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Comment by Temporary_31337 | Hacker News Reader

1M kilograms so 1 gigagram or 1000 tonnes or about ten whales.

Thanks. I got a couple whales of undetermined species in my aquarium and handle them daily to give them a good scrubbing. That comparison gave me some perspective.

that subterranean aquarium under the football pitch?

If we took 1000 tonnes of feathers, how many football pitches could be covered in them?

You didn't specify to what depth, though:

- With goose down having a density of 0.00286 g/cm^3.[1]

- The area of a football pitch being roughly 0.714 hectares.[2]

You could cover one football pitch to a depth of nearly 50 meters:

  You have:  (1000 tonnes / (0.00286 g/cm^3)) / 0.714 hectare
  You want: m
   * 48.970637
   / 0.0204204

(Using GNU Units.)

If you spread the feathers to a depth of 1 cm, you'd get roughly 5,000x more coverage, or 5,000 football pitches. Give or take.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Jing Gao, Weidong Yu, & Ning Pan. (2007). Structures and Properties of the Goose Down as a Material for Thermal Insulation. Textile Research Journal, 77(8), 617–626. doi:10.1177/0040517507079408 <https://sci-hub.ru/10.1177/0040517507079408> p. 624.

2. Football Pitch, Wikipedia, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch>

>You could cover one football pitch to a depth of nearly 50 meters

I feel like there's a physics joke in here, assuming weightless feathers piled on a football stadium in outer space ;)

Something in that joke would of course have to be spherical.

Then there's the prospect of a goose-down singularity. The ultimate soft-landing black hole.

It's a spherical football court, as is usual in space.

Still can't intuitively grasp it.

How many football fields is it?

How many Rhode Islands?

Depends on how deep you dig.

How many busses???

About 146 assuming a bus weighs about 3.5 giraffes.

32 or 64-bit?

About 3 football fields

American or normal?

A bus typically weights around 20-40 tonnes depending on the model. So 25-50 busses.

~7.5 tonnes for a bus that seats ~70 people, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEC_Routemaster

In EU we say 1000 tonnes, but i guess that this does not sound impressive enough for a newspaper.

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