Go back with me to middle school. You’re standing next to the whiteboard and nobody is watching. You look down and see a row of beautifully colored dry-erase markers. What do you do?
The answer is obviously making the longest dry-erase marker sword you possibly could before it either broke, or you got caught.
But now that I’ve grown up, and now that I like to do ridiculous and needless math, I’ve made some fun calculations.
Observe:
How many Expo markers, stacked sword style, are needed to wrap around the circumference of the Earth?
A lot.
One Expo marker is 12 cm long. I know this because I walked into one of the school classrooms at the school I work at, found a ruler, found an Expo marker, measured, and walked out. I’m sure all of the students in that Life Skills class were highly confused.
The very tip of the cap that you insert into the bottom of the next Expo marker is .5 cm long. This is important because we will take .5 cm off of the total length of each Expo marker. This is because, when you stack Expo markers sword style, they aren’t the full 12 cm. There is a small portion of each marker that intersects the next marker, making them effectively .5 cm shorter. This doesn’t seem like a lot, but when we are dealing with the sheer amount of Expo markers that we are, every little bit makes a huge difference.
So for our calculations, we will use the measurement of 11.5 cm for each marker. Or to make future calculations a bit easier, .000115 km per marker.
The Earth has a circumference of 40,075 km (Sharp, 2018).
And so with a basic mathematical calculation (40,075 / .000115), we find that it would take 348,478,261 Expo markers, stacked sword style, to wrap around the circumference of the Earth (rounded to the nearest whole marker).
Like I said, a lot.
What if we raised the markers 10 feet off of the ground? How many more markers would we need?
The answer may surprise you. Another million? Several million?
Nope. Only about 160 more markers.
That’s it.
Due to some fun geometry and delicious Pi, the answer is a relatively tiny, 160 more markers.
What if we raised the markers into geostationary orbit? How many markers would we need?
Geostationary orbit is a specific orbit around the Earth that the objects in that orbit appear motionless in the sky when viewed from Earth. This orbit is 35,786 km above the Earth’s equator (Wikipedia, 2021).
So to stretch the length of this orbit with an Expo sword, we would need 2,304,347,827 Expo markers (rounded to the nearest whole marker).
And with this, we can finally channel our inner Beyonce and show our planet how much we like it, by putting a ring on Earth.
Stay Salty
Sweet ‘n Salty: We are living in such a big world with so many things going on at the moment that many of us often feel lost or insignificant. But when you feel like this, think of the Expo Sword around the equator. When we wanted to raise the height of the markers, it didn’t take but just a few extra markers to show a significant change. So if you ever feel small or insignificant, just know that even the smallest of changes can raise your situation to a whole other level. Keep pushing, you got this!
Have you noticed my URL? It's sad, isn't it? I'd love to fix that, but can't do that on my own! So if you would like to help me get a proper URL, feel free to click the link below! I would highly appreciate it! Stay Salty!
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