• Question: what would happen if everyone in the world jumped at the same time

    Asked by to Ekbal, Andrei, Gemma, Helen, Ruth on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ekbal Hussain

      Ekbal Hussain answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Hi,
      That’s an interesting question and one that is actually quite fun to answer and think about.
      Let’s make your question a bit more interesting and bring all the World’s people to one place before asking them to jump. There are around 7 billion people on this planet and let’s say we can all jump about 50 cm.

      So, we all jump and land at the same time… what happens? Other than lots of flat vegetable gardens, the Earth’s surface would be pushed down by less than an one atom’s width! That’s a pretty terrible effort to be honest…

      So why do we make no difference to the Earth? It’s because even though there are 7 billion people on the planet, the Earth still weighs 10 trillion (that’s 10,000,000,000,000) times as much as we do!

      So jumping on it won’t do anything I’m afraid, other than scare the living daylights out of a lot of worms!

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