How weight is the earth?

Answer 1

The Earth's mass is 5.9736 x 1024 kilograms. That, we can say with assurance.

It's not so easy to say what the Earth's weightis, because the weight of any mass

depends on what else is nearby. Most people have heard by now that a 200-pound man

weighs only 33.1 pounds on the Moon.

If you take one Earth mass, crunch it down somehow to the size of a Basketball,

and then set it down on the ground in your back yard, it weighs

13,169,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds.

If you take it to the moon and set it down on the ground there, it only weighs

2,179,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds up there.

Every time you take it to a different place, the weight changes.

Here's something cool to think about. I don't know how much you weigh, so I'll

tell you this one with me playing the leading role:

What if you take the Earth, in its present familiar almost-spherical shape, and

put it on me ? What would it weigh ?

That's a very easy question to answer. When I get on the bathroom scale to measure

my weight on Earth, I read 186 pounds. We know that the forces of gravity are equal

in both directions between two masses. So we can either immediately state the Earth's

weight on me, or if you prefer, I can measure it. I turn the bathroom scale over, so that

its feet point up at me and the numbers point down at the floor, and then I stand on it

again. The numbers then display the Earth's weight on me . . . 186 pounds, just as Newton

would have expected.

Answer 2

It isn't.