posted
Pennies. Ten Billion pennies. I'd have them dumped in my backyard and swim in them. It'd be fun, if a little impractical.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
That would be nearly a million gallons of pennies, and that's assuming relatively perfect packing. Probably closer to 1.5 million when you dumped them out.
You could cover an acre about a meter deep.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Using the 282,000 number for a 55 gallon drum, you get about 5127. At perfect packing, you'd get about 470,000 in the drum, so about 8545 in a gallon.
So fugu's answer to the volume it would take is a minimum - there'd likely be even deeper. This site gives the result 7771 pennies per gallon.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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Then I let google do various calculations for me; the amount of extra space if they weren't perfectly packed was guesstimated by me.
As for how many pennies in a gallon, that same page also has this to say on the subject: 7771, if absolutely perfectly packed.
I had arrived at the nearly a million gallons by using the .36 cc volume of the penny. Using the more correct .35 cc volume and asking google, we get 924 602.179 US gallons ( http://tinyurl.com/7khly . . . and I have an intelligent browser that splits overlong URLs up on the display ), or about 10 815 per gallon.
But using the optimal packing number for a gallon, we find that ten billion pennies would take up many more gallons, about 1 286 835.67 , which is 4 871.20293 cubic meters. At one meter deep, that would cover 1.20370046 acres, and this is at optimal packing. With a suboptimal packing resulting from dumping them, I wouldn't be surprised if we hit 1.5 or more acres at one meter deep.
quote:Originally posted by ricree101: Pennies. Ten Billion pennies. I'd have them dumped in my backyard and swim in them. It'd be fun, if a little impractical.
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Bwahahahah! Thanks to my widescreen computer, the URL does not force me to scroll horizontally, as it would have on my old computer. Victory is mine!
Troubador, I could invest the $100 million until I made $200,000 in interest, and then go to the moon and on Virgin Galactic.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:Current estimates by the U.S. Mint place the number of pennies in circulation at around 140 billion. Others have estimated as many as 200 billion currently circulating. Since the first penny was minted in 1787, until present-day, over 300 billion pennies have been minted in the United States. So that leaves about 100 billion pennies that have been retired by the Mint, lost down sewer drains, stored in jars, smashed by trains, or collected by numismatists in the past 200 years.
posted
I'd buy chips twice as often, and donate some to charity. I'd invest enough in business for a secure future, and hire someone to post my posts on Hatrack.
No, wait, drop the last one. I'd buy Orson Scott Card and have him write me books.
Posts: 2978 | Registered: Oct 2004
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theamazeeaz MUST be from Canada, since whenever we visit Vancouver we have to buy a box of "Kraft Dinner" but we say it "Kraft Dinn-AH" to match the local accent.
As for me, I'd buy a sandwich. Maybe something forty stories tall. If not that, then I'd pay rent to live inside Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride...kick the skeleton out of his money-draped bed and wave at the tourists, hang out in the burning village, and sing off-key shanties all day.
Hey, a boy has to have his dreams, right?
Posts: 325 | Registered: Dec 2004
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If I had 100 millon dollars, I'd buy my own opera house and I'd buy Neopets so I could shut down the abominable site. I'd also arrange a meeting with all my favourite famous people and have dinner wit them at my own restaurant cruise with all glass bottom. I'd also do something about that dangerously-close-to-obsession attraction I have for Orlando Bloom...
Posts: 3389 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
So, any comments about the feasibility of the Russian Space Agency's plan to offer moon tourism? Will anybody actually pay $100 million, even if they are Bill Gates and want to claim the moon in the name of Microsoft?
Personally, I'm not sure the space agency is capable of delivering. Heck, I'm not sure NASA could make it back to the moon right now. Russia, so far as I know, hasn't had an active moon program since the '60s or '70s. Granted, the Soyuz was their moon vehicle, and those seem to be doing pretty well today (they haven't been grounded, and if one blew up recently, I haven't heard about it). But if Soyuz could get to the moon, why did the Soviet Union not bother? "Vell, ze capitalist pig-dogs got to ze moon first! Ve didn't vant to go anyvay! Ve ver just...making big rockets for...uh...peaceful purposes that don't include going to ze moon, yes! And vehr are zose nuuuu-cleee-arr wessels?" Somehow, I don't think so.
As it turns out, the N1 rockets that they were planning to launch (the equivalent of the Saturn V, it seems) kept failing, which is why they never went to the moon. But the article doesn't make it clear what's changed in the Russian space program.
I also think that many people, even if they could afford it, would consider a trip to the moon too risky (surely more risky than staying in earth orbit).
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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