How much does the earth weigh?

Wife was questioning me with some suspicion about how come I needed to buy 3 bags of gravel for today's project.

I told her that the ground has a tendency to just swallow things up. I made the point about a path that my dad had built, just a short path, where after the hardcore layer, he'd order half a tonne of gravel and sand to knit it together.

That got me to thinking, how much does the whole earth weigh? I know when I dig bits of it it is quite heavy.

Apparently it is very heavy indeed. Its about 600 quintillion tons. That's a lot. Written down in numbers it looks like this: 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

 

This was the first calc for the Earths weight from G in about 1800 by Cavendish , very clever the early scientists. No Wikipedia in them days !
Mass (1024 kg) 5.9736
Volume (1010 km3) 108.321
Volume is above in case you wanted to work out how many 22kg bags of gravel = 1 earth !

 

I just turned my scales upside down to weigh it and it's only 800 grammes.

 

1lb = 0.453592kg - don't know if that helps

 

Will it be even heavier once you lay your 3 bags of gravel?
You'd better ask OH Clueless - you don't want to be wrong

 

You weigh less when the Moon is directly above you.

 

So what happerns when there is a full or new moon and is aligned with the Earth and the Sun, you have two gravitational pulls, pulling against one another

 

Better still, when there's a solar eclipse, if you time it exactly right when the sun and the moon are working together against the earth, if you choose the exactly correct moment to jump up in the air as hard as you can, you can actually fall off earth altogether. But before we report this to NASA, there's a slight problem. The effect only last for a few milliseconds, and then the alignment is broken and once again Earth is strong enough to keep you. The net result is that you will leave the ground briefly, but then you'll come back down again a moment later.

 

So who is going to do the space jump in reverse

 

I'm not taking any chances, next time I jump under those conditions, i'm holding onto a rope