And Slaters Go Plop

Like me, you probably wonder from time to time whether you can eat the moon.

I have some bad news; you can’t, even with your friends helping you. Let’s do the figures:

The moon is bigger than it looks (this is because it’s far away) and it weighs in at about 73,477,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. Contrary to popular opinion it’s made of rock, not cheese (and a half moon is not, in fact, half the size). The fact that it is made of rock is a spanner in the works because it considerably reduces the amount a person can eat in a day. If you want to eat it you are going to have to powder the rock first and then eat it along with other food.

Still, this is a fairly simple equation and we have all the numbers: the weight of the moon divided by the amount you can eat per day gives you how many days it will take to eat the moon.

So, let’s assume that you can eat two powdered tablespoons per meal and we’ll assume that two tablespoons of powdered rock weighs a tidy 50 grams. That leaves us with the weight of the moon divided by 0.150 kg which tells us that it’ll take a person 1,342,045,662,100,456,621,004 years to eat the moon.

If you were to enlist the rest of the world to help you in this enterprise you would be looking at reducing this figure down to a mere 203,271,750,023 years. The age of the universe is 13,700,000,000 years which means you and the rest of the world would be required to exist for 15 times longer than the entire universe has done to date. And to make things worse you’ll probably spend a considerable percentage of this time on the toilet.

(There’s no way to wrap this up in a dignified manner so I’ll just say that perhaps, one day, someone will enter the search string “can you eat the moon?” into Google and I’ll have a little chortle to myself when I see that particular stat in my logs.)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 7:19 am and is filed under Astronomy, Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.