How much for a tunnel of Livesavers for an ant to walk to the moon?

The Game Room
1

This is a mental arithmetic exercise that I used to do when I was a kid and bored in class. You have to do all the calculations in your head - no calculators or writing allowed, though I will allow one Google price check.

This assumes the moon is in miraculously geostationary orbit, and that you can poke a hole in the first and last Lifesaver to let Mr Ant in and out.

I’m interested in how wildly diverse potential answers might be via this method - and how your minds work…

My answer, with mental workings from when I was walking to the store just now, is:

[spoiler]I googled Lifesavers and found a 50 oz bag containing 365 Lifesavers, for $12.99. No point in buying at full retail, is there?

I estimate one Lifesaver, stacked, is about 1/4 inch. So 4 per inch. The moon is approx 250,000 miles away, so I need to work out 4 x 12 x 3 x 1760 x 250,000. Which I make to be… er… 144 x 1760 which is… oh God this is too much to do in my head, going to go for estimated values here, one up, one down - say 150 x 1600 which is… 240,000.

So I neatly get 24 x 25 (which is 600) and 8 zeroes - so I need… 60,000,000,000 Lifesavers.

Now the hard bit - how much is one Lifesaver? 1299 divided by 365 in my head ain’t going to work. Let’s call it 350 Lifesavers for a start. 350s into 1300? Hmm. Not going to try. OK, well it goes into 1400 neatly, at 4. But that brought the estimate higher on both sides of the dividing line, so clearly price is just under 4. Let’s say 3.5c.

So 60 billion times 3.5c, is 3.5 x 6 with ten zeroes, but it’s dollars so it’s actually 8 zeroes, so (18 + 3 is 21) so it’s going to cost:

$2.1 billion.

I reckon I should suggest this to Obama as part of his stimulus package.[/spoiler]

2

Unfortunately the life expectancy of the ant is too short to allow it to get from the earth to the moon, isn’t it?

But getting back to the math, I’m confused about the terminology - is a ‘lifesaver’ what I would call a ‘packet of lifesavers’ (i.e., about 3 inches long)? Or is it one individual candy?

3

A Lifesaver is a single candy.

4

OK, that’s what I thought - but then I wondered why we have to “poke a hole in the first and last Lifesaver to let Mr Ant in and out.” Oh, I see now - ants can’t tunnel through rock, OK got it, but at first I assumed the lifesavers would be resting on soil, through which the ant would burrow.

Even assuming a geostationary position of the moon, I guess this lifesaver tunnel won’t be going in a straight line, it’s going to have a huge arc in it’s shape. I don’t know exactly how to calculate that, but I have some ideas. Let me think.

5

I did it with Polos instead, which are round mints with a hole in the middle and sold in packets about a handsbreadth across. I guessed that a packet costs 40p for about 7.5cm so took 50p for 10cm as a round figure. That’s £5/metre or £5000/km or £8000/mile times 1/4 million miles gives me £2bn for a Polo tunnel to the Moon.

6

Yeah, that was the original, but I Americanized it for the Dope.

7

I just checked my working on a calculator and got:

$2,254,921,643.84 Not bad!

8

Not bad? You were off by over one hundred and fifty million dollars! $154,921,643.84 is not bad? Remind me not to ask you for any estimates!!
:slight_smile: :slight_smile:

9

That kind of money is chump change to me. I lose more than that down the back of the sofa.

10

Amazon sells two fifty ounce bags of wint-o-green lifesavers for $25.00. Only a forty-nine cents saving per bag but it adds up over 384,399 kilometers.

11

Are we factoring in labor costs? How about the cost of an adhesive to keep all those Life Savers stuck together? Any kind of structural support to keep the tower from collapsing?

Seems to me some major considerations are being overlooked here…

12

I meant to say, we can lick the Lifesavers to stick them together. And who needs structural support? It’s stretched in between the Earth and the Moon - held in place at each end!

13

126,375,320,756,001.

14

Won’t the wint-o-green hurt the ant’s sensitive little feet?

15

Ok, we’ll also have to factor in the cost of six tiny little boots.

16

I didn’t know the distance to the moon and guessed it to be a million miles (it’s easy to work with). I came up with roughly $8B, so to take into account my being off by a factor of four on the distance, that’s pretty close to your value.

17

How many licks will it take to get to the moon? Let’s ask Mr Owl.

18

He’s got his mouth full.

19

Are you factoring in the occasional nom?

20

I love this kind of exercise! I have not yet looked at any other answers on this thread.

My answer, in my head, was $5 billion. Since I went only by common sense and memory about all of the numbers and dimensions, that’s probably way off.

[spoiler]I started with: 10 cents per lifesaver, 3 lifesavers per inch, and a quarter-million miles to the moon. So, 36 candies per foot, and 5280 feet to the mile, simplified to 40 X 5000 in my head, for 200,000 lifesavers per mile.

For me, the easiest way to multiply 200,000 x 250,000 in my head is to multiply 200k by a million and then divide by 4. So, 200 billion / 4 = 50 billion.

50 billion lifesavers x 10 cents per, equals 5 billion dollars.[/spoiler]