[PhasmaFelis]

It's amazing how many words he spends saying "this large body of water is really quite large." I mean:

> The official NASA news release describes the amount of water as "140 trillion times all the water in the world’s oceans," which isn’t particularly helpful, except if you think about it like this.

> That one cloud of newly discovered space water vapor could supply 140 trillion planets that are just as wet as Earth is.

Oh, so that's what that means! Gosh!

[GotAnyMegadeth]

I think the line underneath was better

"The new cloud of water is enough to supply 28 galaxies with water."

[fridek]

Replacing "140 trillion times the total water on Earth" with "enough to supply an entire planet's worth of water for every person on earth, 20,000 times over." wasn't a particularly good idea.

[x5n1]

I like 140 trillion earths figure, that's pretty unimaginable. 20,000 not so much.

[nutbutter]

I'm not satisfied till I see it measured in toilet flushes.

[logfromblammo]

That number would be too large to fit in an ordinary person's brain. Let's instead continually flush all the toilets in Yankee Stadium twice per minute, to see how many years you could continue to do that. Still too big. Continually flush all the toilets on Earth twice a minute instead.

So let's see... 1.335e21 L per ocean, 1.4e14 oceans per space cloud, ~6 L per flush, 1051898.4 flushes per toilet per Gregorian year, ~1.4e9 toilets on Earth.

You could flush all the flush toilets currently installed on Earth, continuously, twice per minute, for 2.1e19 years.

Still too big. That's 1.5 billion times the age of the universe. No one can truly grasp that magnitude. Let's multiply the number of Earths and try to fix the time at the approximate age of the Earth. So, divide by 4.5e9 years... There we go.

You could continually flush all the currently installed flush toilets on Earth twice a minute over the entire history of the planet, on 4.7 billion identical Earths!

Finally! A completely meaningless number that everyone can understand! ~