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Likewise, it is crazy to me when I realised how thin our oceans are. I used to think of them as super deep (I mean, they are) but even the Mariana trench is a m
by rich_sasha 1y ago
Likewise, it is crazy to me when I realised how thin our oceans are. I used to think of them as super deep (I mean, they are) but even the Mariana trench is a mere 0.2% of the Earth's radius. Average ocean depth is more like 0.05%.
- hinkley 1y agoI didn’t think that sounded right but went and did the math and you’re actually round up to .2%. It’s .156%. And that’s already a mind numbingly scary place to be.
- arkmm 1y agoAs a follow-up to this, even though water makes up 70% of the Earth's surface, it's only 0.02% of the Earth's mass.
- rich_sasha 1y agoI might have messed it up, but as a follow up to your follow up, I think the depth of the ocean is comparable to the width of a single human hair compared to the head. If you inflate a 18cm diameter head to the size of our planet, a 75um hair would be about 5km wide - which is about the average depth of our oceans. It's one hair, not a whole head of hair!
- TheOtherHobbes 1y agoWe live at human scale within a thin slice of a planet-sized environment. On the planetary scale, humans are tiny. We're more or less equivalent to bacteria. Our entire civilisation is a skin rash.