are there denser substances like alloys or non-standard crystal configurations of other elements which are denser than pure osmium?
- bruh your username 😭😭 respect.
  also, surely flerovium and the other mostly-theoretical elements would be denser, no? at least for a couple microseconds until they yeet some protons and fling themselves apart.

you can balloon the box out a ways to get more volume
- The surface area of the box is about 135 inches. If this surface area were spread over a sphere, it would have a diameter of about 6.5 inches and a volume of nearly 150 cubic inches (nearly twice the volume of the uninflated box!). 150 cubic inches of osmium weighs about 120lbs.
  So, indeed you could exceed the weight limit of the box by ballooning it out and filling it with something that's at least 7/12ths as dense as osmium (or a little more dense than lead).
  
  The demon core's theme just started playing for some reason
- Hmm, that might make it feasible to do with something that you can actually buy in large quantities, like tungsten! Would still probably cost four or five figures though.

What about dark matter? One pound of it weighs over 10000 pounds.
- Doesn't matter. You won't see it til it too late.
- Do we have a source for this or are you just joking?
  
  It's true. One kilogram of dark matter weighs as much as ten thousand kilograms of feathers.
  
  It’s what happens when all the gravitons and graviolis get mixed up
  
  https://getyarn.io/yarn-story/5f8d07b3-d956-481b-b7c9-8f68de41a8ad

Tariffs on neutronium are out of this world though.

at least 2 sci-fi franchised used "neutronium as a ex machina armor: sg1 and ST(exclusive to select advanced race who can use and make the "armor", although i think its mostly an alloy in both of these shows rather than pure neutronium(alloy of neutronium and some other metal)

What about a ' shrodingers 71 pounds ' cat.'
- If it was dead before you put it in the box, it's still dead.
  
  True but if it is 71 befor putting it in....
  Inside the box it can stay 71 or... loose fat to 35 . You can only know by picking up the box.

He forgot packaging, gotta protect the ultra dense substance from bumps and scuffs

What about one tablespoon of material from a neutron star?