{"id":4519,"date":"2017-04-20T19:26:24","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T19:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4519"},"modified":"2017-04-21T16:00:40","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T16:00:40","slug":"how-long-would-it-take-to-empty-the-oceans-with-a-teaspoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=4519","title":{"rendered":"How Long Would It Take To Empty The Oceans With A Teaspoon?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I pointed out that persuading teenagers to stop thinking “filthy” thoughts is roughly comparable to the task of emptying the ocean with a teaspoon, and someone retorted that the later was possible. Well perhaps, but until we’ve worked out a rough calculation we don’t really know do we?<\/p>\n

And yes I am weird enough to have gone ahead and worked it out.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

Swirling Sea<\/p><\/div>\n

According to the wonder that is Wikipedia, the average teaspoon can contain approximately 5ml of liquid – not often ocean but the type of liquid is irrelevant.<\/p>\n

According to a handy table<\/a>, there are approximately 1.3\u00a0billion<\/em> square kilometres of water in the world’s oceans. And according to a handy units calculator<\/a> this equates to 1.3e21 litres of water. Dividing this figure by the volume of our teaspoon, we get the value\u00a02.6e+23 teaspoons of water in the ocean.<\/p>\n

Assuming that it takes 10s (we could argue about how accurate that is, but trust me it doesn’t make too much of a difference to the final conclusion) to move a teaspoon of seawater into a truly ginormous container that magically appears to contain it all, it will take approximately\u00a02.6e+24 seconds to empty the oceans.<\/p>\n

Now you could work on this non-stop, but I’m no Victorian factory owner, so I will be assuming an 8-hour working day, and a 5 day working week. Admittedly no paid holiday (you want pay for this? I don’t think so).<\/p>\n

So dividing the stupendously large number of seconds by 60 (to get minutes) by 60 (to get hours) by 8 (to get days) by 5 (to get weeks) by 52 (to get years) we get approximately\u00a03.5e+17 years. Good! We’ve reduced the E numbers somewhat!<\/p>\n

Now if we divide this number of years by the expected lifetime of the sun (10 billion years – and ignoring the fact that we’re approximately half-way through the sun’s lifetime), we get a much more manageable figure of\u00a034,722,222 sun lifetimes.<\/p>\n

However it is not unreasonable to assume that something will happen to the oceans before we get anywhere near completing this little task.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I pointed out that persuading teenagers to stop thinking “filthy” thoughts is roughly comparable to the task of emptying the ocean with a teaspoon, and someone retorted that the later was possible. Well perhaps, but until we’ve worked out a rough calculation we don’t really know do we? And yes I am weird enough […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7,13],"tags":[1507,1508],"class_list":["post-4519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-humour","tag-ocean","tag-teaspoon","category-7-id","category-13-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-1aT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4519"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4521,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4519\/revisions\/4521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}