What if the Moon were made of cheese….and you ate it?
This lunchtime I stumbled across the following tweet by GrrlScientist
“mmm, cheese! RT @LookMaNoFans How many Calories would a Moon made of cheese be, you ask? A made-of-manchego Moon = 285 septillion Calories.”
A septillion is 10^24 so that’s a lot of calories! Naturally, I wanted to check the facts so I asked Wolfram Alpha which, sadly, didn’t have the specifics on manchego cheese so I substituted monterey cheese to get a result of 8.5*10^25 calories. This disagrees with the tweet but it’s the figure I’m going to go with for now.
Since I am into running, I wondered how far I’d have to run to burn that many calories. Using Wolfram Alpha’s running calorie calculator I found out that at a pace of 8 minutes per mile I would need to run 0.675 miles to burn 85 calories (assuming average body weight*) so would need to run 6.75*10^24 miles (almost 115 billion light years) to burn off the calories contained in a moon made of monteray cheese. That’s larger than the diameter of the observable universe!
*Obviously, if you ate the moon then you would weigh slightly more than average so this is a gross over-simplification.
IIRC, the RT was of Neil Tyson’s tweet, and he usually has his facts in a row. Or is that ducks?
The disagreement is around a factor of 3. Would be interesting to find out what the cause of that disagreement is.
some cheeses has a higher fat content than others … than may account for the discrepancy.
Interesting post. When I was young, I actually thought that the moon was a big ball of cheese and the dark spots on it are mouse holes =) Thanks for sharing, this post tickled my imagination a bit