#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:
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#1“WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF WINNING
THE LOTTERY?”
For the absolute jackpot of the Euromillions lottery 140 million
