#2“HOW
MANY GRAINS OF SAND ON
THE EARTH?”
Mathematician
Marcus
du Sautoy, author of The Number Mysteries (Fourth
Estate), says that sand is rock with a diameter of between 0. 625mm and
0. 2mm.
Assuming
a grain of sand is roughly
spherical, the average volume of a grain is 4/3 x pi x r3=0. 00947mm3,
where r
is the radius.
So
how many grains of sand are there in a
metre cube box?
It
has 109mm cubes inside (10N is how
mathematicians write a 1 followed by N zeros), and if they are arranged
randomly, about 65% of the box will be sand and the rest air.
So
we can estimate that the number of
grains of sand in a metre cube box is 109 x 0. 65/0. 00947, or roughly
70bn
grains.
Now,
let’s go for an average of 5% of
the surface of the Earth being covered in sand with a depth of 100m.
The
surface area of the Earth is 4 x pi x
r2 where r is the radius of the Earth, which is 6,378,000 metres.
So
the volume of sand comes out at: 2. 5 x
1015m3.
So
the rough estimate is that the number of
grains of sand on the Earth is a number with 27 digits … that
is …
1,
000, 000, 000, 000, 000,
000, 000, 000, 000
Now
lets suppose you could place a number
on each grain and had a lottery for picking the winning grain.
“And
now …. Ladies and Gentlemen … the
winning number is 973, 251, 684, 342, 701”
Dear
Reader would you be having a bet in
this lottery? HARDLY!
But
you’re betting your soul … an eternity
in hell … against the odds of a DNA strand by evolution with a
number of
40,000 digits!
Methinks
only the certified insane would
take these odds … WHAT SAY YE?
“Look
Preacher, you’re just
trying to scare me about burning in hell!”
“Yes
I am … you’re absolutely
correct!”
Harley
Hitchcock
This
website’s front page is:
www.
#1“WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF WINNING
THE LOTTERY?”
For the absolute jackpot of the Euromillions lottery 140 million
