An Absolute Crap Ton!

Hello Nerdfighters!

I just finished listening to this week's episode of Dear Hank and John, Episode 130: The LaCroix Boix, and there is one particular conversation that I have not been able to stop thinking about. The conversation was spurred by a seemingly simple question from Anna that began like this...

"Dear Hank and John, how much sand is there?"

Hank and John Green then dove into quantifying the amount of sand on Earth by comparing it to the number of stars in the universe. In fact, John says that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth. As pointed out by Hank, this seems to have been paraphrased from the Carl Sagan quote: "The total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth." Granted, this is no actual number, but it seems to be one of the only ways we can actually describe this quantity in a way that makes any sort of sense.

However, John went on to research the current estimate of the actual number of how many grains of sand there are on Earth. According to his source, the number is this:

7,500,000,000,000,000,000
aka 7.5x10^18
aka 7 quintillion 500 quadrillion

Furthermore, according to John Green, the universe has this very realistic, totally quantifiable number of stars:

"An Absolute Crap Ton"

What is an Absolute Crap Ton, you may ask? I don't think anybody really knows, BUT what Hank deduces is that is must be at least greater than 7.5x10^18. This is what got me thinking.... What else can be quantified as having an amount of an Absolute Crap Ton? What else is there that exists in quantities so massive that we don't have a reasonable guess to just how much there really is? I needed to find out....
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Here's a quick list of a few of the things I discovered to exist in Absolute Crap Tons (ACT for short):

1. H2O Molecules

This one you may remember from the pod. As the sand conversation was being carried out, John eventually dropped this mind-blowing fact:

"If you took 10 drops of water, regular drops of water, and you counted the number of molecules of H2O in those 10 drops of water, you would get a number approximately equal to all the stars in the universe."

What this means is that there is an ACT of H2O molecules in JUST 10 DROPS. And how many drops of water are actually on Earth? Well, according to the USGS Water Science School, there are 332,500,000 cubic miles / 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers of water "on, in, and above the Earth". Now just imagine how many singular drops of water make up that volume... What's the number, exactly? Well... an Absolute Crap Ton.

This only means that there's at least An Absolute Crap Ton x An Absoulte Crap Ton, or rather an (Absolute Crap Ton)^2 number of water molecules on Earth, not even counting all of the water in the universe.

This also means that there's at least an ACT of most commonly found molecules, like carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen... you get the point.

2. Turtles... All The Way Down 

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT (kinda, but if you'd like to avoid it anyways, just skip to #3)

If you've read John Green's latest book Turtles All The Way Down, you probably remember the scene where Daisy tells a story of an old lady claiming that there is a turtle holding up the Earth. According to her, the turtle is then standing on top of another turtle, and this pattern continues to form a sequence of "turtles all the way down". Obviously this is a metaphor for a bigger picture, but because of the infinite nature of the words "all the way down", this can be interpreted to mean that there is an infinite number of turtles.

Therefore, there is at least an Absolute Crap Ton of turtles/metaphorical things you like to interpret as turtles.

3. Heart Beats

According to Live Science, the average adult heart rate is between 60-100 beats per minute. At the time I am writing this, Worldometers estimates there to be approximately 7,607,494,600 humans on Earth. Based on these two numbers, I did some math... If you assume an average of 80 bpm for all humans (an extremely rough estimate):

80 bpm x 60 minutes/hour  x 24 hours/day x 365 days/year =
3.2x10^17 human heart beats per year

Now, this isn't quite an Absolute Crap Ton (it's actually less than 1/20 of an ACT for perspective). And even if you factor in the accelerated heart rates of babies and children, it still wouldn't be quite that large BUT humans aren't nearly the only animals with beating hearts. So, when you incorporate the hearts in all of the animal kingdom, there's no doubt there are probably multiple Absolute Crap Tons of heart beats on Earth per year (and maybe in the galaxy if you believe aliens exist and also have hearts).


And that's it for now. In the process of making this post, I was actually surprised by how many seemingly massive things just didn't exist in amounts as large as an Absolute Crap Ton. I tried calculating things like the number of human thoughts per day and the number of breaths per day but there just aren't many physical things (that aren't atomic) that really exist in that quantity. This really puts the number of grains of sand on Earth and the number of stars in the universe in perspective.

Can you think of anything else that exists on the scale of quadrillions? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter @rehankandjohn!

And as always, please let me know if there's any other dubious advice from Dear Hank and John that you'd like me to research or try out in my own life. I love getting your input!

DFTBA,

Liana