Thursday, November 13, 2008

We burn all these fossil fuels, why aren’t we falling into the sun?

I was listening to my normal "drive to work, mindless banter" radio station this morning and the DJs brought in a self-professed "genius". They asked their audience to call in with questions to pose to this guy. This was one of the questions asked.

Yes, knowing a little bit about physics, this is a rather silly question. If speed remains constant and mass is reduced, the objects will move further apart. The genius went into some silliness about people getting fatter, thus off-setting the loss due to fossil fuel burn-off.

However, the question of how much is actually being burned off stuck in my head all the way to work, and through a chunk of the day. Eventually, I decided I would dig into some solid data (yay! wikipedia) on this. So, here it is:

7.2 Barrels of Oil = 1 ton
Daily Oil Consumption = 82,234,918 bbl/day (barrels per day)
Daily Coal Consumption = 16,975,037 tons/day
Earth Mass = 6x10^21 tons
Sun Mass = 2.19240901x10^27 tons
Daily Solar Mass lost through fusion = 1,968,413.057 tons
Daily Solar Mass lost through solar wind = 2.19241x10^13 tons

One Year = 365.2422 days

Annual Percent Loss =

Earth-Oil = 0.000000000069527%
Earth-Coal = 0.000000000103333%
Sun-Fusion = 0.000000000000000%
Sun-Wind = 0.000000000365242%

Mass Losses Combined =

E = 0.000000000172860%
S = 0.000000000365242%

The Earth is losing mass through other methods (like plants and animals converting matter into energy so they can live), but with that said, the sun is actually burning through a lot more mass than we are. So, we are moving into a higher and higher orbit around the sun. How fast are we moving away from the sun? Based on the solar loss of mass alone, over the last 4.5 billion years, we have moved 7,000 miles apart (astronomycafe.net). A blisteringly fast 0.000000000177457 mph. So, I guess I'm not going to worry about the earth cooling off quickly in my lifetime. Oh well, back to work!

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