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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

Also.. the largest sphere has a radius of about 92 miles. It reaches to the edge of the atmosphere, and about 1/3 of the way to low earth orbit.

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> The largest sphere represents all of Earth's water. Its diameter is about 860 miles

Should be a radius of 430 miles, no?

The image is very non-intuitive, IMO, because it's making the water appear so small compared to the entire planet (which, duh, obviously the water is only part of earth), but also drawing the planet that small really hides how friggin big the earth is!

Yes. The fresh-water lakes and rivers sphere definitely does not look like it could fill the Great Lakes next to it. I am not saying it doesn't, I'm just saying it doesn't look like it could.

It does look very small in comparison to say Lake Michigan but most lakes are very thin. Lake Michigan is about 500km by 200km but only .085km(85m) average depth.

Average depth of Lake Michigan is around 300 feet. Longest dimension is about 300 miles. If you drew a map of Lake Michigan on a sheet of letter-sized paper, the paper would be thicker than the average depth of water.

Helped for me to compare to the moon. The water sphere has less than half the radius of the moon (~1080 miles). Think that’s roughly 7-8% of the moon’s volume if it were a perfect sphere.

I thought the border with space is generally (and arbitrarily) said to be the Kármán Line, at 100 km / 62.1 mi. I'm not nitpicking, just curious about other definitions.

Also, I thought LEO typically begins around 180 km / 112 mi.

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