Sorry for pooping on the party, but this would not work.  Any arbitrary number of people (or fleas) could jump simultaneously, and they would push the earth away, but the gravitational pull of the jumpers would attract the earth back towards them, in equal and opposite reaction, and they would meet where they started.  There’s nothing external to push on in space- it’s like trying to get off the middle of a frozen pond by waving your arms around: you can wiggle back and forth, but you can’t move, without pushing or pulling on something.

The only way the earth’s orbit could be permanently changed is for the jumpers to reach escape velocity (around 25,000 mph) and leave the Earth forever.  But since most people can’t jump that fast, and the mass of all the people on the planet is smaller than the mass of the Earth by a factor (give or take an order of magnitude) of 10,000,000,000,000, I’m afraid we’ll have to get out of our SUV’s to do something about global warming.

Despite the zilch’s perfectly legitimate comments about equal and opposite reactions, I decided to have some fun.

I decided that people weren’t jumping...that instead we would take all the people on the earth, and smash them into the earth as a huge meteor travelling at much faster than jumping speeds.

6 billion people, at 200 pounds per person = 1.2 Trillion pounds.

A cubic foot of water is about 64 pounds.

So all the people on the earth weigh as much as 18 billion cubic feet of water. (1.2 trillion divided by 64 = 18 billion)

This is a big blob of water that is almost exactly a half-mile per side (2640ft ^ 3 is 18 billion cubic feet)

At this point, I went to the University of Arizona Impact Effects page.

I suggested that it was a big piece of ice, and slammed it into the earth at an ASTOUNDING 0.1 miles per second. (Remember that we are just jumping up and down here, and that force is a component of velocity^2.)

The resulting force was about 850 kilotons of TNT. A small atomic bomb. Big, but not enough to have significant impact on the earth’s course.

When I told the program that the meteor was actually made of iron, instead of ice, it jumped up to 7 megatons.

As a result of these calculations, I am forced to go with zilch’s SUV idea.

I’m sure glad you got to this before I did because I don’t think I’d have been so polite about it. I had to go off and stop laughing before my sides split first, though.

Damn, didn’t ANYBODY study Newton’s Laws in school? Those are the basics of the basics, folks, and yet they’ve served us pretty well for hundreds of years. I didn’t even take physics and I studied Newton’s Laws for crying out loud!

Ah, this is what you get when you let Hollywood get away with people being thrown back dozens of feet every time they get shot with a bullet in movies. What really cracks me up is that no one considers the possibility that even if this did have any hope of working it’s a very crude method of shoving the planet around and what happens if we jump at the wrong time and make things worse by shoving the planet closer to the sun?

What then, eh? I suppose we’d have to launch two space shuttles with huge nuclear payloads to be set off on the opposite of the planet just far enough away to nudge us back into place yet not harm any life on the planet. Bruce Willis will lead the team and Steve Buscemi will be the guy who gets SPACE MADNESS and tries to fuck it up for everyone by accidentally blowing one of the shuttles up halfway through the mission.

Yo, don’t be blamin’ me, dogs. I just report what I read.

Seriously though, I left out a lot of jokes I was gonna make about the situation, wanting to see what types of responses I would get. I was hoping for intelligent responses and got them in spades.

Just keep in mind though that when I read about other fabtabulistic methods for solving problems, I may keep them to myself until they are thoroughly vetted. I’m still checking into
being able to travel to Kansas by clicking red shoes together but am loath to report that theory prematurely for fear of being scoffed at.

I wonder if Shana would loan me her shoes…

Jumping might help stop global warming.  If everyone spent ten minutes a day jumping on a small exercise trampoline, they’d lose weight and have better endurance.  Then (in a slight expansion of Zilchian climatological theory) they’d be more likely to walk or bicycle instead of drive an SUV.

Kansas by way of clicking little red shoes together? Now that is a known and proven method of travel that has been in use for decades.

The problem is, who the hell wants to go to Kansas?

I’m still checking into being able to travel to Kansas by clicking red shoes together but am loath to report that theory prematurely for fear of being scoffed at.

Brock, this study is a waste of time, as has already been pointed out. We KNOW it works..it’s been proven.

If you want to provide REAL value, find out if I can tap blue shoes together, and end up in Oregon or Mass, or another blue state.

Better yet, can we tap blue shoes together 600 million times and get a real president. Just wondering.

This isn’t even a nit, but I’m going to pick anyway.  Those “red shoes” or “ruby slippers” of movie fame aren’t in the book.  To quote:

There, indeed, just under the corner of the great beam the house rested upon, two feet were sticking out, shod in silver shoes with pointed toes.

Brock, I might be persuaded to loan you the shoes...but what will YOU do for ME?  A vacation in Fiji sounds nice…

(The part they don’t tell you about is that Kansas is a bar in Hoboken.)

Zilch: sssh!

this site could be used to collect e-mails for spam.

May be the jumper’s waves do not surpass the red hater of stones that float at the center of Earth.Luckily, because July 20, 2006 Italy play soccer against Brasil, and if the ball leave ellipse and catch parabola, when we will be near Saturn remember me the summer’s days.
We, from all University of Italy, will have some training weekly, playing music O’Fortuna, from Carmina Burana , XI century.
O Fortuna
velut luna
statu mirabilis
semper crescis

Is the above comment an example of the message being lost in translation?

I’m trying very hard (perhaps too hard) to figure it out. Please elaborate, Eraser.

sorry, forgive me for my english.In italian language the situation of planet Earth is clear.
See the site if you want more news on the great event of JUly 20th 2006.And please study more and watch less TV, films and other fiction

many languages, messages lost in translation,many opinions, but an only big foot and only big shoes on july 20th 2006.
I am thinking in making shoes , made in Italy, with concrete base, che trasmette bene l’urto.
Una soletta in cemento armato di 5 cm di spessore,buchi neri per le stringhe cosmiche, e forma a curvatura variabile.

Erasor- to quote your countryman Galileo: eppure si muove.

sure,Galileo should be in the first place on july 20 ,2006, if he could be out from prison.
May be he see us from another Universe, and he would to buy fine Italian shoes in concrete and steel for that day, and for the day after ,if Brasilian team put the ball again in the first orbit.
In a brasilian site they say that are “flautolentias bovinas” that change the climate, and not the orbit.