The "ask a silly question, get a sensible answer" thread

Curio

Curio

Curio

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OK, this might fail miserably, but we have a wide selection of brainy people in various fields on GD, so it might work out...

Think of some silly hypothetical question, and let’s see if we can come up with a sensible and valid stab at the answer.

I’ll start. If the Pacific Ocean had a standard bath/sink plug hole installed on the sea bed, and one was to pull the plug, how long would it take for the ocean to drain completely? You must show your working. Extra points for diagrams, charts or graphs!

Obviously ignore the various problems with this question – it’s silly and hypothetical, remember? :)

Over to you. <fingers crossed>
 
It would have to drain all the water in the world considering 99% of it is linked somehow. Only isolated lakes won't drain
 
Have we built hypothetical walls around the Pacific? If not, all the other oceans/rivers/seas (excluding land locked) will also drain down your plug hole.
 
I can't find any data for the volumetric flow rate of a plug hole but according to this site, the average flow rate of a US tap is 3 gallons (13.63 litres) per minute or 0.227 litres per second.

Assuming with the plug out, a plug hole can cope with this flow rate without filling the sink I'm going to use it as a basis.

According to Wiki the Pacific contains 2.8 billion cubic litres of water. I'm assuming US billion of 1,000 x 1 million:

That's 2.1952 e+28 litres of water.

Divid by 0.227 litres per second and I get 9.6704846 e+28 seconds.

Thats:
1.6117474 e+27 Minutes
2.6862457 e+25 Hours
1.119269 e+24 Days
3.0664904 e+21 Years
3.0664904 e+15 Million Years

I'm sure someone will come along and defunct my calculations but I'm really not very good at maths.
 
Gallons of water in the sea: 326,000,000,000,000,000,000
Bath tubs hold about 50 gallons
And empty in lets say 5 mins.
Flow rate of a plug hole: 10 gallons/min

326x10^18 / 10 = 326x10^17 minutes.

Or

6.19832236 × 10^10 millenia. or 60 billion billion years.

Something like that.
 
thats a pretty silly question but i start it off

first got to calculate the amount of water in the pacific ocean

now there is around 70 million cubic miles of water in pacific alone

using area to volume calculations = to around

187 quintillion gallons or 187,189,915,062 billion gallons

now to calculate how long that much amount of water would take to pass through a plug hole we need the flow rate of a standard plug hole.

[edit] damn allot of replies while i were calculating

i got a feeling its going to be many million if not billions of years
 
Last edited:
Irish_Tom said:
I can't find any data for the volumetric flow rate of a plug hole but according to this site, the average flow rate of a US tap is 3 gallons (13.63 litres) per minute or 0.227 litres per second.

Assuming with the plug out, a plug hole can cope with this flow rate without filling the sink I'm going to use it as a basis.

According to Wiki the Pacific contains 2.8 billion cubic litres of water. I'm assuming US billion of 1,000 x 1 million:

That's 2.1952 e+28 litres of water.

Divid by 0.227 litres per second and I get 9.6704846 e+28 seconds.

Thats:
1.6117474 e+27 Minutes
2.6862457 e+25 Hours
1.119269 e+24 Days
3.0664904 e+21 Years
3.0664904 e+15 Million Years

I'm sure someone will come along and defunct my calculations but I'm really not very good at maths.
Click to expand...

flow rate is pressure specific.

One should calculate pressure as a function of ocean surface height. This would define the flow rate (it is not constant).
 
Tom & Blood - excellent stuff. That's what I'm looking for.

The rest of you.....did you not read the words "silly hypothetical"? :D Of course there are all sorts of problems with the question......you're just supposed to ignore them as the above two posters did :)

Gambisk.....that's not getting into the spirit of things :(

Come on GD!
 
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