Here's a big number for you: How many snowflakes have fallen on the earth?

Factual Questions
21

Hah! :stuck_out_tongue:

All those years of spelling it flawlessly and then comes along this fucking search engine…

22

Civilization (as we know it) is fucked. :frowning:

23

Unca Cecil touched on this issue in this column: How can they be sure no two snowflakes are alike? But he got sidetracked by the googles, “swept up in a fit of literary grandiosity …”

24

I know your number has already been beaten, but I can’t let it pass without mentioning that chess is a game for children who haven’t learned to master Go (at approx 10[sup]700[/sup] possible games)

25

Not hard to make a rough guess, using actual numbers. I’m going to use exponential notation here, so “1E6” means 1x 10^6, or one million. (I’m not too lazy to spend 10 minutes doing the math, but I am too lazy to do the coding for little exponents. So?)

Start with the figure above of 10 million snowflakes per cubic foot of snow, and use a rough average of snow being 10% as dense as water, giving 1E6 snowflakes per cubic foot of melted precipitation.

A chart (here:http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/world-s-surface-water-precipitation-evaporation-and-runoff) says current annual precipitation across the world is 116 km^3. Now rather than do more research, I’m going to guess about 1/10 of that is snowfall, taking into account how much rainier the tropics are than the poles. I suspect that’s still way high, but if anyone wants to dig it out, go for it. So 11.6 km^3 of (melted) snowfall.

At 3.5E10 ft^3 per km^3, that’s 3.6e11 cubic feet per year.

So for one year, we have 3.6e17 snowflakes.

Now, I have just about zero data on how to estimate past years compared with current ones. What with ice ages, humid polar swamps of the Jurassic, etc. I’m just going to assume they average to just like current.

Age of the earth is estimated often as 4.54 billion years. I’m going to assume it was too hot for snow for say the first billion, so we have 3.54 billion years, which is 3.54e9 years.

That give a grand total of 1.3 E 27 snowflakes. Which is, as these things go, within shouting distance of the 1 E 30 given above.

26

One.

Eventually.