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%

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