Cecil is correct claiming that the earth’s orbit would not change. However, something else would happen.
While standing on top of their chairs, the earth’s total moment of inertia will increase, due to the fact that a mass of 1GC (one Giga Chinese) increased its rotation radius around the center of mass (almost the center of the earth). The inertia increase would cause a decrease in the earth’s rotation speed around its own axis (a similar thing happens when spinning ice skaters open their arms wide to reduce their spinning speed).
The earth’s rotation speed will return to normal once the Chinese have safely landed back on the planet’s surface, but as a direct result of their action, the entire human population would have to adjust their clocks backwards. I didn’t calculate the amount of time change, but I estimate it to be few Pico seconds for each day the Chinese spent on top of their chairs.
A similar thing happened last year, when extreme El-Ninno conditions over the pacific caused billions of tons of sea water to evaporate into the atmosphere. As a result, the atomic clocks around the earth were set back a full 1 millisecond.
A few billion Chinese, a billion five-hundred million pounds.
We have seen (or experienced) the Earth hit by objects of unknown mass at greater velocity (the Tunguska blast) without the Earth’s orbit affected, and have set off nuclear test devices (bombs) over and over, many of which had the force of millions of tons of TNT being exploded, with no measurable effect on the Earth’s orbit, rotation, etc.
I think the power of any of the above would exceed even the whole world’s population jumping off chairs in China.
Breathe easy, that’s not how it’s gonna happen.
(But, if they DID do that… would we be knocked off our chairs in Kansas?) :dubious:
It would be more proper to ask, "What is the mass of planet Earth?"1 The quick answer to that is: approximately 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6E+24) kilograms. Take the average weight of a Chinese person. lets say 105 pounds then multiply that number by the number of Chinese people that live on the planet that would come to 107,835,000,000 pounds compare that to the weight of the planet earth. It’s all relitive. It would be like droping a 5 pound lead ball from three feet on a concrete sidewalk …Evermore
Hey, this thread gives me a chance to pose a question I’ve had for a few years now… Now that the Indian population has surpassed the Chinese in number, should we be focusing on a massive Indian chair jump? How about Indians marching four abreast or all Indians shouting at once?
Funny how these things get stuck in the cultural memory (China = most populous nation, true for our lifetimes until recently) and are hard to dislodge.
Also, is the average Indian a bit heavier? And remember we’re calculating for slightly more people. And most of India is father south than China, so how does that affect the aforementioned rotational wobble?
As these quotes show, predicting future population is a fool’s game, with whatever trend you project likely to be wrong 50 years out. But every single reference I can find shows India far behind China today.
Thanks. I seem to have misremembered the 1999 announcement that India surpassed 1 billion people for an announcement they passed China. Oddly a lot of the population stuff I just looked up has India still at just over 952 million, five years later. I think it’s very possible India’s being undercounted, and could pass China sooner than expected. (Throw in an earthquake, flood famine or civil war and who knows what could happen).
OK, what if India & China leap at the same time? Everyone on Earth? Still any impact (no pun intended)?
I suspect there are a lot more insects on earth than humans. What would happen if even one group (let’s say a family—we can work up to order in a future query) like cockroaches or common house flies decided to climb up on chairs (your choice of roach/fly chairs or human chairs) and all jump at once? There must be some mass that would affect the earth (“when a butterfly flaps its wings in the forest…”)
-flahoo78-
Gotta figure the average weight of both and divide and then take the square root of both races and then multiply by the factror of the price of beer in Canada
Glad I could help. (How the frick does one spell that Nation nortn of Us?
Where’s Eric Cartman?
heck, I can’t get my staff to do anything at once, except punch out when it’s time to go home…No way are you going to be able to get even 5% of the population jumping at once.
