Thoughts From the Front Porch

Remember those neat world globes we had in school?   I mean the kind with raised mountains that you could feel with your fingers.  Ever wonder just how authentic they really were?  Surely such mighty peaks would have to be much higher than those rows of little embossed bumps.  Let’s see if we can put it to scale.

Here’s some figures we can work with:
Earth diameter = 8,000 miles
Mt Everest = 29,000′ or about five miles
Mt. Cheaha = 2,400′  or about a half mile
Marianas Trench (deepest part of ocean) = a little over six miles
Empire State Building =  1,400′ with antenna, or about a quarter mile
Grand Canyon = one mile deep in places.

Now let’s find something we can use for our Earth;  ah yes, how about that nice, shiny bowling ball from PP3.   Being about eight inches in diameter, it gives us a perfect scale of 1″ = 1,000 miles.   Our next step: landscape the ball.   A little arithmetic brings us some surprising answers.

At our scale of 1″ = 1,000 miles, then .001″ must equal one mile.  Our lofty Empire State Building has suddenly shrunk to one-fourth of one thousandth of an inch!   That’s .00025, folks; less than half the diameter of a blonde human hair.  Heck, we could barely see it with a magnifying glass, let alone feel it on our globe.

The mighty Grand Canyon would be a slight scratch on the ball’s surface, about the same depth as the thickness of a sheet of toilet paper.  Our own Mt. Cheaha would protrude about one-half that height, and that’s above sea level, not the valley floor.   Mount Everest would tower a whopping .005″, or about the thickness of a playing card, and the Marianas Trench would barely catch a fingernail dragged across it.  Clearly, we need a much bigger ball if our globe is to be feelable at all.

In fact, if we don’t wash the bowling ball it will probably be far rougher than Earth’s surface at that scale, and the thumb hole would easily swallow almost everything east of the Mississippi into a pit nearly three thousand miles deep!   That’s all the way down to where the planet’s insides are made of molten nickel and iron.

To carry this comparison even further, the Earth’s crust, which averages about eighteen miles in thickness, would be roughly equivalent to five sheets of paper or about half the gap on an average spark plug.

Yep; our Earth is actually an extremely smooth place, covered mostly with oceans that amount to little more than condensation on a bowling ball.  It only seems magnificent to us because we are so incredibly tiny.

Views From Benny Hill is a series by Jerry Smith

Views From Benny Hill