Have you ever wondered what would happen if everyone on Earth jumped at the same time? If we all jumped at the same time, could we affect the Earth’s motion or slow down our planet’s rotation?
Unfortunately, we cannot say for sure what will happen. However, several people have searched for the answer, and one physicist has calculated that we can change the motion of our planet – at least temporarily – by a small percentage.
In an experiment for the BBC’s Earth Lab, science reporter and presenter Greg Foot tried to answer the question by having a crowd of 50,000 jumping simultaneously and measuring motion on the ground from a distance of 1.5 kilometers.
“And then with a little math I can scale it up and see what would happen if everyone around the Earth jumped at the same time and if that would change the Earth’s spin rate,” Foot says in the video.
Earthquakes, if they are large enough, can affect the rate at which the Earth spins. The great earthquake that struck Japan in 2011 slightly accelerated the Earth’s rotation and shortened our days by about 1.8 microseconds. That’s why Foot believed in the idea that if everyone jumped at the same time, we could affect the Earth’s rotation.
Indeed, the team was able to detect an earthquake measuring 0.6 on the Richter scale from a mile and a half away. But when Foot magnified it, he realized it wasn’t enough.
“Earthquakes don’t affect the planet’s rotation until they reach at least eight, and you’d need seven million times more people than currently live on the planet,” Foot says. “So the urban myth is completely false. You can’t change the planet if everyone jumps at the same time; how much “You can’t even change that it’s spinning fast. There’s no truth to that.”
But can we not move the planet at all?
Physicist Rhett Allain has an answer to that. Allain estimated the average weight of humans and children and the mass of the Earth, thinking that everyone would jump 0.3 meters, and again assuming that everyone was jumping in the same place.
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Based on the 7 billion people living at that time, Allain calculated that the Earth would move by about one percent of the radius of a single hydrogen atom. “All humans fall back after they jump, meaning they move towards Earth. During this time, the Earth will move up again. Everything will be as before. So even the small impact we created will instantly return,” Livescience told Live’s Little Mysteries series. made the statement.
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