Skip to main content

Extra Credit Blog

What would happen if everyone jumped at once?

The current human population on Earth is estimated to be about 7.6 billion people. The global average body mass for a human is 62kg (it sounds small because in America our average is 80.7kg, about 180 pounds). The humans will be jumping, giving themselves potential energy mgh at their max height (about 0.5 meters for this analysis) and then that kinetic energy will be converted to kinetic energy that will be involved in the collision that hits the Earth. If a 62kg person accelerates toward the Earth at 9.8m/s^2 for 0.5 meters, mgh can be used to calculate the KE on impact.


m1 is the mass of all of the humans on Earth. This can be estimated to 7.6B*62= 471,200,000,000kg. If you assume that all of the humans on Earth jump 0.5 meters and use mgh to calculate the KE, then 235,600,000,000J=KE. 235.6GJ is an immense amount of energy, but this energy is facing a mass of 5.972 × 10^24 kg.

 If you consider "everyone jumping at once" to be an inelastic collision in which all of the kinetic energy of the humans is transferred to the Earth, we can model the system as

m1*v1=(m1+m2)v2

m1 is 471,200,000,000. 
0.5=1/2*9.8*t^2
0.5/4.9=t^2
t=0.1020408163 sec
vf=at, 9.8x0.10204= 0.999m/s

471,200,000,000*0.999=(471,200,000,000+5.972 × 10^24)v2
~(1/5.972 × 10^24)m/s.

For such a collision with numbers that are so unmatched a vf is meaningless, it is difficult to retain any information from this. 1 over the mass of the Earth in kg is an absurdly small number and proves that the Earth would move, but only a very small distance. In physics, we are accustomed to analyzing collisions that involve two masses of relatively comparable size. This results in a meaningful Vf that is logical. Because the mass of all of the people on Earth is only 0.000000000000789% (total human mass divided by earth mass equals 7.890154052x10^-14) it is difficult to retain useful information from this data.

I did find a video on this subject by one of my favorite YouTube channels on this topic that says if everyone jumped at once, the Earth would move, for an instant, about the distance of 1/100th of the width of a single hydrogen atom. 

https://youtu.be/jHbyQ_AQP8c
The answer is at about 2min in.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Physics of Black Holes...Or Lack Thereof

Isabella Jacavone To comprehend how the universe works, we must dwell into the most basic building blocks of existence; matter, energy, space, and time. NASA's  Physics of the Cosmos program involves cosmology, astrophysics, and fundamental physics intended to answer questions about the elusiveness of complex concepts such as black holes, neutron stars, dark energy, and gravitational waves. In this blog post, I'd like to elaborate on a subject that is very intriguing  to me; Black holes. And more specifically, what would happen if we got near one. A black hole is anything but a hole, but rather an immense amount of matter compacted into an extremely small area. A black hole is caused when, hypothetically, a star four times more massive than our sun collapses into a sphere no bigger than 600 square km. To put that in perspective, that's about the size of New York City. B lack holes were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which showed that when a...

The Physics of Spiderman

Over this past weekend after I finished working on my homework, I decided to relax and watch a few movies before going asleep. Among the movies I watched was Spider-Man 3 from 2007 and despite the movie flaws I was interested by the scenes that showed Spider Man shooting through the sky with the use of his webs that come out of his wrists. Due to this, I decided to make my blog post about the physics of Spider-Man's slingshot. After doing some research, I discovered just how much information there is on the physics of Spider-Man and how elements of Spider-Man can be used as examples for most topics learned in mechanics. For this investigation, I will not be using the horrible cliche and terrible CGI infested mess that Spider-Man 3 is but instead the all around superior Spider-Man movie of Spider-Man 2 to investigate the physics of Spider-Man's web propelled slingshot.  I want to talk about what happens in terms of physics when Spider-Man launches himself across a dista...

2017 Physics Nobel Prize - Capturing Gravitational Waves

 2017 Physics Nobel Prize - Capturing Gravitational Waves Gravitational Waves Captured by LIGO Who?  Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne - LIGO/VIRGO Collarboration What?  Observation of gravitational waves for the first time using LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Where?  Two locations in the US - Hanford and Livingston. (See figure 1) Figure 1: LIGO in the US When?  14 September 2015 HOW?  The scientists captured gravitational waves by using an interferometer. The LIGO interferometer is a more glamorous interferometer than the original Michelson interferometer. It works through using light waves to measure gravitational interference (i.e. waves). First, one needs to understand the parts of an interferometer. The LIGO interferometer (and most) is shaped as an L. It has two 4 km vacuum tunnel arms with a mirror at each end. At the center of the arms, there is a beam splitter. Th...