eustacetilley wrote:
Just what does one do with that many shoes?

eustacetilley wrote:


Some claim that "Dinosaurs" did not go extinct; they evolved, as usual, or if one prefers, as planned.
They taste just like chicken.

Some math fun:
Say 7 Billion People on Earth, and each weighs 50Kg. (Note that the last billion are all under the age of ~14.)
That's ~350 Billion Kilograms, which seems like a lot. But it isn't really.
Put them all through a blender, and you have roughly 350 Billion liters of Human Soup.
That's roughly 350 Million cubic meters, or a cube ~700 meters per side.
Housing such a cube poses difficulties, leakage being one of the worst, but it is not insoluble, and there isn't any need really.
The Grand Canyon gets up to 1800 Meters deep, so just find a likely corner, and pour it all in. Once Gravity does its job, all that is left is a rather large pink stain in one corner.

The numbers are pretty big still, so let's just take Manhattan, which has a permanent population of around 1.6 Million. (This has been stable for decades.) New Yorkers can get fairly large, so let's bump up the weight to 70KG per Manhattanite.
~112 Million Kilos, ~112 Million Liters, ~112,000 Cubic Meters. A cube a bit less than 50 meters to a side.
The Empire State Building is around a Million cubic meters, so if one liquifies the population of Manhattan, and pours it into the Empire State Building, it would reach the 12th story, give or take a story or two.

These numbers don't take into account one critical factor- Shoes.

Assuming that half the World population is wearing shoes just before Liquefaction, that means that there will be around 7 billion shoes to deal with.
Just what does one do with that many shoes?

Eustace

mrlynn wrote:
[quote=davester]
[quote=mrlynn]
I have often wondered whether, had not the dinosaurs been wiped out c. 65 million years ago, they might have evolved into creatures with big-enough brains to be called human-like. Many walked on two legs, with small arms that could have developed opposable thumbs. Some of them may have had binocular vision, not unlike ours. It's interesting to speculate whether their non-mammalian brains might have developed very different kinds of symbology (language, music, art), etc, or for that matter, any at all.

/Mr Lynn

davester wrote:
[quote=Article Accelerator]
Beyond that, h o m o sapiens possesses certain characteristics that appear to be absolutely unique, e.g. time sense (both literal and existential), symbology and modelling, and music. None of those is a mere extension of "intelligence." We are also the only known species that cooks its food, a capability critical to efficient caloric intake and intensive exploitation of the environment. Without cooking, we likely could not have supported our brains and brain evolution.

The appearance of homo sapiens in the fossil record does not appear to coincide with the huge intellectual leap that begat us civilization. That leap came fairly late in the reign of homo sapiens.

Carnos Jax wrote:
P.S. - Its easy to forget that what we've talked about are the vertebrates. Cephalopods (octopus, squid) humble me with the intelligence they show in their short lives. I wonder what they would amount to if they had longer lives.

PeterB wrote:
[quote=Carnos Jax]
P.S. - Its easy to forget that what we've talked about are the vertebrates. Cephalopods (octopus, squid) humble me with the intelligence they show in their short lives. I wonder what they would amount to if they had longer lives.

Scientific American wrote:
Carl Sagan speculated about intelligent dinosaurs in The Dragons of Eden (1977) and posed the question: what if non-avialan dinosaurs hadn’t become extinct? If Cretaceous forms were already so ‘smart’, what would have happened given another 60-odd million years of evolution?