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Closer to a bowling ball that picked up a drop of beer from your hands.



This didn't sound right, so I did the math.

The volume of all water is 1,386,000,000 km^3, which is then 1.386e+21 liters, or right about the same number of kilograms.

The mass of Earth is about 5.972e+24 kg. So the percent fraction by mass is 0.0232%.

A "drop" is typically estimated at 1/20th of one mL, which is then 0.05 grams. We can estimate the mass of a small-ish bowling ball at 5kg, or 5000 grams. 0.05 / 5000 * 100 = 0.001%.

So it's an order of magnitude shy, but that's still closer than I expected! It's about 1 ml of beer on a bowling ball - a small splash. Or maybe a very large drop.


You'd have to use the volume of earth, not the mass. Google tells me that lava is ~3x denser than water.


Lava is not really representative of the Earth as a whole, as it turns out. The mantle (which is the vast majority of Earth's volume) isn't a liquid, it's a squishy deformable solid. Magma that comes from the mantle is only liquid because of the removal of pressure or the addition of water; it wasn't liquid down there. And a lot of lava comes from crustal melting, not mantle material.

Earth as a whole has a density about 5.5x that of water.


Thanks. This really put it in perspective for me better than the image or other analogies!


The picture already answers this question. If the earth was a bowling ball the blue sphere would be much bigger than a single drop, maybe slightly bigger than a popping boba, the size of a small grape?


The sphere of water would have a surface gravity of 0.016 g, 1.6% of Earth's gravity, 1/10th of the Moon's gravity.


Alas, the atmosphere it could hold would be insufficient to avoid it all vaporizing.


A dash.




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