What would happen if everyone on the planet were to crowd into the same place, like Arizona, and jump at once?

Question

Would it be possible to knock the Earth out of orbit?

Answer 1

Actually if that were to happen, at the precise moment when the people jumped, the loss of all that weight from the earths surface would cause the earth to move out of orbit, but the moment the people's feet landed back onto the ground, that force would put the earth back into normal orbit.

Answer 2

That's quite the curious mind you have there. Good to think openly, Einstein actually thought about random things like that. He thought that if he could run fast enough to go fast as a beam of light and could get in front of it that the light would appear to be frozen in time. It's crazy thought processes like that that inspire great discoveries.

As for what would happen if that happen, I doubt it would affect the orbit because gravity would still have it's effect and the earth is much too dense with much too centrifugal force on the planet from it's rotation to affect orbit at all. I would presume all that weight at once could affect the tectonics though, perhaps throw a localized plate off balance and cause an earthquake of some degree? But I'm no physicist and there are probably a lot of factors on the quantum level as well I couldn't account for.

Answer 3

What would happen if the whole world jumped in unison?

Umm...nothing, really.

That's the deduction from an experiment carried out with tens of thousands of human lab rats who attended the German music festival Rock at the Ring. It got started when the creators of a science program on German television asked themselves what would happen if the world's entire population engaged in synchronized hopping.

They saw Rock at the Ring as an opportunity to provide an answer to that question on a microcosmic scale. At the concert, the band We Are Heroes cued the thousands of rock fan/hoppers (total attendance 50,000) with drumbeats to go airborne, while the program's crew recorded the event on videotape and the Potsdam Geological Research Center recorded it on seismometers.

The seismometer measured four oscillations per second, while the earth moved only one-twentieth of a millimeter. "We showed that people cannot start a (real) earthquake by hopping," remarks Ulrich Grünewald, producer of the program, who emphasized the difficulty of getting tens of thousands of people to synchronize their jumps.

There have also been similar experiments in Great Britain and the United States all bearing the same results.

I guess the earth won't be coming off its axis anytime soon.

Answer 4

No. The humans (with a total mass of about 4.8*10^11 kilograms) would jump maybe 0.5 meters off the ground, while the Earth (with a mass of 5.97*10^24 kilograms) would move a distance proportional to the ratio of the masses.

So, the Earth would move about 8*10^(-14) meters, or 80 picometers. Then, at the zenith of the jump, the humans would reverse their trajectory, and fall back down to Earth. The Earth would simultaneously retrace its 80-picometer journey, ending up exactly where it was before.

Since the Earth+humans system has no external forces acting on it due to the humans jumping, Newton's laws tell us that it cannot change its momentum at all.

Answer 5

Dear Adam:

I have seen this question numerous times before. I would seriously advise you to go and visit the Grand Canyon. Really.
I mean it.

Visualize one human being's weight being say 1/4 of a wheel barrow full of dirt and rock.

Now how many wheel barrows "full" have been washed out of the Grand Canyon and spread out elsewhere??? Look at the Sahara Desert...how many wheel barrows full of sand are out there??? a bunch...right?

So, jump up and down as much as you want. An M-1 Abrahms tank is still nhot going to move from where it sits. And, the Earth is not going to jiggle one tiny bit. Besides, the force of impact is insufficient to do any real harm.

Now, if you took everyone on Earth and mashed them into a ball of iron and flung them at the Earth at around 35,000 Miles Per Hour...Hmm-m...maybe you might stir up some real trouble...Like an Asteroid hit... Then you would have real trouble.

Answer 6

Nothing, the mass all the people in the world is pale in comparison to that of the Earth.

The English units uses slugs the SI units uses kilogram

The mass of the Earth is 409399999999999850000000 slugs.
A person has a mass of 5.284 slugs * 6 billion people = 31704000000 slugs

The Earth isn't moving at all from its orbital course!

Answer 7

Surprisingly, everyone could stand in Arizona easily

The weight of the human race is surprisingly small compared to the weight of the earth. At 150 lbs per person which is on the high side, 6 1/2 billion people weigh in at about 1/2 Billion tons. A single cubic mile of water weighs 4.6 Billion tons and there are millions of cubic miles in the ocean, not to mention of course all the rocks, minerals, mantel etc

All the people jumping up and landing at the same time would have about as much effect as a pea shooter would have on a battleship.

Let me know when you are going to try this. I want to get my hot dog stand set up ahead of time...LOL

Answer 8

Eureka! That's EXACTLY how the Grand Canyon was formed!!

Just wait a few more years...all the Californians are moving to AZ, and should all be here by December 21, 2012...and in the winter, everyone from Canada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Minnesota, Michigan, etc., is in either Sun City or Apache Junction...so IF you can get them all to jump at once, maybe we'll find out!

You wouldn't happen to be a reincarnated Mayan, would you?

Answer 9

Jeez this is so ignorant its unbelievable.

Have a look on Google Earth - you only have to zoom out a little before all evidence of humans disappears.

Have you never flown long distances and seen how much empty space there is in the world. jeez 70% is ocean.

But that is nothing. Most of us live in the about the bottom 1 kilometre of 100 km of atmosphere, the whole atmosphere being just a thin skin of gas around the Earth, thinner relatively than the skin of an apple to the apple.

Underneath is 14,000 kms of solid Earth.

The Earth is in fact about 20 TRILLION times the mass of the whole human race. A colony of fleas have more chance of moving a mountain.

You can squeeze 6 humans standing into 1 sq meter. That means that 6 billion humans could stand shoulder to shoulder in 1 billion sq meters. Sounds a lot, but that is only about 1000 sq kms

OR a square 32 kms wide (20 miles wide). About the size of one medium sized Australian sheep station.

But even then, that 6 billion people are just a smidgen, like a full stop printed on a beach ball.

I shake my head. It is amazing. I advise you to get out and about more and see how much space you got, even in USA. Even in China.

Answer 10

pretty much nothing at all. the combined weight of everyone on earth is insignificant compared to the weight of the planet. The earth weighs roughly 6 billion trillion tons ( 6x 10 to the 21st) That means each of the 6 billion people on earth has roughly one trillion tons of rock, metal, and molten goo. How much force will your perhaps 150 lbs exert on 1 trillion tons with a jump of perhaps a foot? I refuse to do the math.