If money makes the world go round....

... How much should we shell out to the sun for its gravitational pull????

I've always heard that money makes the world go round... and ever since I was a little child I have suspected that this was a gross exaggeration of money's power... I would hear the words come out of a family members mouth in an effort to leave me with a little parable about the value of a dollar- hoping to inspire a desire to work hard in combination with the business mind to know how much my time was worth...but when processing the words as a little boy, I would imagine money getting up when everyone was sleeping and working together on some sort of magical rowing machine to get enough momentum going on the world to keep it spinning for the rest of the day....and then later, a little older and wiser - I would imagine businessmen behind huge desks making phone-calls to astronauts, who were spinning the world from outer-space on some sort of magical treadmill , and offering them wild amounts of cash to keep the world going for one more day... and then later, (or around the same time) superman was involved in the scheme....

Embarrassment will not allow me to mention the age that a sense of logic entered on the subject and I realized that 'Money makes the world go round' is a metaphor for - keeps business moving - and has very little to do with the actual movement of the earth (Let's just say, I shouldn't have been driving).

I am now positive (almost) that money has absolutely nothing to do with the world "going 'round". Not only that, whatever it is that DOES make the world go 'round, isn't man-made at all... it isn't money, or government, or religion, or guns ( or as I used to think - video games and the ice-cream man).

Recently it popped into my head 'well what if gravity (assuming thats what does it) DID require a certain amount of money to insure that the world would continue to go round?'... How much would that cost?

To start, gravitational pull is measured in Newtons..
-1 Newton is the amount of force that is needed to move a 1 kilogram object 1 meter per second squared (a force of about 0.2248 lb. object one foot per second).  But that will only push me slightly closer to the answer to my ridiculous question...I have to figure out how to convert Newtons into a unit of measurement that has a monetary value.

I decided to choose Kilowatts Per Hour (or kwh).. the measurement used in calculating the common electricity bill. For the purpose of simplicity we will say the Sun lives in the fine state of Virginia where the average price of one kwh in july of 2010 was 10.78 cents.

From the information I can find... I mean decipher, the sun exerts 3.5x1022 newtons of force on earth.
But Newtons alone are not convertible to kilowatt hours.

A Joule is the unit of measurement for the amount of energy exerted to move the object. Easily convertible to kilowatt hours!!!! GREAT! Who doesn't like easy, right?

Work = Force X Distance

So in order to continue with the illusion of precision we need a distance factor - which I found out, after hours of research, would be the distance of the earth's orbit.


General Consensus places that around 300 million km.


so ....here's the part where I poop myself and cuss alot....


(3.5x1022 newtons)x300000000km = 1,073,100,000,000,000 Joules...


1 Joule = 2.77777777777778E-07 Kilowatt Hours so consequently


1073100000000000 Joules = 298083333.3333333 Kilowatt Hours


Everyone still here? ok good.


298083333.3333333 Kilowatt Hours at 10.78 cents (or $ 0.1078) = 


$32,133,383.3 and thats per hour.


so our monthly bill to the sun would be - $23,472,935,155.60






Which is -


* a little over 1.6 % of our national deficit - 1.42 trillion
* Around the same amount that Goldman Sachs awarded in holiday bonuses in 2009
* Around the same as the estimated losses the 2010 oil spill created for the Gulf Coast States.
* The sun could buy Dracula's castle 170 times a month and still have money left over
** or build 70 Disney worlds a month.


Q: So what's a number like that translate to anually?


A: It's a lot of scrap...


$281,675,221,687.2 per year. - According to sources - that's a only 40,000,000,000 over the total amount of money spent on advertising in the U.S. for 2009... So, I think we should start paying up - aside from bringing a little bit of truth to an otherwise ridiculously conceited, and completely false cliche - less commercials would make t.v. easier to watch.


This is Perry Wheldun - thanks for popping by.