Lake Tea

What if we were to dump all the tea in the world into the Great Lakes? How strong, compared to a regular cup of tea, would the lake tea be?

Alex Burman

Weak, bordering on homeopathic.

The standard cup of tea, as described by the International Organization for Standardization in ISO 3103, contains two grams of tea per 100 mL of water.[1] The Great Lakes have a volume of about 22,600 cubic kilometers, which means we would need about 450 billion tons of tea to reach proper strength.

According to the Tea Board of India, one year's global tea harvest totals only about 4.8 million tons,[2] only 1/100,000th of what we'd require to make Great Lake Tea. If we dumped those 4.8 million tons into the lakes, the resulting tea would be about as strong as if we'd dripped two drops of tea in a bathtub.[3] Proper bathtub tea, of course, requires one 3-kg bag.

For better lake tea, we should find a lake with a volume of 240 million cubic meters (0.24 cubic kilometers).

Wular Lake in Kashmir is one candidate. Its volume varies with the seasons, but during the winter it's just about exactly the right size.[4] India is the world's second-largest tea producer, so it's also conveniently located.

Ullswater, in the UK's Lake District, is another great candidate. With a relatively stable year-round volume of about 0.23 cubic kilometers, it would be an excellent site for brewing a global cup of tea.

Of course, while neither Wular Lake or Ullswater has ever been used as a giant teakettle, something like this was—famously—attempted in my own backyard in Boston. In 1773, a group of colonists disguised as American Indians[5]boarded three British ships and threw the cargo of tea—around 44 tons of it—into Boston Harbor to protest British-run tax policy.

Boston Harbor has a volume of about 0.44 cubic kilometers, which means that the "tea" brewed in 1773 would have been even more dilute than our Great Lakes tea. The harbor is also somewhat larger[6] than Wular Lake or Ullswater, so all the tea in the world would still make Boston Harbor slightly too weak.

There's another problem: Heat. If you wanted to make tea from a lake, such as Ullswater or Wular Lake, you'd have to heat the water up. Is that even possible?

There's clearly enough stored energy in the world to do it. After all, we presumably heat that amount of water for tea every year already; we just do it in small batches around the world.

To heat up Ullswater to 80°C[7] would take 6.6×1016 joules of energy—about 20 days worth of British electricity consumption. which is roughly what would be released if you dropped a water bottle full of antimatter in the lake.

Asking Britain to go without electricity for 20 days just to fill one of their lakes with tea seems like it might be a hard sell. Fortunately, there's an easier solution.

Boiling Lake in Dominica is a volcanic lake about 60 meters across. Its temperature varies, but it's often near boiling at the edges and vigorously boiling in the center. Measuring the depth of the lake is difficult, so it's hard to get an estimate of the total volume.

Frying Pan Lake in New Zealand, on the other hand, is the largest hot lake in the world. It has a volume of about 200,000 m³, and an average temperature of around 50°C—not quite hot enough for tea, but much closer than Ullswater or Wular Lake.

New Zealanders consume about 600 grams of tea per person,[8] for a total of 2,700 tons of tea. If they waited until Frying Pan Lake got particularly hot, then dunked it all in at once ...

... they could brew a year's worth of tea in minutes.

T-Rex Calories

If a T-rex were released in New York City, how many humans/day would it need to consume to get its needed calorie intake?

Tony Schmitz

About half of an adult, or one ten-year old child:

Tyrannosaurus rex weighed about as much as an elephant.[1]

No one is totally sure what dinosaur metabolism looked like, but the best guesses for how much food T-rex ate seem to cluster around 40,000 calories per day.[2]

If we assume dinosaurs had metabolisms similar to today's mammals, they'd eat a lot more than 40,000 calories each day. But the current thinking is that while dinosaurs were more active (loosely speaking, "warm-blooded") than modern snakes and lizards, very large dinosaurs probably had metabolisms that more closely resembled komodo dragons than elephants and tigers.[3]

Next, we need to know how many calories are in a human. This number is helpfully provided, by Dinosaur Comics author Ryan North, on this wonderful t-shirt. Ryan's shirt tells us that an 80-kg human contains about 110,000 calories of energy.

Therefore, a T-rex would need to consume a human every two days or so.[4] The city of New York had 239,736 births in 2011, which could support a population of about 1,000 tyrannosaurs. However, this ignores immigration—and, more importantly, emigration, which would probably increase substantially in this scenario.

The 33,000 McDonald's restaurants worldwide sell something like 15 billion hamburger patties per year,[5] for an average of 1,245 burgers per restaurant per day. 1,245 burgers is about 600,000 calories, which means that each T-rex only needs about 80 hamburgers per day to survive, and one McDonald's could support over a dozen tyrannosaurs on hamburgers alone.

Ands if you live in New York, and you see a T-rex, don't worry. You don't have to choose a friend to sacrifice; just order 80 burgers instead.

And then if the T-rex goes for your friend anyway, hey, you have 80 burgers.

Growth Rate

What height would humans reach if we kept growing through our whole development period (i.e. till late teens/early twenties) at the same pace as we do during our first month?

Maria

Tall.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the average newborn's height (length) is approximately 0.5 meters,[1] or a quarter of the diameter of the Death Star thermal exhaust port.

From this initial height of 0.5 meters, they grow to about 1.5 or 2.0 meters:

Babies grow fastest right after they're born. During their first month, infants grow about 4.4 centimeters, ten times their growth rate during their early teenage years.

In Maria's scenario, this growth rate continues until about age 20:

Let's follow that child's growth over the years.

By its first birthday, the baby would be a meter long:

At 2 years and 3 months, the kid would reach 169 centimeters (5'7"), the average adult height in the US.

By age 3, we'd have a 2.08 meter (6'10") toddler, taller than Darth Vader ...

... and much taller than Yoda:

By age 4, the child would be nearly nine feet tall, able to dunk a basketball without jumping.[2]

A few months later, the kid would surpass Robert Wadlow to become the tallest human in history.

At age 5, the child would be π meters tall (10'4"):

At age 7, the child would be 4.2 meters tall, able to stare down a T-rex:

By age 10, the child would be 5.8 meters tall (19 feet). If we assume these giants are proportioned like adult humans, this kid would weigh over a metric ton.

Actual humans wouldn't be able to grow to such heights. Thanks to the square-cube law, our bones would be too thin to support our weight and our hearts would be unable to pump blood around our bodies. Even breathing would be difficult; we might be able to position ourselves to keep our airways opened, but to breathe in a lungful of air would require very high airflow rates; we'd experience tornado winds all the way down our airways.

Our giant would reach a final height of between 10 and 12 meters, assuming growth tapered off around age 20. At that height, they'd be able to comfortably dunk a basketball while keeping one hand on the court outside the three-point line.[3]

In addition to the insurmountable health problems, someone with this rapid growth rate would face another hardship.

To ride roller coasters, you have to be above a certain minimum height. However, they generally also have amaximum height.

Bizarro, a coaster at Six Flags New England, has a minimum height of 137 cm (4'6") and a maximum height of 193 cm (6'4"). Our child would be tall enough to ride Bizarro at age 2 ... and too tall by age 3. Their coaster-riding window would last only 387 days.

It's a sad truth: Roller coasters just aren't for everyone.