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What would happen if everyone on Earth, all 7,442,000,000 of us, were to jump at the same time? If we all jumped where we are right now, nothing would happen. The population of Earth is pretty even distributed, so all of the individual jumps would cancel out.

Let's say we got everyone on Earth to gather in one spot. Everyone could live, fairly comfortably, if we packed into an area the size of Texas. However, I imagine we would want to fit everyone into the smallest area possible. Unfortunately, all seven billion people would be unable to stand next to one another in T.F. Green Airport, but they could all fit shoulder-to-shoulder in the 503 square miles of Los Angeles.

Although it would be impossible for this to happen, let's imagine that everyone took time out of their day to squeeze into L.A. If everyone jumped 30 centimeters in the air at exactly the same time, the Earth would be pushed away about 1/100th the width of a Hydrogen atom. To put this into perspective, a piece of human hair is a million times thicker than an atom, and an atom is about 1 x 10^-10 (0.0000000001) to 5 x 10^-10 (0.0000000005) meters wide. The Jump would move the earth about 1 x 10^-12 meters... or 0.000000000001 meters away from us.

However, despite our collective effort, the earth will just move back to where it originally was, so the Jump would ultimately have no lasting effect on the earth's motion. The mass of seven billion people is nothing compared to the mass of the earth. If the average mass of a person is 70kg and there are 7 billion people, the total mass of the population would be around 490 billion kilograms. The earth has a mass of 5.972 × 10^24 (5972000000000000000000000) kg. In case you were wondering, that's 21 zeros at the end.

You would hope that the Jump cause some sort of seismic activity, but that's not the case. There would not be some devastating earthquake that would wreak havoc across the globe. In order to create significant and destructive seismic activity (about a nine on the Richter Scale), we would need seven million times more people than there are living to participate in the Jump.

The Jump would create a lot of energy-- about the same as 500 tons of TNT. One ton of TNT is about 4.184*10^9 J of energy, so the Jump would generate about 2.092 x 10^12 Joules of energy.

Even thought the results of the Jump may be somewhat disappointing, I think it would still be fun to get everyone on Earth together in one spot. Regardless, we should be glad that our Earth isn't so easily hindered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHbyQ_AQP8c

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