By “smoothing out” I mean flattening all mountains and filling all trenches so that the entire earth has exactly the same radius everwhere. Water naturally spreads out equally on such a surface, so how high would the water level be?

  • Kairos@lemmy.today
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    2 days ago

    https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceanwater.html

    So there’s 332,519,000 cubic miles of water on the planet approxomately

    The earth has a radius of 3,950 miles

    That leaves a surface area of 4 * pi * r2 = 196,066,797 square miles.

    332 miles3 / 196 miles2 = ~1.7 miles I know I’m supposed to do 3D calculus but I don’t want to do that right now and the difference in radius is negligible,

      • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
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        2 days ago

        Ahaha. All the people from the US downvoting this 🤦‍♂️ So many solutions to questions like this a just easier and more intuitive in metric. Tec diving is just hilarious in imperial units

        • Successful_Try543@feddit.org
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          2 days ago

          I’m fine with imperial units, as long as somebody stays in one unit system and doesn’t mix miles, yards, feet and inches, or square miles and acres, etc.

          • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
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            2 days ago

            Yeah, I’m fluent in what you listed too… but everything you listed is just meters in metric so that’s five-ish conversions to needlessly need to know. And if you start using equations in then standard units play up a lot like when diving with imperial units you measure depth in feet but pressure in pounds per square inch so you have an awkward feet to inch right there and the equations are just more complicated. Anything beside the simple gets compounding unit conversions. And the countries left in the world that only use imperial are the US, Myanmar and Liberia.

        • Kairos@lemmy.today
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          2 days ago

          Imperial units are fine. They have rational conversion ratios between them and standard metric. I was in bed at the time and miles is what I got from search results.

          • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
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            2 days ago

            Sure, they’re great for people chatting casually in the US, Myanmar and Liberia but even there they still add unnecessary complexity with scientific or engineering applications