Ok. What if it were a tunnel made out of a material that could withstand the heat? We are hypothetically speaking, as you could not realistically have everyone jump at the same time, drill through the center of the Earth, nor specifically *know* how hot the center of the Earth is or what it is made of.PureFodder wrote:
5,000 degrees celcius hot.Jello.01 wrote:
...The center of the earth is magma. Hot magma. It would disintegrate before it even got close...KEN-JENNINGS wrote:
Unless you were to launch it with enough force to escape Earth's gravity.
Average weight of a person is about 170 pounds.
Multiply that by 6 billion and you get:
1,020,000,000,000lbs.
Still not the weight of the earth.
Also, it wouldn't work because:
1. You wouldn't get the entire global population to participate:
2. They wouldn't be able to jump at the same time, they are too busy filling their fat guts with their Big Mac's.
Multiply that by 6 billion and you get:
1,020,000,000,000lbs.
Still not the weight of the earth.
Also, it wouldn't work because:
1. You wouldn't get the entire global population to participate:
2. They wouldn't be able to jump at the same time, they are too busy filling their fat guts with their Big Mac's.
Last edited by Ryan (2007-05-17 17:51:41)
which would be probably like 360,000,000,000 kgRyan wrote:
Average weight of a person is about 170 pounds.
Multiply that by 6 billion and you get:
1,020,000,000,000lbs.
Still not the weight of the earth.
according to google, the mass of the earth is 5.9742 × 1024kg, or
5,974,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg
so even if you did get every one on earth in one small area, it would be like a bacteria trying to move you, or something else really small.
Think about this...
Constantly ocean waves are hitting the shore all over the earth...
Waterfalls are falling..
Trees are falling...
People are walking...
people are jumping...
Hammers are hammering...
Cars are moving...
Can u feel it... ???
In short... the Earth moves when IT wants to.
Or if you listen to that really really bad 70's song that goes like this...
"I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky come crumblin down."
Weight of the earth >ownz> weight of all living things.
Constantly ocean waves are hitting the shore all over the earth...
Waterfalls are falling..
Trees are falling...
People are walking...
people are jumping...
Hammers are hammering...
Cars are moving...
Can u feel it... ???
In short... the Earth moves when IT wants to.
Or if you listen to that really really bad 70's song that goes like this...
"I feel the earth move under my feet, I feel the sky come crumblin down."
Weight of the earth >ownz> weight of all living things.
Why this won't work
First things first: why won't the Earth move if we get 600,000,000 people to jump up at the same time? There are three reasons, actually.
Mass delusion
First, there's the problem with mass. 600 million people sounds like a lot, but the Earth is big. Really, really big. Let's say each person weighs 100 kilograms to make it easy (that's 220 pounds, so we're already being generous). 600 million people times 100 kg = 60 billion kilograms. That's a lot of meat! But the Earth masses 6 x 1024 kg, or 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. In other words, the Earth weighs (well, masses) 100 trillion times the total mass of all those people!
Put it this way: a single cell weighs about 1 billionth of a gram. Compared to the weight of a human, that's the same ratio as 600 million people compared to the Earth. Now imagine a single cell jumping up and down on your head. How much do you move? That's the scale we're talking here.
Even a major asteroid impact won't move the Earth much in its orbit. So people-- even all of us, all six billion or so-- won't make any difference in the Earth's orbit. I actually calculated the energy of 600 million people jumping at once: I get about the equivalent of 50 tons of TNT exploding. Since we blow up bombs much larger than that, why hasn't the Earth been jerked around its orbit thousands of times?
Where in the world
The second problem is one of placement. Even if 600 million people could move the Earth, they're located all over the world. The Earth being a ball, that means that people in, say, northern Spain will be perfectly canceled out by people in New Zealand. You'd need to get all 600 million people in one place on Earth to do this. Not only that, you'd have to find the right place so that when the Earth moved, it went in the right direction. Global warming won't be stopped if you accidentally move the Earth closer to the Sun. That also means timing the jump perfectly, since the Earth rotates.
Newton's Third Law
Finally, there is another basic reason this won't work, even if everyone on the Earth weighed 100 trillion times as much. The problem is that we're a closed system. If we get everyone to jump up, they'll fall back down. So even if we were able to push the Earth in one direction by jumping, when we come back down we'll move the Earth back to where it was!
Think of it this way. Stand up. Now bend over and grab the tops of your shoes. Now pull up. Are you flying? No, duh, because as you pull up on your shoes, your shoes pull down on you by the same amount. You won't go flying around, no matter how much you believe Wile E. Coyote cartoons are actually documentaries. You're attached to your shoes, just like we're attached to the Earth.
Because we are gravitationally bound to the Earth, no matter how hard we jump, when we fall back down the Earth will move back into its old position. The energy you got from jumping up is returned to the Earth when you fall back down, and the net effect is zero.
I'll mention that you can move the Earth if you really needed to, and you had several million years to do it. You could turn a bunch of rockets upside-down and fire them so they push down on the Earth. The energy of the exhaust comes from chemicals burning, so in a sense it's not a closed system. But even with powerful rockets it would take essentially forever to move the Earth by any measurable amount.
Why nothing would happen even if this did work
So okay, World Jump Day won't work. But even if it did, the claims they make as to why we should do it are wrong as well. They want to lower the Earth's average temperature to counteract global warming. A noble idea, but I don't think they did the math. You'd have to move the Earth out from the Sun to lower its temperature, of course. It turns out that the temperature of the Earth depends roughly on the square root of the distance. The Earth's temperature is about 280 Kelvin (about 7 Celsius), so to drop the temperature one degree you'd need to move the Earth out from the Sun by about square root (1/280) = 6% of its current distance. The Earth is 150 million kilometers from the Sun, so we're talking moving the Earth 9 million kilometers farther out. That's 22 times the Moon's distance from the Earth. According to the WJD website, they want to drop the temperature about 2 degrees, which means moving the Earth more like 13 million kilometers.
Hmmph.
First things first: why won't the Earth move if we get 600,000,000 people to jump up at the same time? There are three reasons, actually.
Mass delusion
First, there's the problem with mass. 600 million people sounds like a lot, but the Earth is big. Really, really big. Let's say each person weighs 100 kilograms to make it easy (that's 220 pounds, so we're already being generous). 600 million people times 100 kg = 60 billion kilograms. That's a lot of meat! But the Earth masses 6 x 1024 kg, or 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. In other words, the Earth weighs (well, masses) 100 trillion times the total mass of all those people!
Put it this way: a single cell weighs about 1 billionth of a gram. Compared to the weight of a human, that's the same ratio as 600 million people compared to the Earth. Now imagine a single cell jumping up and down on your head. How much do you move? That's the scale we're talking here.
Even a major asteroid impact won't move the Earth much in its orbit. So people-- even all of us, all six billion or so-- won't make any difference in the Earth's orbit. I actually calculated the energy of 600 million people jumping at once: I get about the equivalent of 50 tons of TNT exploding. Since we blow up bombs much larger than that, why hasn't the Earth been jerked around its orbit thousands of times?
Where in the world
The second problem is one of placement. Even if 600 million people could move the Earth, they're located all over the world. The Earth being a ball, that means that people in, say, northern Spain will be perfectly canceled out by people in New Zealand. You'd need to get all 600 million people in one place on Earth to do this. Not only that, you'd have to find the right place so that when the Earth moved, it went in the right direction. Global warming won't be stopped if you accidentally move the Earth closer to the Sun. That also means timing the jump perfectly, since the Earth rotates.
Newton's Third Law
Finally, there is another basic reason this won't work, even if everyone on the Earth weighed 100 trillion times as much. The problem is that we're a closed system. If we get everyone to jump up, they'll fall back down. So even if we were able to push the Earth in one direction by jumping, when we come back down we'll move the Earth back to where it was!
Think of it this way. Stand up. Now bend over and grab the tops of your shoes. Now pull up. Are you flying? No, duh, because as you pull up on your shoes, your shoes pull down on you by the same amount. You won't go flying around, no matter how much you believe Wile E. Coyote cartoons are actually documentaries. You're attached to your shoes, just like we're attached to the Earth.
Because we are gravitationally bound to the Earth, no matter how hard we jump, when we fall back down the Earth will move back into its old position. The energy you got from jumping up is returned to the Earth when you fall back down, and the net effect is zero.
I'll mention that you can move the Earth if you really needed to, and you had several million years to do it. You could turn a bunch of rockets upside-down and fire them so they push down on the Earth. The energy of the exhaust comes from chemicals burning, so in a sense it's not a closed system. But even with powerful rockets it would take essentially forever to move the Earth by any measurable amount.
Why nothing would happen even if this did work
So okay, World Jump Day won't work. But even if it did, the claims they make as to why we should do it are wrong as well. They want to lower the Earth's average temperature to counteract global warming. A noble idea, but I don't think they did the math. You'd have to move the Earth out from the Sun to lower its temperature, of course. It turns out that the temperature of the Earth depends roughly on the square root of the distance. The Earth's temperature is about 280 Kelvin (about 7 Celsius), so to drop the temperature one degree you'd need to move the Earth out from the Sun by about square root (1/280) = 6% of its current distance. The Earth is 150 million kilometers from the Sun, so we're talking moving the Earth 9 million kilometers farther out. That's 22 times the Moon's distance from the Earth. According to the WJD website, they want to drop the temperature about 2 degrees, which means moving the Earth more like 13 million kilometers.
Hmmph.
Last edited by Rubix-Cubes (2007-05-17 18:04:33)
Whoa..
We(the Earth) are currently hurtling through space at a speed of 360000 m.p.h. and spinning at a speed of about 900 m.p.h. So yes, we would move, but we are moving already.
alien would play basketball with us !
For the earth to change it's rotation you will need a force greater than the earth's own gravity pull to make it; for the earth to change it's orbit around the sun it will need a force greater than the sun's pull on earth.
To put it in simple terms: No.
It's not scientifically possible unless you have a force that's like...a lot.
It's not scientifically possible unless you have a force that's like...a lot.
Yes. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so it WOULD move.
However, the Earth is not a solid lump of rock. Most of the shock would be taken up by the tectonic plates floating, thus translating a short sharp shock into a spread-out slosh. Friction all the way through would bleed the kinetic energy into heat, as it tends to do.
Then we consider that the Earth is absolutely fucking MASSIVE. It's a ball so big that it looks flat from where you're standing. It took us milennia and actually doing around to come back to where we started to find out that it WASN'T just an infinite ocean, or a blob sitting in nothingness. So even if all 7 billion-odd people jumped at once, barely anything would happen.
However, if you used that to propel a spacecraft, you could actually get quite a bit of thrust from it due to the lack of drag out there. A similar principle was used with Project Orion, which was one of the more far-fetched ideas from Operation Plowshare, an investigation into peaceful uses for nuclear weapons which was conducted into the 50s. The idea was basically to build a spacecraft the size of a small city, mount it on giant shock absorbers, and blast it upwards by detonating nukes underneath it repeatedly, relying on the shockwave to propel it. With 50s and 60s era building materials, they could have sent a few million tons into high orbit. Nowadays, they could probably manage New York.
It was shelved as being just plain stupid. Research showed that every launch would kill ten people from cancer instantly, and many more over time
Another wonderful idea was to construct a harbour in alaska with a series of nukes. That was shelved for many reasons, chief among them being the fact that nobody WANTED a harbour isolated enough to blast out with nukes. Also, the locals complained about not wanting to be nuked (wusses), the fallout resulting, and the loss of wildlife. It would also have been full of ice 6 months of the year.
(On a related note, the Russians had similar ideas, and managed to dam a river with a high-yield nuke. How, you say? They set it up so the crater rim wall would juuuust nudge up against the river and block it. It worked, too.)
On the center of the earth and hole thing, it would eventually just stabilise in the middle due to air friction slowing it down over time. The gravity gradient on the other side was a real kicker when the Nazis theorised collaborating with the anti-semitic aliens in the center of the earth to help out the war in the Pacific by flying aircraft through a tunnel at the poles.
Which is yet more evidence that the Nazis were nutcases.
However, the Earth is not a solid lump of rock. Most of the shock would be taken up by the tectonic plates floating, thus translating a short sharp shock into a spread-out slosh. Friction all the way through would bleed the kinetic energy into heat, as it tends to do.
Then we consider that the Earth is absolutely fucking MASSIVE. It's a ball so big that it looks flat from where you're standing. It took us milennia and actually doing around to come back to where we started to find out that it WASN'T just an infinite ocean, or a blob sitting in nothingness. So even if all 7 billion-odd people jumped at once, barely anything would happen.
However, if you used that to propel a spacecraft, you could actually get quite a bit of thrust from it due to the lack of drag out there. A similar principle was used with Project Orion, which was one of the more far-fetched ideas from Operation Plowshare, an investigation into peaceful uses for nuclear weapons which was conducted into the 50s. The idea was basically to build a spacecraft the size of a small city, mount it on giant shock absorbers, and blast it upwards by detonating nukes underneath it repeatedly, relying on the shockwave to propel it. With 50s and 60s era building materials, they could have sent a few million tons into high orbit. Nowadays, they could probably manage New York.
It was shelved as being just plain stupid. Research showed that every launch would kill ten people from cancer instantly, and many more over time
Another wonderful idea was to construct a harbour in alaska with a series of nukes. That was shelved for many reasons, chief among them being the fact that nobody WANTED a harbour isolated enough to blast out with nukes. Also, the locals complained about not wanting to be nuked (wusses), the fallout resulting, and the loss of wildlife. It would also have been full of ice 6 months of the year.
(On a related note, the Russians had similar ideas, and managed to dam a river with a high-yield nuke. How, you say? They set it up so the crater rim wall would juuuust nudge up against the river and block it. It worked, too.)
On the center of the earth and hole thing, it would eventually just stabilise in the middle due to air friction slowing it down over time. The gravity gradient on the other side was a real kicker when the Nazis theorised collaborating with the anti-semitic aliens in the center of the earth to help out the war in the Pacific by flying aircraft through a tunnel at the poles.
Which is yet more evidence that the Nazis were nutcases.
ok if there was the hole going straight through the earth, (just say it goes all the way through, with no magma or anything in the way,)
When you launched someting into it wouldn't it pick up a lot of speed as it decended due to gravity so once it reached the center and started is ascend on the other side it would just need enough speed/thrust to reach escape velocity.
from the surface of the earth i think escape velocity is something like 7 miles per second.
When you launched someting into it wouldn't it pick up a lot of speed as it decended due to gravity so once it reached the center and started is ascend on the other side it would just need enough speed/thrust to reach escape velocity.
from the surface of the earth i think escape velocity is something like 7 miles per second.
I think thats about right..buttersIRL wrote:
from the surface of the earth i think escape velocity is something like 7 miles per second.
Why?!
the moon exerts as much gravity on a person as a pea held 20 inches over their head.
just heard that on the National Geographic channel.
just heard that on the National Geographic channel.
Did a problem like this in one of my physics class a while back. And nope, it ain't gonna happen. The earth is just way too heavy and massive to even be slightly nudged.
Well...in the 2004 boxing day tsunami or Indonesia the worlds axis revolved like 2 inches.. wikipedia it.
Irellevant: there's no friction to hold the Earth in place, meaning any bump will affect it.Ryan wrote:
Multiply that by 6 billion and you get:
1,020,000,000,000lbs.
Still not the weight of the earth.
There doesnt need to be friction my little lizard. The earth is held in place by gravitational and magnetic forces. Any force under a humungeous force, like a colliding planet, would do diddle squat to effect the earths current position.Bubbalo wrote:
Irellevant: there's no friction to hold the Earth in place, meaning any bump will affect it.Ryan wrote:
Multiply that by 6 billion and you get:
1,020,000,000,000lbs.
Still not the weight of the earth.
Not to mention the earth has a lot of inertia (force that holds it in place and keeps it going in the direction it's going), so you would need enough force to overcome that, and then some if you want to move it significantly.
Last edited by mtb0minime (2007-05-18 04:11:34)
I have a crazy theory, if all the animals in the world, including humans, farted at the same time then the amount of greenhouse gasses released in one instance would be too much for the World to handle and it would heat up and implode in seconds....
But seriously this is true because I just worked it out after not believing a mate: -
If you were to wrap a rope around the world and measure it's circumference and then raise that rope 1 inch from the ground all around the world, you would only need 0.15 metres more rope for the new perimetre. You'd think it would makes miles of difference...
But seriously this is true because I just worked it out after not believing a mate: -
If you were to wrap a rope around the world and measure it's circumference and then raise that rope 1 inch from the ground all around the world, you would only need 0.15 metres more rope for the new perimetre. You'd think it would makes miles of difference...
Short answer: yes
Why. every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
As you jump you are both pushing yourself up and pushing the earth down. as you get to the max height of your jump. Gravity of the earth is pulling you down and your gravity is pulling the earth up.
End result the earth starts and finishes in the same place but did move.
Thing is even with everyone on the planet plus every animal etc jumping in the same area the effects will not be noticeable and will only be recordable to the most sensitive of equipment.
Why. every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
As you jump you are both pushing yourself up and pushing the earth down. as you get to the max height of your jump. Gravity of the earth is pulling you down and your gravity is pulling the earth up.
End result the earth starts and finishes in the same place but did move.
Thing is even with everyone on the planet plus every animal etc jumping in the same area the effects will not be noticeable and will only be recordable to the most sensitive of equipment.
I see a lot of people saying that everything has an equal and opposite reaction, which is true, but the earth absorbs your action. If you run into a concrete wall at full speed, does it move? No, of course not, it's a solid wall. The wall absorbs all your energy and very minute deformations are made in the material (on the molecular level) but it quickly returns to its original position. So the ground on earth slightly deforms as a way of reacting to your action, but as a whole the earth does not move at all.
Also, if you were pushing the earth down at the same time of pushing yourself up, then if someone was already off the ground when another person jumped up, the first person would have a longer hangtime since the earth would be pushed lower than when they started. And that's obviously not the case.
Furthermore, yes your body does have a gravitational field, but it is so small and so minute that it does not pull the Earth back to you. Think about a large asteroid passing near the earth. It's much larger than any human being, but when it passes (or in some cases enters) our atmosphere, the earth doesn't suddenly get pulled by it since it's so large that even a large asteroid has no effect on it (maybe on the water level if it's large enough, but not the entire earth).
Also, if you were pushing the earth down at the same time of pushing yourself up, then if someone was already off the ground when another person jumped up, the first person would have a longer hangtime since the earth would be pushed lower than when they started. And that's obviously not the case.
Furthermore, yes your body does have a gravitational field, but it is so small and so minute that it does not pull the Earth back to you. Think about a large asteroid passing near the earth. It's much larger than any human being, but when it passes (or in some cases enters) our atmosphere, the earth doesn't suddenly get pulled by it since it's so large that even a large asteroid has no effect on it (maybe on the water level if it's large enough, but not the entire earth).
Last edited by mtb0minime (2007-05-18 04:18:50)
WTF are you on about?DrunkFace wrote:
Short answer: yes
Why. every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
As you jump you are both pushing yourself up and pushing the earth down. as you get to the max height of your jump. Gravity of the earth is pulling you down and your gravity is pulling the earth up.
End result the earth starts and finishes in the same place but did move.
Thing is even with everyone on the planet plus every animal etc jumping in the same area the effects will not be noticeable and will only be recordable to the most sensitive of equipment.
I think the most poignant answers is,
"The Earth would not move but the earth would"
In other words, the planet wouldn't be affected one iota but the ground your standing on might, depending on its characteristics. So if you were standing in grass you would make a dent on landing but if you were on concrete you wouldn't make any noticeable difference.
Yes, every action has an opposite and equal reaction but that isn't necessarily the obvious. When you jump, the action is you bending your knees and pushing up off the ground. The E&0 reaction is you bending your knees as you land to soften the impact; and the planet is totally unaffected.
Of course you don't have to bend your knees on impact but then you'd brake (or seriously hurt) your legs; if the Earth "moved" then you would be able to not bend your knees upon impact just like on a trampoline.
I showed your post to my science-geek mate and here's what he E-mailed me back....
"Well there is some truth in the "Gravity of the earth is pulling you down and your gravity is pulling the earth up."
We do have our own gravity which pulls the earth and any matter in the universe towards us, but it's bollocks that the earth actually moves. There are forces far far stronger than that tiny bit of attraction that override it. And that guy has just commit a mortal sin by using the americanised and incorrect definition of Newton's third law of motion. Every action does not have an equal and opposite reaction, because you haven't qualified that a force has to be acting and that there is a linear path of motion etc.
And that guy just sounds like a cock by starting his answer with: "Short answer: yes"
What an idiot. He also doesn't appear to realise that gravity is acting on the person even when he is still in motion away from the earth: "as you get to the max height of your jump. Gravity of the earth is pulling you down and your gravity is pulling the earth up."
It is proven that if every habitant of China jumps into the Pacific Ocean all at the same time, it will cause a tsunami that will destroy North-America.