What ifs not only make questions, they are the crux of most discovery and debate. A person who cannot honestly answer a what-if is a person not worth wasting time on.
I.e. "What-ifs" are a test of a person's intellectual honestly. Simple what-ifs like I have proposed are a test to whether the other party is even open to changing their mind if confronted with indisputable evidence. When people refuse to be pinned down to simply acknowledging the obvious, it is clear that they cannot be successfully engaged with logic.