earth sciences and ecology question #1616

Bobbi Jo, a 16 year old female from Wyalusing asks on October 11, 2003,

Q:

With the volume of the earth, how many baseballs can fit inside it?
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the answer

Barry Shell answered on November 12, 2003, A:

The mean radius of the earth is approximately 6.4 million meters (exact = 6.378 x 10^6 m). The formula for the volume of a sphere is 4/3pi x radius squared. The Earth's volume is then:

(4/3) x 3.14 x 64000003 m3

This comes to 1,097,509,500,000,000,000,000 cubic meters. Needless to say, this is very large! If you say that a baseball is about 10cm in diameter, then it would fit into a 10cm cube. This is an approximation. In one cubic meter there would be 10x10x10 of these, or 1000, so you could fit 1,097,509,500,000,000,000,000,000 baseballs into the Earth.

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