Jumping for Joy for Extra Credit!

Jumping for Joy for Extra Credit!

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Have you every wondered what would happen if everyone in the world gathered in one area and simultaneously jumped?  You may have never thought of it but I challenge you to think about it right now!  You may be thinking, will the world collapse?  Will we all fall?  Will nothing at all happen?  Well, in a very simple term, nothing will really happen!  Maybe shocking but it actually makes a lot of sense!  

Imagine, everyone gathered at T.F. Green airport fora free vacation that was being offered.  The only mandatory requirement was to jump one hour before takeoff.  It seems silly, but it is all for an experimentation that is trying to be conducted!  

At 12:00 pm, everyone in the world gathers at the airport.  Of course T.F. Green airport may not be large enough for everyone, so everyone is spread across the parking garages and anywhere in a close radius to the building.  At 12:05 an alarm sounds and every single person jumps.  

WHAT HAPPENS ...

Well we may assume that the whole world's population is very great (making up 800 billion pounds), which in proportionality it is larger than other things, however Earth outweighs the population of us individuals by a factor of over 10 trillion.  Therefore, nothing will really happen to the Earth and there will be no dramatic affect on the population.  

So, what is the reaction of the population?  Well they are pretty stunned and amazed and want to know how this happened!  

So we delve into the science behind the whole scenario...

Reading a Live Science article I found ... 

"Using the laws of conservation of momentum and energy, Allain, a physicist at the University of Southeastern Louisiana and blogger at Dot Physics, calculated what would happen to the 6-trillion-trillion-kilogram Earth under these circumstances. For simplicity's sake, he assumed the average human could jump one foot (30 cm) high and that we'd all be jumping from exactly the same point.

To cut to the chase, Allain found that our jump would push on the Earth ever so slightly, giving it a recoil speed of 2.6 x 10^-13 m/s. That is, in one second, Earth would move about a hundredth of the radius of a single hydrogen atom .

It's not so much, but would the infinitesimally small recoil last forever? Would we have permanently changed the course of the Earth? Allain says no.

"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," he told Life's Little Mysteries.

The situation is much like two objects of very different masses connected by a spring. If you pull the masses apart and then let go, the force of the spring pulls them back together. The smaller mass moves much more than the larger mass, but both move. The Earth and the people are much like these two masses, Allain explained, except that "in this case, the spring is like gravity."

It seems pretty crazy to think that the whole world population jumping at the same time would not affect anything, but it was proven by scientist Allain from University of Southeastern Louisiana.  It was interesting to see the comparison he made to two objects connected by a spring relating to the Earth and the people and the spring acting like gravity. It gives a simple and real life example of how the Earth and gravity allow the human population to be unaffected by a simultaneous jump.  

Awesome video that helps to explain why this also occurs:

Sources:

https://www.livescience.com/33383-everyone-on-earth-jumping-at-once.html

https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/