Q: What would happen if everyone in the world jumped at the same time?

Physicist: Sounds like a party!

It would create a spherical wave that would descend through the Earth, focus at the core, and then expand again hitting the entire surface again, at more or less the same time, a little under 20 minutes later. In some areas of the Earth there’s a chance that someone might feel or hear a gentle bump. But probably not. Also, don’t worry about the core. It’s already suffering from much worse than a bunch of people jumping around.

A more interesting question might be “can you weaponize hopping?”

Good clean fun? Or the most deadly stealth weapon since HAARP?

There is some precedent for shock waves alone doing damage.  Both Mercury and Saturn’s moon Mimas have suffered massive impacts (the Caloris and Herschel impacts respectively) that created shock waves that moved through/around them and focused on the far side, causing geological scale damage (Allegedly.  It’s hard to say for sure what caused the damage).

Depending on how high the people of the world are willing to jump (without injury), we can generate energy on the order of approximately 1-2 kilotons of TNT. For comparison, the Little Boy nuclear bomb detonated over Hiroshima had an estimated yield of around 15 kilotons.

Now say that the entire world decides that Paris has created more than enough high art, and needs to be dealt with.  By carefully timing when everyone jumps off of their kitchen tables, so that the waves thus created by everyone arrive at the Eiffel tower at the same moment, a fair amount of damage could be done (maybe).  Due to fluctuations in density and material throughout the planet waves have a tendency to get scattered.  As a result, the best you can do is a “fuzzy focus”, like trying to burn something with a smoked-glass magnifying lens.  So here’s a guess:

I’d bet that if everyone on the Earth jumped in the right sequence then you could (mostly) focus the waves at some point on the surface and create an earthquake of no more than 5.0 on the Richter scale.

Here’s another example of “phased array” technology, the terribly named: “hypersonic sound“.

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8 Responses to Q: What would happen if everyone in the world jumped at the same time?

  1. v.sivasai says:

    if everyone in world jump at a same time. is there any resonance occur if our forced frequency equals to actual frequency of earth.is it leads to breaking of earth?

  2. LordFlippytastic says:

    Then it would be the coolest simultaneous jump ever.

  3. The Logical Man says:

    It would be kind of hard to get everybody in the world to jump at the exact same time.

  4. dexter says:

    its hard to make everyone jump at the same time because the half of the world sleeps right now

  5. Barrett H says:

    Taking the average human body weight worldwide of 136.4lbs, I can place the pillar of force one person wide into one spot. This means 136.4 x 7Billion. 136.4 falling only
    2.8 ft per second^2 will exert around 318 lbs of force when hitting the ground. All 7 Billion humans doing this will push against the ground at 2.67344 x 10 to the 12th power in Joules. One of the biggest Volcanic Eruptions in recorded human history is 2.9288 x 10 to the 15th power in Joules. This means that the Earth will not move from the Human forces unless they jumped from an extreme height(which would kill them/us). Another big factor is that realistically, we can only stand shoulder to shoulder, front to back in a given area. This means the force will be more distributed among the surface resulting in less shock from the impact. At most this will produce a rather large Earthquake felt for miles.

  6. versch81 says:

    “It’s already suffering from much worse than a bunch of people jumping around”
    I disagree, look at that
    http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/29/why-do-poisonous-caterpillars-jump/

    – Verna

  7. Grav7ty says:

    It won’t produce an Earthquake. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

  8. Anonymous says:

    gyatt

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