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I don't know what to do with these numbers. I can relate to our ocean in some way, 2 times, 5 times, maybe 10 times the amount of water but higher numbers are too much for me.

They should just use liter instead.

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Earth holds about 1.26x10^21 liters (source: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophys...). So 140 trillion times that would be 1.764x10^35, or about 176 decillion liters.

I don't know what to do with these numbers either.

Given that the difference between our calculations is a result of the margin of error in determining the Earth's ocean's volume, I wonder what the margin of error is for NASA's measurement.

1.918 * 10^35 cubic liters [1]

[1] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml

Can anyone come up with a good comparison for this? A sphere the size of Mercury's orbit is an order too large (~ 1.4e36L according to Wolfram Alpha).

Edit: Of course Mercury's orbit isn't spherical, but we're talking ballpark here :P

I like the idea of using Mercury's orbit as a comparison. Some more fodder:

Just over 13,583,569.4 times the volume of the Sun. [2]

[2] http://www.smartconversion.com/otherInfo/Volume_of_planets_a...

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