I remember hearing a quote a while back, “Would you eat the moon if it were made of ribs?” I could have sworn it did not come from SNL, but apparently it did.
Anyway, I was wondering - if the moon WERE made of ribs, how many ribs would there be to take up the same dimensions?
Bonus points for answering additional metrics like: How much less would it weigh than the current moon? How many pigs would it take? How long would it take the world to eat all the ribs? How long would it take one person? And any other fun metrics you want to bend your mind around.
I believe I calculated it out as a kid, but my math and estimates may have been wrong, because the results seemed just about unfathomably huge. It might also be because I am a puny human and cannot comprehend the size of the moon properly.
I suspect the answer would be different depending on whether you wanted to replicate the moon’s mass or its volume, but I am neither astrophysicist nor pitmaster.
A rib is about 6 cubic inches. The moon is 1.310^24 cubic inches. If we ignore the ribs being compressed under their own weight and assume perfect packing, then you’d have about 2.210^23 ribs to make the same volume.
If a person eats 20 ribs a day, it would take the current world population the age of the earth to eat the moon.
If I remember right, I was flabbergasted that replacing the moon with ribs would result in so much food that it would take at least the entirety of humankind’s existence to eat it all. I remember calculating it based on the average number of tons a human eats per year, or somesuch. Then I started thinking about population growth and I decided to stop there.
Wonder how much BBQ sauce it would take.
It’d be interesting to add physics/gravity into the equation. Though I imagine that would ruin a lot of the ribs and they’d become inedible - no fun in that.
xkcdhas already done this with moles. It’s a fortunate coincidence that they wind up with a ball of meat just about the size of the moon. There is much discussion of gravity, physics, etc.
