800 Billion Pound Jump

800 Billion Pound Jump

Ever wonder what would happen if every human on earth gathered in one place and jumped up at the same time? There are around 7 billion people on this earth with an approximate total weight of 800 billion pounds.

A physicist at the University of Southeastern Louisiana, Allain, studied and calculated what would happen to the earth if it experienced this massive jump. He estimated that the average human could jump one foot and found that our jump would barely impact the earth. 

We would push on the earth slightly, giving it a recoil speed of 2.6 x 10^-13 m/s, meaning that in one second earth would move approximately one hundredth of the radius of one hydrogen atom. 

Many people wondered, would this tiny recoil last forever? Allain responded with: "After all the people jump they would 'fall' back down - move towards the Earth. During this time, the earth would move back up. All would be as it once was". 

Allain compares this situation to two objects of different masses connected by a spring. If you pull on the objects then let go, they are pulled back together by the force of the spring. Both objects will move, but the smaller one will move more than the other. He says that the earth and the people are much like the masses, except in this case "in this case, the spring is like gravity". 

Another experiment was done by astrophysicist Paul Sutter at The Ohio State University and physicist Mark Boslough at Sandia National Laboratories. 

They said that there would be a lot of energy released when everyone landed back on the ground and while some of that energy would go back into our shoes, the rest would disperse into the air and ground, resulting in some of the following consequences. 

• There would be a huge sound like an applause, at 200 decibels (the loudest possible sound ever created on Earth). This noise could easily shatter ear drums. 
• The ground would begin to shake, and if the jump happened near the coast, it could trigger a tsunami with 100-feet-tall waves.
• The shaking could also lead to an earthquake in the 4-8 magnitude range.