Congratulations to Garystar who came up with just about the same number we did for Friday's Fermi Problem soultion! Garystar, please send us your mailing address to physicscentral@aps.org and we'll send you a prize package of some Physics Central goodies!
As a reminder, on Friday I posed a Settlements in Space Fermi problem based on the painting below of a fictional space station called the Stanford Torus. By guessing the dimensions of the station in the painting below, how many of these torus-shaped space stations would we need to house all of the people on Earth? Here's the solution:
[Rick Guidice's painting of the Stanford Torus space station was commissioned by NASA in the 1970s. Think you'd like to live there? Photo credit: NASA]
After eyeballing Rick Guidice's painting above, I assumed the diameter of the entire Stanford Torus space station was 1 km while the diameter of the interior of the 'doughnut' was 50 m. Since people and houses are seen only o…
As a reminder, on Friday I posed a Settlements in Space Fermi problem based on the painting below of a fictional space station called the Stanford Torus. By guessing the dimensions of the station in the painting below, how many of these torus-shaped space stations would we need to house all of the people on Earth? Here's the solution:
[Rick Guidice's painting of the Stanford Torus space station was commissioned by NASA in the 1970s. Think you'd like to live there? Photo credit: NASA]
After eyeballing Rick Guidice's painting above, I assumed the diameter of the entire Stanford Torus space station was 1 km while the diameter of the interior of the 'doughnut' was 50 m. Since people and houses are seen only o…