What if the wise men kept walking after Jesus’s birth?

Get a copy of What If? 2 and Randall’s other books at: https://xkcd.com/books More serious answers to absurd questions at: https://what-if.xkcd.com/ This question comes from N. Murdoch, who was thinking about how the three wise men in the Christmas story followed a star to Bethlehem where they found the baby Jesus. The question is: what if you did walk towards a known star at a fixed speed? What path would you trace on the Earth? Credits ******* Randall Munroe | Narrator Henry Reich | Writer & Director Lizah van der Aart | Illustration and Video Editing Ever Salazar | Chief Chaos Controller Know Art Studios | Music & Sound Effects What If? The Video Series is the official adaptation of the What If? books by Randall Munroe and is produced by Neptune Studios LLC. Randall Munroe is the author of the New York Times bestsellers What If? 2, How To, What If?, and Thing Explainer; the science question-and-answer blog What If?; and the popular web comic xkcd (https://xkcd.com). A former NASA roboticist, he left the agency in 2006 to draw comics on the internet full time. Henry Reich is the creator of MinutePhysics and executive producer of MinuteEarth and MinuteFood and founder of Neptune Studios LLC (the parent company for all three youtube channels). ©2025 xkcd, inc.