Have you ever wondered what would happen if every single person on Earth jumped at the same time? It’s a question that many people have pondered, but no one has ever attempted to answer… until now.
Recently, a physicist named Greg Foot decided to investigate this intriguing question. He gathered a small group of 50,000 people at Reading Festival and asked them all to jump simultaneously. Foot then measured the movement from a mile away to see if they could create any noticeable effect on the Earth’s spin.
In the video, Foot explains his process: “With a bit of math, I can scale up the movement I observed and see what would happen if everyone around the Earth jumped at the same time, and whether that would change the speed of the Earth’s spin.”
The results were fascinating, but not quite what many people might expect. According to Foot, if every person on Earth were to jump simultaneously, we could temporarily shift our planet by the smallest of movements. This is because earthquakes have the potential to affect the Earth’s spin.
In fact, Foot points out an example from 2011, when an earthquake in Japan actually accelerated the Earth’s spin, shortening our days by 1.8 microseconds. So, the idea that our collective jumping could influence the Earth’s spin is not entirely far-fetched.
However, when Foot measured the movement caused by the jumping crowd from a mile away, he found that it only created an earthquake of 0.6 on the Richter scale. This level of movement is not enough to have any significant impact on the Earth.
Foot explains: “Earthquakes don’t affect the planet’s spin until they reach at least eight, and for this, you’d need seven million times more people than currently live on the planet. So, the urban legend is completely untrue. You cannot shift the planet if everyone jumps at the same time; you can’t even change how fast it spins. There’s no truth in it at all.”
This doesn’t mean that our jumping would have no effect whatsoever. Physicist Rhett Allain believes that if everyone were to jump 0.3 meters at the exact same location and time, the Earth would move around a hundredth of the radius of a single hydrogen atom. However, as Allain points out, after all the people jump and then fall back towards the Earth, everything would return to normal.
So, in the end, while it might be a fun thought experiment, the idea that everyone on Earth jumping simultaneously could have any significant impact on our planet is simply a myth. The Earth is much too large and our jumps are much too small to make a difference. But hey, it’s always fun to imagine what could happen if we all tried!
