Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Worst Idea Ever

I usually don't post twice in a day, but this is too dumb to pass up. All I could think about was Tom from Office Space's "Jump to Conclusions" mat when reading this website. Go on, check it out, or better, become one of the many idiots who will all jump at the same time later this week in efforts to change Earth's orbit. You read that correctly: I said CHANGE EARTH'S ORBIT.

Special thanks to Shirley the Great for bringing this idiocy to my attention. Everyone knows how much I adore stupid people. I wish they'd send me money.

8 comments:

Jen said...

WTF?
Do they realize that the momentum of x-number of people jumping will not do anything that an earthquake, avalanch, or falling tree could not have already done?!!!
I want to meet the genius that came up with this idea.

Ben said...

I'm actually interested enough in this retardedness to do a little research. Moreso than an earthquake, I'm confident the moon's gravitational pull will do more than this. Here's what I've found:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/
question30.htm

The earth, according to this website, weighs about 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (6E+24) kilograms. I'm going to guess that the average person weighs about 150 lbs (factoring in children participants). That gives them 198,000,000,000 kg of force to work with.

Now, they can almost double that because of the force of jumping. I suppose in theory, we *could* push out our orbit if everyone jumped at the same time, but I'm pretty sure we need a lot more than 600M people to do it. More like 600T, which doesnt exist yet.

Red said...

I read this article on Straight Dope awhile back:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_155.html

I love their response...

Ben said...

Do you mean Newton?

Lilize said...

well, well.

there needn't be many researches to know that, uh?
but hey, how bad can it be, have 600.000.000 people all over the world jumping up and down for 2 minutes like crazy??? at least it should be fun.

you know what i think is stupid though? asking people to come to your blog so they can read you think they're stupid.
:/

your "100 things" post was nice though.
thanks for dropping by anyway, and welcome back anytime you're in to read some more crazy idiotic ideas!!! =D
i master them. (you should have read my world cup theory)

Jen said...

Also, if you have everyone in the world jumping at the same time, someone on the direct opposite side of the world will counteract your jumping. If you collected everyone on the same side of the earth to jump it would work. However, the people in china are pushing to earth towards the Us and we're pushing the earth towards them.
It's like a tug of war battle- we're all jumping, but not all in the same direction...

CRAIG said...

Wikipedia says that it was a hoax...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Jump_Day

Jen said...

I liked Wikipedias explanation through Newtons third law.

"The gravity between the people and the earth would then suck the people and the earth together again at 1m/sec. They would then collide, and cancel each other's momentum, having no net effect, except possibly causing an earthquake, which would have no effect on the earth's orbit."
Wonderful! We won't decrease global warming, we'll cause an earthquake instead.