Ever heard those analogies about how “If you took all of X on Earth and put them in a row, it would stretch all the way to Y”?
A while ago I heard one of these about parasites on Earth reaching out light years and felt a bit skeptical.
So I thought,
“At the extreme, the farthest extreme would be taking all the atoms on Earth and stretching them out in a row”
Turns out it’s not a hard calculation.
The mass of Earth is ~6 x 10^27 g = 6 x 10^24 kg
With all the Iron, Uranium, Water, etc, the “average atom” of the Earth is Sulfur, with a weight of 32 g/mol and a radius of 109 pm (picometers)
So there should be around 1.8 x 10^26 mols of this “average” stuff sitting around here.
And that should stretch out about 2.4 x 10^40 meters.
That’s ~2.5 x 10^24 light years
(No Ratings Yet)
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