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All the water and air on earth gathered into spheres

boingboing.net — Dan Phiffer found this image on a message board, and by his calculations, he says it's accurate.

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  • f3l1x, on 03/12/2008, -0/+106By _my_ calculations, I wouldn't want to be in Italy when the water balloon is let go.
    • LongShlong, on 03/12/2008, -14/+4WHO GAVE YOU THE FORMULA?! I mean... LOLZ, I can has water balloon? Totally dugg it!
    • rootneg2, on 03/13/2008, -0/+3I assume you used STP...
  • phoenixian, on 03/12/2008, -13/+4How that can be? I've thought that the world had a lot of water...
    • willeagle, on 03/12/2008, -0/+8That's what I thought... but then I thought, relatively, water covers just a surface layer of of the planet, so in terms of the volume of each, water isn't nearly as great as the volume of actual 'earth'. Same is true of air, as they say on the site, apparently it's mostly within the first 5 miles. I don't know how 'deep' earth is, but it's a lot more than 5 miles! It's weird but looks right...
      • firstpost, on 03/12/2008, -0/+2radius of Earth = 6 378.1 kilometers
        (according to Google)
        It's very simple by the way:
        c = 2πr
        r = c/(2π)
        c = about 40,000 kilometres (about 24,000 miles)
        so r = about 6,366 kilometres (3956 miles)
    • teh_techie, on 03/12/2008, -0/+17A lot of the world's SURFACE has water... in the grand scheme of things, it's not very deep
      • Lone1, on 03/12/2008, -0/+8yea, the pic was surprising but it makes sense. Its like pictures taken from orbit that show the atmosphere, you see a tiny layer and its weird to think that little bit of stuff is keeping everyone alive.
    • unreg, on 03/12/2008, -1/+7It's off by about 10% according to my calculations
    • arobar, on 03/12/2008, -0/+4Just because the sphere is small in the photo doesn't mean it's not "a lot of water". 1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of water is quite a bit of water, in my opinion.
    • ophello, on 03/12/2008, -0/+2its a small picture. remember, that waterball is 1300 miles wide.
    • bitcloud, on 03/13/2008, -2/+4They might not be taking into account the water in organic matter (you're 60% water for example...)
      that adds another 240 billion litres for humans alone...
    • keeganspeck, on 03/13/2008, -1/+3Is it counting trapped water in Greenland and the poles? I can see Greenland's white mass clearly on the globe.
  • Shakermaker, on 03/12/2008, -0/+55Well, if you can't trust Dan's calculations...who can you trust?
    • postitnote, on 03/12/2008, -1/+17Lisa: I don't understand professor, why didn't your tests show that the skeleton was a fake?
      Dr. Gould: I'm going to be honest with you Lisa, I never did the tests.
    • Black6x, on 03/13/2008, -2/+1Dan, Dan, He's our man....
  • Quicksilver4648, on 03/12/2008, -9/+22Somehow I doubt it... But then again, I did spend a whole 3 seconds of thought on the subject.
  • idiosyncrisia, on 03/12/2008, -3/+54I really want to swim in a sphere of water now.
    • aigulf, on 03/12/2008, -6/+4Super Mario Galaxy, FTW
    • mitchlourens, on 03/12/2008, -1/+11it's not too much, basically like swimming in a cube of water.
    • ZaZ2137, on 03/12/2008, -2/+14Playin some blitzball.
  • paintpro, on 03/12/2008, -17/+4old
    http://digg.com/environment/This_is_how_little_wat ...
    • saxreturns, on 03/12/2008, -0/+15The old one never got popular, though.
  • SteeleyDan, on 03/12/2008, -4/+75Really thought it would have been bigger
  • HiKevinRose, on 03/12/2008, -14/+1Damn, we need to show this to China and tell them to stop ***** the rest of us over. Though we are partially to blame we're at least trying to correct our mistakes.
    • WhiteRaven, on 03/12/2008, -1/+4Uh.... is this post in the right thread? What are you talking about?
      • HiKevinRose, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1Use your brain. There's that much water and air on Earth. Why do you think there's concern over air pollution in China for the Olympic Games? They've polluted and smogged the hell out of it. Just think about my comment and you'll get it. There's limited air and they're carelessly polluting it without stressing any environmental clean-up.
    • arobar, on 03/12/2008, -0/+5Yeah, at least the small percentage of your country that are eco activities are trying to correct their mistakes. Don't worry about the other 99% who don't give a *****.
  • TobiasParker, on 03/12/2008, -7/+2Good thing most of our air isn't at sea level, show it at upper atmosphere air pressure and it would be huge.
    • tmbrwolf19, on 03/12/2008, -2/+4there is very little of that air at upper atmosphere air pressure. 80% of that volume is in within 10 miles of earths surface, and space begins at 75 miles, meaning remaining 20% is somewhere in that 65 mile area. In reality, there really isn't much air on this planet, or least as not as much as some people believe.
    • teh_techie, on 03/12/2008, -1/+7But... most of our air IS at sea level. Silly. Air becomes more sparce as you leave earth...
      • TobiasParker, on 03/12/2008, -7/+1what is the elevation of the city you live in? is it 0 because odds are you do not live at Sea Level
    • firstpost, on 03/12/2008, -1/+3that would actually silly because it will keep getting less dense until you are in the vacuum of space, where the sphere would be theoretically infinitely large (seeing as pressure equals zero)
  • mark076h, on 03/12/2008, -1/+18i wonder if a sphere like that was to be let go would all the water find its way back to where it was?
    • Emachine, on 03/12/2008, -0/+10Where else would it go?
    • teh_techie, on 03/12/2008, -1/+13Oceanwise, maybe... but not lake and groundwater wise...
    • Gestalt63, on 03/13/2008, -3/+2It depends over what timeframe we're talking about I would suppose... but over a geologically short time frame even lake and groundwater surely must recover back to where it was due to precipitation. It would perhaps take much, much longer for say the icecaps and glaciers to recover (assuming that at some point there IS another ice age which is looking highly improbable in - dare I say it - the current climate)
    • ophello, on 03/13/2008, -1/+22It would probably take several weeks to settle, but the damage would be catastrophic.

      The resulting pressure would force the land immediately below the impact downwards by a mile, perhaps, and a new ocean might form. The debris from 1000 mph water erosion would fly across the land in a massive flood, pulverizing mountains. Air dispersion from the falling water would result in destructive wind forces in surrounding areas, and much of the water would be thrown across the Sahara desert, burying much of Africa. The Mediterranean countries would likely get pushed completely underwater after it settles, and most of the mountains in the impact area would be eroded.

      The rest of the world would be experiencing relatively quiet results, with a steady trickle of rising sea-levels that wouldn't return to their normal levels for years. The shifting air currents, however, would cause deadly hurricane-force winds worldwide for years as well.

      It would be an utter catastrophe, to be sure, and also a great movie.
      • bam359, on 03/13/2008, -0/+2Hopefully someone would think to build a big boat of some kind, and safely store two of each kind of animal on board so as to maintain the Earths Biodiversity.
        • FLarsen, on 03/13/2008, -0/+2I don't think I would like to be in a boat if that happened.

          A waterproof underground bunker on the other side of the world. That's more like it.
  • maskedkoala, on 03/12/2008, -1/+15I wonder what a ball of the Earth's organic matter would look like on that scale.
    • teh_techie, on 03/12/2008, -1/+6What organic matter are you speaking of...
    • Zeigy, on 03/12/2008, -1/+5It would probably be a giant liquid red ball.
      • ThE0eNiGmA, on 03/12/2008, -0/+4Doubt that it would be red. There are a lot more insects and plants than there are red-blooded animals. Black, green, or brown maybe.
        • MasterGrief, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1While you're right about there being a lot more insects and plants, there is still the fact that it takes a vast quantity of insect blood, and by extension insects, to equal the amount of blood in, say, a human being. The plants, though... Probably be lots of green. My guess is that the ball would be a shade of brown.
    • heymike, on 03/12/2008, -0/+1Ya I see what you are saying. If they made a sphere composed of the top 1" of all exposed earth or something so you could gauge the mass.
    • elint6, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1Maybe a tenth of the size of all that water. Remove bacteria from the equation and maybe a fifteenth.
    • Qeveren, on 03/13/2008, -0/+2I did a back-of-the-envelope style calculation for topsoil, and it's remarkably small. It'd make a sphere 30km in diameter.
  • Sp0rAdiC, on 03/12/2008, -1/+9Anybody have a link to a higher resolution?
  • michael43, on 03/12/2008, -8/+17It's not right. I've got a glass of water by my bed and nobody came by and counted it. There's also a few air filled balloons in my daughters room, I guess I better hoard them like gold.
  • chrisaug18, on 03/12/2008, -10/+3This is very humbling
  • GodIsntReal, on 03/12/2008, -2/+11Anyone have a larger image?
  • rockon4life45, on 03/12/2008, -7/+3screw global warming we should be scared giant water balloons
  • pokemonfan4eva, on 03/12/2008, -0/+18It's very important to know these things in case all the water on earth forms into a big sphere and rolls over Europe.
    • Tetraca, on 03/13/2008, -0/+5Sure, be sarcastic now, but when all the water on earth forms into a big sphere and rolls over Europe, will YOU be prepared for it?
  • SSCrow, on 03/12/2008, -8/+1Lucky for us there is no where for that water to go thanks to gravity.
    • snoox, on 03/13/2008, -1/+0wow, dig real geographic facts. dig them to hell.
  • jttennisplaya81, on 03/12/2008, -11/+1Yeah, sorry not true. There is no way anyone knows how much water we actually have. Who knows how many water filled cave systems we have yet to discover?
    • Zeigy, on 03/12/2008, -1/+7Yeah, I'm sure there is some giant water filled cave under Russia or Saudi Arabia about the size of a continent that is still undiscovered, loaded with water; and, shoot, all those oil wells haven't found it yet.
    • darklights, on 03/12/2008, -0/+8Believe it or not, there are a lot of people more clever than you on this planet. Its not hard, you dont have to be super accurate. Just take the total water surface area on the planet and multiply it by the average water body depth - its a bit more complex than that but thats the gist of it.
  • euphioquestion, on 03/12/2008, -1/+17So all the water on the earth amounts to... an icebreakers liquid breath mint?

    Sweet.
  • Strunt, on 03/12/2008, -7/+5mmm..boobies!
  • tahcoboy, on 03/12/2008, -7/+2pics or it didnt happen.
  • frsrblch, on 03/12/2008, -0/+8*****, there goes Italy. Hopefully it isn't rolling this way!
  • scribby, on 03/12/2008, -0/+6It is a few thousand dollars for a poster-size reprint of this image. An associate got one as a gift so I checked pricing for my own copy. I will have to settle for a 350x210 px image.
    • Sharky35, on 03/13/2008, -1/+1wtf... PROBABLY CALLED "art"... by some a-hole who calls things art and then charges a retarded amount of money for those things.
  • byttle, on 03/12/2008, -1/+5can i get some resolution...?
    • Scrappy1850, on 03/13/2008, -0/+21280x720 and i would have a new desktop
  • Spiffness, on 03/12/2008, -1/+29If ALL the water in the world is represented, why are Greenland and the north pole covered in snow?
  • insomniac8400, on 03/12/2008, -2/+9So what they are saying is that a giant space maid with a vacuum could easily suck up all the air and water and easily store it?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceballs
  • CrankyHippo, on 03/12/2008, -0/+29I wouldn't mind seeing some other balls ;-) , like what a ball of all the vegetation would look like, and a giant ball of all of earths lifeforms or a giant ball of rubber bands. I have a strange fascination of giant balls...
    • vegetables, on 03/12/2008, -0/+6But seriously, a ball of all humans would be pretty cool/useful, just to see how we compare. Someone else has to make the call on the Giant Human Ball(s) pack density, though.
      • fatinez, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1It's not impressive. With 6.7 billion people getting a nice 1000 sq ft condo with 8 ft ceilings in one gigantic building, that building would only have to be 365 cubic miles. That is just over 7 miles wide, tall, and long.
    • vincible, on 03/13/2008, -0/+3A ball of humans would be on the order of 1 billion times smaller than the water ball so it wouldn't even be visible on the same scale. It kind of makes sense if you think about how humans are about the same density as water and its pretty clear there's way more water than humans.

      Average human density of 1010 kg/m^3:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_( ...
      Average human mass of about 80 kg (wikipedia only gives western country averages, but this is more than close enough):
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_weight
      1010/85 = 12.6 Which means within 1 cubic meter you can fit about 12 humans (tight fit, but it can be done with a blender!)
      World population of 6.7 billion:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
      6.7 billion / 12 = 560 million
      So 560 million cubic meters of human mass. Sounds like a lot, but that's only 1/2 of a cubic kilometer compared to ~1.5 BILLION cubic kilometers of water. The ball would actually only be 1 kilometer in diameter.

      It would still be interesting to see that ball next to insect, plant, other animals and total organic matter balls but it would have to be on a very different scale (say floating over a map of Manhattan).
    • GuacamoleSan, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1how bout a giant ball of all the poop inside people right now
  • bdpf, on 03/12/2008, -9/+4I for one like to know what scale he used and the source of his figures.
    How do you calculate all the ground water?
    Parts of the oceans are miles deep, not silly little kilometers! The trenches run for hundreds of miles. Now parts of the great lakes are too deep to touch bottom.
    Just some thoughts the might mean the water figures are a bit off the mark, I would say.
    Good try though. SMILE SMILE LOL xoxoxoxo
    • razrielle, on 03/12/2008, -0/+4I really hope you forgot your sarcasm tag
  • Versh, on 03/12/2008, -0/+2Then again, comparing the total Earth as a cumulative surface (lifted from the globe, and unfolded to one continuous sheet) than the default sphere, perhaps there wouldn't be such a large visual discrepancy. I dunno, maybe a ratio should be made of habitable land in comparison to the whole Earth-- still, I like the concept. I would prefer for all my information of statistics to be somehow represented this way...
    Hooray for visual learning!
  • D3koy, on 03/12/2008, -7/+1I call *****, the Indian ocean alone must be at least that big
    • ophello, on 03/13/2008, -0/+2Youre wrong, and an idiot.
    • elint6, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1That sphere is probably a few miles high. Do the volume of a sphere yourself V = 4r(pi)^3
  • AncientWeird, on 03/12/2008, -1/+5Blitzball field?
  • fakesinatra, on 03/12/2008, -8/+3I want to see all the poop on earth gathered into a big sphere.

    (and dropped on Exxon headquarters.)
  • AngeloM3, on 03/12/2008, -1/+5Direct link with larger resolution pictures....
    http://www.sciencephoto.com/images/imagePopUpDetai ...

    I would think the water sphere would be bigger
  • Caerbannog, on 03/12/2008, -0/+2That's the relationship between surface area and volume, in a nutshell.
  • dualboy24, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1I would like to see a comparison set showing the worlds oil supplies one of today and one of 100 years ago.
    • MyExSucks, on 03/13/2008, -0/+2I hope you realize that the amount of oil we have compared to water is very tiny, and the water ball is small to start out with. you probably wouldn't even be able to see the ball of oil 100 years ago compared to the earth anyway
  • ninjaberry, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1I wonder how much bigger the water sphere would be if you sucked the water out of every living thing on the planet.
    • disappointed, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1Negligibly bigger. Especially when you consider that they probably didn't remove the volume of all the fish from the volume of all the ocean water when they calculated this.
  • 4d669, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1I expected a huge water sphere. They should make a human sphere and maybe a Coca Cola sphere.
  • rainierbeer, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1wouldn't all the ice in Greenland be gone?
  • wushu18t, on 03/13/2008, -1/+1i don't know about the sphere of air. that sphere could be any size depending on the pressure it is under. arguable the water could be too, but the change in volume for water relative to air is very very small.
  • DrummerAndrew, on 03/13/2008, -0/+3From the comments:
    I'm going to be generous in my assumptions, so the resulting ball will be bigger. I'm going to claim that my upwards error is exactly the same as the extra volume added by the packing inefficiency that's inevitable when stacking human bodies together in space. Not that I'd know, of course; my orbital death platform is entirely fictional. Honest.
    Asumptions:
    6.7 billion humans in the world
    Average mass of a human is approx 65kg (Wikipedia says that the mean for the UK and USA is around 75kg; I assume most of the world is lighter than us)
    The mean density of a person is 1g/cm3
    So humans mass a total of 6.7 billion people x 65kg/person = 4.355x10^11 kg.

    At 1g/cm3 this mass takes up 4.355x10^11 litres = 4.355x10^8 cubic meters.

    Now we plug this value into the formula linking the volume of a sphere with its radius:
    Volume = 4/3 * radius^3

    Therefore

    Radius^3 = Volume / (4/3)
    Radius^3 = 4.355x10^8 / 1.3333333etc
    Radius^3 = 3.266x10^8
    Radius = 688.69 meters

    The sphere of all living human bodies would therefore be a puny 1,377m across. That's pretty humbling.
    • tensvb, on 03/13/2008, -0/+11,377m meatball? Hardly humbling.
    • Bugsdigg, on 03/13/2008, -0/+0If you scroll down a bit you'll see that I forgot to include pi in the calculation that time. Idiotic, but there you go. The actual diameter based on my assumptions would be 940.3 meters.

      If you think that sounds big, picture it at the same scale as the rest of the picture: our entire species would be represented by a ball 1/1000 the size of Britain. We're not even close to being a single pixel.
    • drizzlelicious, on 03/13/2008, -0/+3And yet its enough to screw the world over
  • soil, on 03/13/2008, -0/+4what I'd like to see is a ball of all the earth! ...oh wait.
  • utahnkid, on 03/13/2008, -0/+2I know this makes it seem like we don't have all that much water and air but if you saw a ball representing how much space every human on earth would take up it would be absolutely tiny compared to the air and water balls. I remember back in high school I got in an argument with a tree hugging science teacher about over population and I came across a little known fact that if you put EVERY human on earth into the state of Texas we would all have 6 meters across of free space... Now put into perspective just how small our planet is compared to the universe or even just our own galaxy and it's pretty humbling how insignificant we (even as a whole) really are.
  • oep4, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1cool images, i wouldn't say that our resources of h2o and oxygen as chemicals, or elements in the case of oxygen, are available as finite because we can synthesize them h2o once again and we can create oxygen as well using chemistry (not exactly sure how). basically air and water aren't lost there just converted into other substances/chemicals/elements....and in the amount of time we will have had "used up" these resources, we will (hopefully) have already invented a way to efficiently synthesize both of these things essential to humans.cannabis
  • Pinkertinkle, on 03/13/2008, -2/+1That's almost as big as my right testicle.
    • jalfor, on 03/13/2008, -0/+0The water ball or the air ball....cause that would make all the difference in the world
  • ninepointfive, on 03/13/2008, -0/+2seems awfully small. a little too little .

    Can you even drape that ball of water over the surface area of ocean property? From this viewing angle, it seems very unlikely.
  • Bugsdigg, on 03/13/2008, -0/+0Have you guys actually read the page? The calculations for air, water and a ball of all humans are right there for you to check if you doubt them.
    Volume calculations are often counter-intuitive because they increase with the cube of the radius. This means that a very large volume formed into a sphere (say, of all the water in the world) will generally look much smaller than you expect it to. Also bear in mind that while some of the ocean trenches are very deep and contain a lot of water, the Earth itself is just under 8,000 miles across. The very deepest ocean trenches barely scratch the surface.
  • whalt, on 03/13/2008, -1/+2I'm sure Sen. Inhoffe has a list signed by over 500 economists, TV weathermen, dental technicians, and plumbers who will insist that this is a hoax. I mean if water and air were only that big it would imply that human actions might have an affect on them which of course we know is untrue.
  • snoox, on 03/13/2008, -0/+0why's it gotta be on Africa? That's racist.
  • JB449, on 03/13/2008, -0/+1t=0, Great Flood
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