I really should have been working today, but instead sat around and thought of many stupid things.
Perhaps the dumbest was this: I recently read (on this very board, if memory serves) that there are some 7000 commercial airline flights per in the US, or an average of about 292 per hour. If I assume a ballpark average of 150 passengers per flight, then about 44000 persons are suspended in the air at any given moment.
But wait, I haven’t factored in private and military aviation; there may be several thousand more SOB’s (souls on board) to account for there. And what about the rest of the world? Perhaps you can see where I’m going. Is there any reliable way to determine how many people have slipped the surly bonds of Earth at any given moment? If so, has anyone already worked it out so that I don’t waste yet another day thinking about this?
And of course, if we Dopers can join together and find an answer to this knotty problem, we can then proceed to the real (and much scarier) issue: just how many pounds of crap are speeding over our heads at this very moment?