jebbers Posted March 18, 2006 Share Posted March 18, 2006 now ive been out for a long time and i thought it would be fitting to return with a WTF thread...now i dont know if this is posted or not but here it goes... Are you registered for World Jump Day? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IG-64 Posted March 18, 2006 Share Posted March 18, 2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Jump_Day Keep in mind, this isn't actually serious. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TiE23 Posted March 18, 2006 Share Posted March 18, 2006 Okay, folks, let's look at this. Suppose everybody on the planet weighed 100kg (which is an overestimate, 70kg is more like it, probably less). Suppose that there were ten billion people (another overestimate - there are about 6.4 billion at the time of writing). Suppose that they all jumped ten metres in the air (a huge overestimate, fifty centimetres is more likely and probably much less). Suppose they were all at the exact same point on Earth (which they won't be, thus mitigating the effects of the jump). And lastly, suppose that they all jumped at precisely the same instant, which of course they will not, seeing as the time difference between the fastest watch and the slowest will likely be over five minutes. Altogether that's a mass of one billion tonnes of humanity jumping ten metres in the air. The Earth has a mass of... let's be nice and round it WAY down to 10^21 tonnes. That's a trillion times heavier than all of humanity. Which means the distance the Earth moves when everybody jumps will be one trillionth of the distance that all the people jumped: that is to say, 10^-11 metres, or about half the radius of a hydrogen atom. It gets better. Even assuming the Earth did move by some significant distance when everybody jumped, just think about it: it'd move right back again! You jump up, the Earth goes down: you fall down, the Earth comes up to meet you. Jumping up and down to try to move the Earth is like mounting a fan on a sailboat, pointing the fan at the sail, and expecting the boat to move forwards. It just doesn't work! http://qntm.org/moving Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jon_hill987 Posted March 18, 2006 Share Posted March 18, 2006 I think that quote TiE found just about sums it up. However if everyone looked at the sun an belched at the same time... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.