I looked up the circumference of a football and it said about 70cm. As the moon is about 10 times the circumference of the earth away, that’d put the moon at 7m away.
You could calculate it more accurately, of course. But the relationship between earth’s circumference and the distance to the moon is roughly 1:10, purely by coincidence, making it easy to calculate an estimate when scaling earth up or down.
7 meters?
I looked up the circumference of a football and it said about 70cm. As the moon is about 10 times the circumference of the earth away, that’d put the moon at 7m away.
Diameter or circumference?
A 70cm diameter soccer ball (>2 ft across) would be kinda fun. Except headers the CTE would be even worse!
All Very true facts. I admit I was and am still taken aback by the measurement and extrapolation of linear distances using… circumference.
Yeah it’s a weird way to make the distances sound shorter than pi*(a measurement we all can visualize).
You could calculate it more accurately, of course. But the relationship between earth’s circumference and the distance to the moon is roughly 1:10, purely by coincidence, making it easy to calculate an estimate when scaling earth up or down.