On: All of Earth's water in a single sphere (2019)

[mensetmanusman]

Can’t help but want to build that.

Apparently all the mined gold in the world would fit inside a 5 m diameter sphere.

Spheres are suspicious in hiding weight.

[nightpool → mensetmanusman]

The World Gold Council says:

> If every single ounce of this gold were placed next to each other, the resulting cube of pure gold would only measure around 22 metres on each side

So that can't possibly be right, you must be off by a factor of 10 or so at least—Wolfram Alpha says a 30m diameter sphere.

[vesinisa → nightpool]

27 meter diameter in fact. A 27-meter sphere is about 150 times as voluminous as a 5-meter sphere.

It's still a mind bogglingly small amount considering that humans have spared no toil, sweat and blood on industrial scale gold mining ever since the dawn of written history - and since gold is so valuable and hard to destroy, most of it should still exist to this day in form or another.

Yet, if you smelted it all to a single object it would fit on a typical single family housing plot.

[guhidalg → mensetmanusman]

I've heard something like this before, but 5m is too small. The gold council reckons it's a little larger than that: https://www.gold.org/goldhub/data/how-much-gold

[dylan604 → mensetmanusman]

Spheres/circles are definitely surprising in how a seemingly small increase in radius changes the volume/area much more drastically. The cubing/squaring exponent is easily taken for granted.

[yzydserd → mensetmanusman]

I thought it was an Olympic sized swimming pool.

[vesinisa → yzydserd]

Close. About four of them, or a single 40-track one (the standard one has 10 tracks/lanes.)