THEN I thought "WHAT WOULD 200 BILLION PING PONG BALLS LOOK LIKE"
Then I took another hit off the bong. JUST KIDDING. It's actually fairly easy to figure out. The volume of a ping pong ball, according to this dork at Physics Forums, is 0.0000335m^3. That times 200 billion is 6,700,000. So 200 billion ping pong balls take up 6.7 million cubic meters.
Still can't picture that? I couldn't either. So I plopped them down onto Civic Center plaza.
So imagine we have a clear plexiglass structure with walls along Grove, Larkin, McAllister, and Polk. (It's plexiglass so you can see all the ping pong balls inside, duh.) If we fill this behemoth up with ping pong balls, how tall is it if there are 200 billion inside?
ANSWER: About 582 feet. Roughly the height of the Chevron tower at 575 Market. You know the one.
Pic stolen from the charmingly named "Skyscrapers of World." |
CONCLUSION: There are a lot of stars in the Milky Way.
This has been fun! Next time, we'll do evolution or something.
3 comments:
It would probably look something like this: http://laughingsquid.com/superballs-invade-san-francisco/
Sorry, that link to the video is now dead. Try this instead: http://stephanietrow.com/2011/06/03/remember-when-sony-let-250000-bouncy-balls-loose-in-san-francisco/114
Add to this that the static electricity produced by 200 billion ping pong balls in a plexiglass box would probably be enough to turn San Francisco into its own kind of fireball.
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