5 Science Comparisons That Flip What You Think
Today, we’re going to put you back into the shoes of a kid taking a standardized test. We’re going to give you a pair of quantities, and we’re going to ask you which is bigger. Every time we give you a new pair, you will answer wrong.
Of course, now that we’ve told you you’ll answer wrong, you’ll easily answer them all correctly, simply by picking the less likely answer each time. Still, these are all questions you’d likely answer wrongly if you didn’t know they were trick questions. So, feel free to later spring them on some unsuspecting friend, and then snap your fingers at them when they’re wrong consistently.
What Produces More Power Per Cubic Inch, You or the Sun?
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You’d Think: The Sun is a mighty ball of flame. It’s ultimately responsible for nearly all energy on Earth, and that’s with the Earth receiving only the tiniest fraction the Sun’s output. This thing puts out a lot of power. You, on the other hand, aren’t generally thought of as putting out any power at all. When you think about it, you do constantly radiate heat, so you must have a power output rating, but it’s a lot less than the Sun.
via Wiki Commons
Also, the Sun releases energy through nuclear fusion, which is surely the densest known energy source. You, meanwhile, release energy by metabolizing Snickers bars. This isn’t a very efficient process, particularly considering how much of that Snickers matter appears to be going to your midsection instead of powering your muscles.
But Actually: The Sun does produce a lot of power, but it’s also extremely large. And while it does host nuclear fusion, not every hydrogen atom there fuses in one go. All of this means is that if we zoom in at the part of the Sun where most of the fusion happens, it releases heat at an estimated 276.5 watts per cubic meter.
And you? Your energy output averages out to around 100 watts, and you’re a lot less than a cubic meter. You’re more like one-sixteenth of a cubic meter. That means you put out more than five times as much power as the Sun, per unit volume. When we’re talking about power density, the Sun is instead roughly on par with the warmth slowly emitted by a compost heap.
To be as fair to the Sun as possible, we zeroed in on the core, which is where almost all the fusion takes place. The entire Sun is 30 times bigger than that but gives off barely any more energy, so its total power density is another 30 less than the number we gave you. Clearly, the Sun isn’t all that impressive after all. You can defeat it with a simple set of curtains.
Who Eats More, Someone on Cocaine or Someone Not?
You’d Think: Some drugs have reputations for giving people the munchies. Cocaine does not. Instead, we associate cocaine with people who are thin — possibly too thin.
Recent developments in pharmaceuticals have shed some new light on this relationship. Ozempic makes people lose weight, and it accomplishes this by making them eat less. Smaller diet appears to be the only way to lose weight, because when you do eat food, that food has to go somewhere, such as to that midsection where you store your Snickers bars. Perhaps cocaine suppresses appetite in the same way Ozempic does.
But Actually: A Cambridge study found that cocaine addicts eat more than people in a comparable control group, and they’re attracted more to fatty foods. Cocaine really does lead to munchies of some kind.
As for the stereotype that cocaine users are thin, the research backed this up as well. When you do cocaine regularly, you eat more and lose weight. And you don’t waste away and lose muscle: The loss relates only to fat. For comparison, smokers have a reputation for losing weight but actually have increased visceral fat around their organs, but cocaine users do not. Cocaine must trigger some profound metabolic changes to reshape the body the way it does.
So, should we all start doing cocaine, for the clear benefits? Possibly not, say the scientists researching this. Mostly, this discovery will be useful in guiding how doctors treat addicts who are weaning themselves off cocaine. Luckily, the new alternate solution, of using prescribed drugs to actually eat less, seems to be melting off people’s weight even better than cocaine can.
What Saves More Gas, Jumping from 25 to 50 MPG or Jumping from 10 to 15 MPG?
You’d Think: There are two ways of looking at these numbers. First, we think about savings in absolute terms. Fifty miles-per-gallon is 25 more than 25 miles-per-gallon, while 15 MPG is only 5 more than 10 MPG. So, the first jump is bigger.
Second, we could look at which has the greater proportional increase. Fifty is twice 25, so that first jump doubles efficiency. Fifteen is only 1.5 times as much as 10, so that’s just a 50-percent increase in efficiency. Either way you look at it, the first jump is the bigger jump.
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But Actually: Let’s say you drive 600 miles. If your engine gets 25 MPG, that’ll take you 24 gallons of gas, but if it gets 50 MPG, that’ll take 12 gallons of gas. That’s 12 gallons less than before. If your car gets 10 MPG, it’ll need 60 gallons of gas to do 600 miles, but if it gets 15 MPG, it’ll need 40 gallons. That’s a savings of 20 gallons. It turns out that the second jump is bigger, saving almost twice as much gas as the first jump.
If we think about proportions, then yes, the first jump uses 50 percent less gas, while the second jump uses just 33 percent less gas. But even though we were the ones who brought up the concept of proportions, proportions don’t matter here. If we have a bunch of inefficient cars and a bunch of efficient cars, we don’t want a bunch of 50-percent increases. What we want is just to reduce gas consumption as much as possible, and it turns out we get that by increasing the miles-per-gallon on the inefficient cars a little, rather than on the efficient cars a lot.
One way this could all be less confusing is if we measured gas efficiency in terms of gallons-per-mile (or gallons-per-hundred-miles) rather than miles per gallon. That’s how they do it in Europe — or at least they do the Euro equivalent of that, which is liters-per-hundred-kilometers.
And in reality, gallons-per-mile is what you care about. You don’t fill your car up with a gallon of gas and wonder how many miles you’ll drive before you must abandon your car. You already know how many miles you’re going to drive, and you want to know how often you’ll have to refill your gas along the way.
What Has More Giant Redwoods, California or the U.K.?
You’d Think: If you know a bit about giant redwoods, you’ll know that they’re the tallest trees in the world (and, by extension, are the tallest organisms of any sort). They’re also some of the oldest organisms of any sort, as they’re thousands of years old. They’re mostly found on the Pacific Coast and are most concentrated in California’s Sequoia National Park.
If you don’t know much about giant redwoods, you still know they’re big, which means there probably aren’t a lot of them in England, since nothing’s big there. You’ll also know that California is almost twice the size as the entirety of Britain, leaving more room for large objects of all kinds.
But Actually: The giant sequoia is endangered, and there are only 80,000 of them left in California. But in the 19th century, when settlers in California were first marveling over the huge things (and were gleefully cutting them down), news of them also reached Britain. Merchants sailed over to there with sequoia seeds and planted them.
Some sources say there are 500,000 redwoods in the U.K. today. That number actually combines a couple different species of redwoods (if we look at all redwoods, California has far more than 80,000), but even if we look just at giant redwoods, Britain has so many that they have more than California.
The oldest of these, while only one-twentieth as old as California’s oldest, is a lot more than one-twentieth as tall as California’s tallest, as it’s nearly 200 feet. Only about 5,000 of Britain’s giant sequoias qualify as mature like that one, while the rest are saplings. We must assume that when the others reach full size, they will leave no room for human inhabitants, who will now have to flee in search of new lands to conquer.
What Weighs More, All Cows or All Wild Mammals Combined?
You’d Think: When we say “cows” here, we’re talking about domestic cattle, both cows and bulls. We have quite a few of those, since that’s where milk and hamburgers come from. Still, they exist only on farms, and those areas are dwarfed in size by mighty nature. Out in the wilderness, we have endless stampedes of antelope, we have giant moose and we have whales so big that we can’t even understand them.
Wild animals also include smaller animals, who are each far smaller than cows but who vastly outnumber them. One famous bit of trivia says all the ants in the world combined outweigh all humans combined. So, if we add up all the countless millions of mice out there, and the not insignificant number of squirrels, you end up with more mass than could ever fit in our poky cattle ranches.
But Actually: To describe the mass of billions of animals, we use the unit “megatons of carbon” (Mt C). This is more useful than talking plain tonnage because it excludes water weight.
Domestic cattle weigh a total of 61 Mt C. All wild mammals combined weigh just 7 Mt C. Not only do cows weigh more than all wild mammals combined — they weigh nearly 10 times as much.
Humans, meanwhile, weigh just shy of all domestic cattle, clocking in at 60 Mt C. All livestock (including cattle and also pigs, sheep and poultry) total 100 Mt C. Wow. So, we really have conquered nature, haven’t we?
Well, sort of. But the real lesson here may be that despite what Zootopia taught us, mammals aren’t very significant.
While that stat about ants weighing more than humans is actually false, arthropods in total (insects, arachnids, crustaceans, etc.) weigh 1,000 Mt C, far more than humans and all mammals. Mollusks, at 200 Mt C, weigh more than all mammals. Viruses, also weighing in at 200 Mt C, weigh more than all mammals.
And all that is still a tiny fraction of what biomass really is. Archaea (a type of microbe separate from viruses and bacteria, which you might not even have heard of) weigh 7,000 Mt C. Bacteria weigh 70,000 Mt C. And then there are plants. Plants, which we think of as just food for us animals, weigh a total of 450,000 Mt C.
So, you can look down on lions, since we’re collectively so much bigger than they are. But in the grand circle of life, none of us hairy animals matter at all.
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