Circling the Earth with Licorice

April 9, 2008 – 9:08 pm

It's a very long distance around our planet, very long indeed. With a diameter of approximately 8,000 miles we multiply by Pi (3.14159) to get the circumference (distance around) and come up with roughly 25,132 miles around.

If you believe Wikipedia's facts about Earth, it's 25,046.5 miles. Let's split the difference and say the distance around the Earth is 25,090 miles. And the first question that occurs to me is: That's roughly what in pounds of licorice ropes?

Well, I decided to use Red Vines Super Ropes as my yardstick, so to speak. At 34 inches per rope, and 3 pounds, 12 ounces per box of 30 ropes, that puts the average weight of a rope at 2 ounces, or 1/17th of an ounce per inch.

At 25,090 miles times 5280 feet times 12 inches, we get 1,589,702,400 inches. Yes, that's over a billion and a half inches. And at 1/17th of an ounce per inch, that's 5,844,494.2 pounds of licorice ropes to circle the Earth.

But licorice used to cost a penny, you say. So, roughly how many pounds of pennies would be needed to circle the Earth?

According to the U.S. penny entry at Wikipedia a penny is 3/4 of an inch wide and weighs 2.5 grams. So, the distance around the earth is roughly equal to 2,119,603,200 pennies laid end to end, weighing in at 11,657,817 pounds.

To put that in perspective, it's roughly equal to $21 million dollars or the cargo capacity of forty-seven 747 jumbo jets (with a maximum payload of 249,122 pounds of cargo).

A couple of other Rough Equivalents for the distance around the Earth:

• 144,518,400 sheets of that 20 lb. bond copy paper in your printer, weighing in at 1,445,184 pounds.
• 336,516,173 CDs weighing 11,105,033 pounds (based on a 15 gram 120mm disc).
• 374,047,624 slices of Oscar Mayer Bologna, weighing 23,377,976 pounds (based on a 4.25" wide slice weighing one ounce).

What are some Rough Equivalents for the distance around the Earth that you can come up with?