Robot Claw – Page 242 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

The Stuff That Had Anakin Panicking

December 30, 2019

I went for a big long walk today along the beaches, and I thought many things. One of those things – and it’s something I’ve thought before – was just how many sand grains are actually on this beach?

Let’s work it out.

That’s Newcastle beach. It’s gently curved, 650 meters long and as best I can estimate using satellite photos, has about 140 feet (~42.7 metres) of sand width. Estimating the depth of the sand is difficult, so I’ll go with a likely conservative average of 2 metres.

Doing the math gives a volume of sand of approximately 55,500 cubic metres. However all this volume isn’t occupied with sand, since there’s gaps between the grains. To work out the actual volume of sand the packing constant (ie what percent of the volume is the media of interest) is needed.

This is difficult to calculate. In fact it’s very difficult since the grains are of varying size and shape. So as an estimate I’ll assume they are spheres (they’re not) and that the sand is mostly settled which gives a value of about 74%

So that gives us about 41,000 cubic metres of sand grains.

Now to calculate how many discrete grains. Once again approximations are needed. The sand on Newcastle beach is very fine but not silt-like, so we’ll use the industrial classification of ‘fine sand’ and treat each grain as a cube with sides 0.25 millimetres.

Diving the total volume by the volume of a single grain gives us a final answer: I estimate there are at least 2.624 quadrillion grains of sand in Newcastle Beach.

To put that into perspective, that’s about 340,000 grains for everyone on Earth, which would fill a volume about as big as a golf ball. So yes, everyone on earth could easily take a handful of sand from just Newcastle Beach without it running out. In fact there’d likely be a lot left over since I probably overestimated sand grain and underestimated depth.

And that’s just one beach. Australia has over 10,000 of them 🙂

(Thanks AW for the title pun…)

Australien

December 27, 2019

Drive about 90 minutes south of Newcastle to Woy Woy road heading south out of Kariong. You’ll see a dirt patch on the east side where you can park, and this sign at the head of a dusty road into the bush:

Walk the path/road about ten minutes, ignoring the bugs and the heat. When you see a second smaller path veering into the bush on the left take it. The surroundings look a bit like this:

Walk a while along the increasingly disappearing path until you see the biggest tree in Australia:

At this tree scramble up the boulders at the edge of an old escarpment, ignoring the snakes and wombats. Marvel at the water-eroded rocks as you climb around them, and slowly circle around some car-sized rocks watching your footing:

Assuming you’re not yet lost – and yesterday Sue and I were for a while – you’ll end up in this narrow gap between two giant rocks:

Look closely at the walls behind sue. Do you see them? Here’s a closer look:

Behold! Incontrovertible evidence that Australia was visited by Egyptians in antiquity. There are the so-called ‘Gosford Glyphs’, discovered in 1975 and dating to ~~the 1920s when Aussie soldiers returning from WW1 carved them~~ about 5000 B.C. Scholars ~~scoff~~ marvel at the fact that hieroglyphs from many different eras of Egyptian history – and some never seen in Egypt – are all gathered in this one spot, not to mention how the carvings seem to have been done with modern tools, as if the carvers ~~did it only a few decades ago~~ had access to technology beyond their time.

Some say they are even evidence of aliens! The same aliens that made the pyramids, it is suggested, hopped over to this remote spot in the Australian outback and graffitied a few rocks before (no doubt) flying home. It’s a strange story to be true, but difficult to disprove.

I’ve brought you many Australian sights on the blog over the years. But can I ever top actual evidence of Aliens? After today’s adventure, nothing would surprise me…