Comments on: Physics is all about scales : Earth Water and Air

By: John

John — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:00:09 +0000

I was thinking about this exact thing the other day. Spooky

By: Sunny Kalara

Sunny Kalara — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 01:16:40 +0000

@Hegemon - you might be missing some zeros.

comparison is being done based on weight.

There is 1.4 x 10^21 kg of water
and there is 5.1 x 10^21 kg of air
Weight of the earth is 5.9 x 10^24 kg

So the image shows the proportionality of the earth, water and air.

By the way, there is 1 trillion metric tons of earth for each person living on the planet.

By: hegemon359

hegemon359 — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 22:50:08 +0000

(a) the volume of air is meaningless without specifying a pressure.

(b) Besides: by mass, 1.4 billion km^3 of water is about 1.4E21 kg. Thus, there is ~270 times more water than air (by mass).

(c) Assuming the molecular weight of air is about 29 g/mol, this still leaves more atoms of water than air by a factor of 170.

By: Seth

Seth — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:04:11 +0000

Very pretty illustrations, but I don’t know why you imply that “70%” is somehow the wrong answer. It’s right if one speaks about surface area, which you happen not to be.

By: Red Barron

Red Barron — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:56:54 +0000

This is beautiful