One of my favorites too. Both for his math/science technique and for the topic.
A month or so after COVID started when we were all in maximum hiding mode I was reading a magazine article written before the pandemic started. I turned the page and there was a half-page photo of a crowded urban subway platform. I did that same momentary recoil as when you turn the page and are surprised by a closeup of a big spider.
I had to laugh, but the reaction was 100% real and 100% involuntary.
Heck, a couple of days ago, I had a naked-in-public dream… except it wasn’t my pants that were missing, but my mask.
I’ve had similar, although weaker, reactions to crowd scenes in movies.
It’s kinda confusing having the Antarctic ice sheet right there next to the Golden Gate tightrope, but models are like that. Nice job explaining it subtly though; took me a bit to get it.
Meta-thought:
There’s a hint this series may go farther.
We’ve had 1E-5, 1E-4, and now 1E-3 scale. I think that 1E-2 probably won’t be interesting enough to be next. Neither would he jump back up to 1E-6 or something farther that direction; too inconsistent
I predict we’re going to keep going right past 1E-2, 1E-1, 1E0 (booooring!, but maybe funny in the larger context) and go straight to 1E2 or more. Where the world is big and humans are tiny. Any takers on this idea?
Could a 1/1000 scale Golden Gate Bridge cable support an adult?
The full-sized cable is 36.5" in diameter. One thousandth of that is 0.0365". Which is between AWG 18 & 20. The AWG system is meant for conductive copper wire, not steel, but it’s more familiar to us non-engineers.
Recall the bridge has 2 cables. Two-conductor 18 gauge is a cheap zipcord. I’m going to bet a light adult human could tightrope an a zipcord. Barely.
For real round numbers the tensile strength of steel piano wire is 12-15x the tensile strength of copper. Even if the real bridge wire is stronger yet, they’d probably have to make the 1/1000 model from commercially available piano wire.
So yes, even a heavy human could tightrope on a pair of piano wires of that diameter. The rest of the scale bridge structure would buckle and collapse. But just stringing two 1/1000 scale piano wires between two human-scale support posts and standing in the middle should be fine.
This version of the world would be 25 miles in circumference. If it were land all the way around and had Earth-normal gravity, a strong hiker could circumnavigate it on foot in a day.
Now I want to know how much of the oceans have depth >5000 feet, so that if I wanted to walk/swim around the 1/1000 scale world, how much of the oceans I’d be able to wade, and how much I’d have to swim.
Ref this wiki map color coded in meters not feet, it looks like almost entirely swimming. Only the very narrow continental shelves seem to be wading-compatible.
Though you could wade between Korea and Australia or around almost the entire periphery of the Arctic ocean. Which is a circumglobal hike of a sort. Likewise (probably) Antarctica.
But straight across the oceans along a line of latitude? Nope.
I was thinking of something like hiking down to the NE corner of Brazil, wading/swimming across to Liberia/Sierra Leone, then land all the way to the Russian side of the Bering Strait, a short but very brisk swim across to Alaska, then back down to the contiguous 48. A more or less fair circumnavigation, but minimizes the water parts.
Looks like the Atlantic crossing would be about 2 miles - have to train for that! - while the Bering Strait would be a few hundred yards. (bring a wetsuit!)
Actually, looking at my National Geographic atlas, it looks like I could break the Atlantic crossing into a few pieces: a couple hundred yards out to the Fernando de Noronha archipelago, then about a half mile to the rise where the St. Peter and St. Paul rocks are situated, then another half-mile to the Sierra Leone rise (though that would be chest-deep water, from the looks of it, so not much of a break), then the final half-mile to the African coast.
I think your shortest swim that’s closest to a circumnavigation might be a N/S route instead of E/W. Down through North and South America, short swim to Antarctica, longer swim to Australia, wade through Indonesia and walk across Asia, then either cut across the Arctic ice if it’s thick enough, or take a little shortcut across the Bering Strait.
I think that, even if I were a thousand times as big, I’d be genuinely afraid to match my swimming skills against the storms and currents of the Southern Ocean. That’s serious shit, down there.
I guess the question is, are you 1000 times bigger, or is Earth 1000 times smaller? In the latter case, weather patterns and currents would be completely different.
If the former, yeah, I’d probably follow your plan, except I’d go the other direction to take advantage of the Atlantic current between Africa and SA (and to chase the sun and avoid hiking in the dark).
My assumption in all of these 1/10^n scale models is that everything works just the same as it does on regular Earth, only at 1/1000 (in this case) of the usual scale, while we stay the same size. Otherwise, negligible gravity, no air, no animals, etc. So the Southern Ocean in the scale model acts just like the Southern Ocean here, only scaled down by a factor of 1000.
Whalefall? Not a word I ever expected to be coined.
He had me at carcinization. Many sea critters that don’t start out so much like crabs evolve into something more crab-like. I did not know that.
Anyone who hasn’t heard of Whale fall is in for something interesting to learn