There has long been a concern about what would happen if everyone on Earth leaped at the same time.
Will the Earth bounce? Or will it wobble?
There are many possibilities for what could happen, but it has never been anything we would ever do.
However, many individuals are invested in the solution to that issue, prompting one physicist to calculate the consequences if we did it.
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Greg Foot, a scientific journalist and broadcaster, attempted an experiment for BBC’s Earth Lab by jumping at the same time with a small group of 50,000 people at Reading Festival.
Then he measured the movement from about a mile away.
He was speaking in the clip: “And then with a bit of math I can scale that up and see what would happen if everyone around the Earth jumped at the same time, and whether that would change the speed of the spin of the Earth.”
We could apparently temporarily alter our host planet with the smallest of moves if everyone on the world did the same thing.
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To determine this, consider how an earthquake may impact the Earth’s spin.
In 2011, an earthquake in Japan accelerated the Earth’s spin, shortening our days by 1.8 microseconds.
So Foot’s hypothesis that we may all influence Earth’s spin by jumping is not a wild one.
When he measured from a mile distant, he discovered that the experiment produced a 0.6 Richter scale earthquake.
However, it would not have a significant impact on the Earth.
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He stated that earthquakes do not impact the world’s spin until they reach at least eight, which would require seven million times more people than currently reside on the globe.
“So, the urban mythology is absolutely false. If everyone leaps at the same time, you won’t be able to adjust the planet’s rotation rate. There is no truth to it at all.
Rhett Allain, a physicist, went on to speculate whether humans could have an impact on the Earth if we all jumped, even if it didn’t change the spin.
For this, he calculated an estimate of what everyone would weigh in comparison to the mass of the Earth and determined that if everyone jumped 0.3 meters at the exact same time, the Earth would move almost a hundredth of the radius of a single hydrogen atom.
He told Live Science’s series Life’s Little Mysteries that when everyone jumped, they would ‘fall’ back down and drift towards the Earth.
“During this time, the Earth would rise back up. Everything would be as it once was.”
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