Tell him about the twinkie.

[digitaldiscipline]

I was entertained by the NPR coverage of how much the water in a hurricane weighs, though, doing some quick mental math afterwards, they could have made one very interesting point.

100,000,000 four-ton elephants = 400,000,000 tons, or about 800,000,000,000 (eight hundred billion) pounds.

If the average human being weighs around 120 pounds, and there are about 6.7 billion of us... a good-sized hurricane weighs as much as the entire human population.

That's a big twinkie.

Comments

Listen! Do you smell something?

[ubiquitous-a.livejournal.com]

As someone who is currently being rained on by a tropical storm that has to weigh at least something along the lines of the population of China, I have no problem imaginging this to be the case.

Dogs and cats living together, MASS HYSTERIA!!

Re: Listen! Do you smell something?

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for that northern arm to swing around and hit me with some much-needed wind and rain.

[fallenlibrarian.livejournal.com]

excellent. you do math, so i don't have to.

terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought.

[vatine]

Hm, I wonder how good 120 lb is as an estimate? It does eem surprisingly hard to find an accurate number, but seeing as how the three places listed on the Wikipedia "Body Weight" page all manage to be over 120 lb as an average...

Admittedly, it makes a hurricane and the human population come out at about the same, but even with 200 pounds, you'd need less than 30% bigger diameter (given the same height and density) to get "the whole of humanity" as the hurricane water weight.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I admit to pulling the average weight out of my ass to make the math simple; I figured that the existence of children would lower it some (since most of the sources seem to turn up adult weights exclusively).

I don't think there's any way the average human weighs 200#; even in obese first-world countries (ie: the US), it's 190 for men, 164 for women.

[vatine]

I am over-emgineering to have a small amount of built-in fault tolerance. When Dale The Whale suddenly pops up in millioncate, our estimate is still withing "sane".

Looking at that, it seems as if the #190 only includes over-18s, so it may be vastly lower. FWIW, I usually prefer numbers that are low multiples of a power on 10 or a power of 2, depending on what I am estimating, so I'd prefer eithre "100" or "200" as a base number (and I usually go from "small to large", you seem to have gone from "large" to "small", since the numbers quoted turn out to be 119.something).

Anyway, you were within a binary order of magnitude and that is, as we say, close enough.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

I actually reverse-engineered that figure, by dividing 800 billion by 6.7 billion (last world population figure I'd heard).

But, yes, those mass figures were for adults only, and, depending what the proportion of the world's population that is below that, not to mention the fact that impoverished or otherwise much-probably-lighter populations weren't polled at all, I think that an estimate for the average adult weighing something like 150 pounds isn't unreasonable, and knocking that down by a quarter to account for the youth population.

The data is frustratingly sparse to make an educated estimate, so that's why you get my napkin math.

[vatine]

Yeah, "start from the large end". :) I did the same to sanity-check your numbers, came up with 119.something (.7? dunno) and thought "yeah, pretty close, how much larger would we have to make the hurricane going from 120 to 200 pounds per person?".

And that turns out to be about 30% larger radius, with the same height ()don't know if that scales with diameter/radius or not) and density (that probably stays roughly the same, I guess).

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Height is a factor of windspeed, not diameter; a small but intense storm (such as Charlier or Wilma in 2004) has higher cloud tops than a very large but relatively mild system.

I will spare everyone my attempt to render a cloud top profile in ASCII.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

So, if we automagically extracted all the water from the human race and dumped it in the air, it would form a hurricane? (Because, like, it would be at 100°F already, which is pretty warm.)

Ygor! Fetch me my goggles while I fire up the Jacob's Ladders!

[etcet.livejournal.com]

No, it'd be a bunch of thunderstorms, with the potential for development into a cyclonic system... but only about 3/4 of the way there. or maybe a small hurricane... (like, for instance, Charlie of 2004)

[vatine]

So if we get the whole world to dance around a HUMUNGOUS MAY POLE! (hiding our water-extracting Tesla coil)...

[angledge.livejournal.com]

Make sure they are dancing in the correct direction (depending on which hemisphere you're holding your May Day dance in).