Bizzare Calculations About Heaven

[Dante]

Ok... I am in finals week and should therefore have no time for such a thing as this... but I couldn't help myself . I suddenly had a bizzare and uncontrollable curiosity/urge/science moment where I wanted to determine precisely what the physical charactistic size of Heaven was... well the city they talk about, not the planet it sits upon.... Amazingly this led itself to a gazzilion other calculations because... well... I'll be honest... I MAJORLY UNDERESTIMATED THE PROPORTIONS STATED IN THE BIBLE X_X!

Ahem... here are the calculations... my fun happy time with a Bible, a TI-89 Titanium and a conversion table from furlongs to feet and feet to meters.

According to Wikipedia (Link! ^_^):

A furlong in Roman times is roughly 660 feet (201.168 m).

From Revelations, the length width and height of the city of God is 12,000 furlongs

And therefore, the length of Heaven is roughly,

12,000 * 201 m = 2.41402E6 meters...

When I first saw this my eyes nearly popped out of my head... thats... thats HUGE! @_@ To give you a rough order of magnitude, the radius of the EARTH is 6.4E6 meters roughly. In fact the width of Heaven is roughly 37% of the radius of the EARTH! Mind you it has living space in the full three dimensions, so that means that the human population density, even for every person that ever lived would still be relatively small given the size!

Now of course... I couldn't just stop there... once I figured this out I had to try other crazy things... for instance if the streets are made of Gold... and its this size... that begs the question... How much does Heaven weigh... and err...

...

... Does it have it's own gravitational field? @_x

That's right, I decided to use the density of gold and assumed that Heaven was 1/10 gold... (the rest of the mass would be relatively negligable compared to the streets)... at which point I can find the following mass of Heaven... in kilograms.

Density of gold = 19,281 kg/m^3

M_Heaven = 19281 * (2.41402E6)^3 / 10 = 2.7E22 kg

Which is a little under half the mass of the moon!

Finally what we've all been "weighting" for! The gravitational acceleration of Heaven!

Now, I'm going to make an approximation for order of magnitudes sake that heaven is a sphere... even though its a cube... just to make my math easier. Then the equation for the acceleration towards the center of Heaven is!

acceleration_Heaven = (6.6E-11)*(2.7E22)/((2.41402E6/2)^2) = .3 m/s^2

That'll make a rather nice semi-slow elevator! They can stick on on each of the sides and then just let 'em go. They'll then oscillate back and forth from one side of Heaven to the other powered purely by gravitation forces!

Now... there are a lot of implications of this. Because while we may live on a planet that has a larger radius... we only occupy the first two dimensions in many cases, and leave much of the land unoccupied. For there to be any population density at all in Heaven given that it is a three dimensional city... that says something really big about the population... otherwise it will be very lonely up there.

By the way... its late and if anyone wants to check my algebra, poke my numbers, or smack around my equations... feel free to do so... for all I know I've spent too much time in finals week! But given how exciting this was I thought I'd share it with you.

-Pascal
(Revelation quote from Revelations- 21-16)

[Sammy Boy]

Hi there, if I understand what you're saying correctly, am I right in stating that you are interpreting the description of heaven found in Revelation in a literal / mathematical manner?

I ask because if that's the case, then it may become an issue of how one interprets Revelation, and that could lead to theological debates which is not allowed here.

I have no intention of debating this by the way, I just wanted to check that I understood your assumptions correctly...

Thanks.

[firestorm]

while im no math wiz I tried out what you were calculating to see for myself. I'm not sure if you did it the same way, but when I pulled up window calcultor and multiplied without rounding. I got 2414016m. jus thought I'd point that out.

[sharien chan]

XD this made me giggle...it's finals week for me too...so my brain is shot...

[minakichan]

Pascal, I... I...

I think I'm in love with you.

[firestorm]

Pascal, I... I...

I think I'm in love with you.

O-O I think that is about the most random thing I've ever seen on this website.... ok lol

[sharien chan]

O-O I think that is about the most random thing I've ever seen on this website.... ok lol

I somehow doubt that knowing this website...

[EricTheFred]

This puts me in mind somehow of my classmate back in middle school who calculated the speed of light in Furlongs per Fortnight and memorized it, just so he could pop up with that when the teacher asked, expecting the miles-per-second value.

By the way, the Furlong is a modern (well, semi-modern) measure. It sometimes is used to translate 'stade', a Graeco-roman measurment (and the origin of the word 'Stadium'.) A U.S. Customary (the system most people still call 'English') furlong is 1/8 of a mile (660 feet) but a Roman stade was closer to 625 feet, because the Roman mile was shorter... so you need to go back and recalculate now.

[Dante]

Hi there, if I understand what you're saying correctly, am I right in stating that you are interpreting the description of heaven found in Revelation in a literal / mathematical manner?

I ask because if that's the case, then it may become an issue of how one interprets Revelation, and that could lead to theological debates which is not allowed here.

I have no intention of debating this by the way, I just wanted to check that I understood your assumptions correctly...

Thanks.

No intentions of starting a debate over here either, really this is just a set of data and could be used for either side of any argument. If one wants to take Revelations literally its cool and if one doesn't its cool too, I'm just dropping in numbers and looked at what I got as a result. Whether I or anyone else agrees with the numbers is not the point... its just for fun.

while im no math wiz I tried out what you were calculating to see for myself. I'm not sure if you did it the same way, but when I pulled up window calcultor and multiplied without rounding. I got 2414016m. jus thought I'd point that out.

Yay someone confirms my calculations! (That's 2.4E6 as well)

Pascal, I... I...

I think I'm in love with you.

O_O Wow... you're the first girl to ever say that to me! WOOHOO!!! (Is distracted from finals )...

This puts me in mind somehow of my classmate back in middle school who calculated the speed of light in Furlongs per Fortnight and memorized it, just so he could pop up with that when the teacher asked, expecting the miles-per-second value.

LOL I was actually thinking of doing something crazy like that recently (Although I wanted to use the Smoot for the unit of length and something like the forescore for time(Forescore and seven years ago))

By the way, the Furlong is a modern (well, semi-modern) measure. It sometimes is used to translate 'stade', a Graeco-roman measurment (and the origin of the word 'Stadium'.) A U.S. Customary (the system most people still call 'English') furlong is 1/8 of a mile (660 feet) but a Roman stade was closer to 625 feet, because the Roman mile was shorter... so you need to go back and recalculate now.

I noticed that myself, its likely the earlier unit of 625 feet but this doesn't really change the orders of magnitude just some of the decimal values (Does make a difference though).

-Thanks for the cool replies everyone! (Is off to determine the total livable surface area in heaven if each floor had its own personal atmosphere )

[Prince Asbel]

Hm. It's a little interesting, but really, there is so much symbolism in Revelation that even though it gives specific measurements, I'm still left wondering what it means.

[sharien chan]

This puts me in mind somehow of my classmate back in middle school who calculated the speed of light in Furlongs per Fortnight and memorized it, just so he could pop up with that when the teacher asked, expecting the miles-per-second value.

That is awesome!

Kind of like when my Renassiance faire friends took F=MA and made it into a bizarre renaissance faire equation.

XDD makes me giggle.

[uc pseudonym]

Administrative note: everyone should take this thread in the following manner:

No intentions of starting a debate over here either, really this is just a set of data and could be used for either side of any argument. If one wants to take Revelations literally its cool and if one doesn't its cool too, I'm just dropping in numbers and looked at what I got as a result. Whether I or anyone else agrees with the numbers is not the point... its just for fun.

That aside, I found this a decent combination of interesting and funny.

[Warrior 4 Jesus]

The calculations make my head hurt but I have to say that's impressive work, Pascal.
You'll go far!

[Saj]

Pascal , you made my day. That is truly awesome. When i see you in heaven, I'm sure youre going to have a notebook in one hand and a measuring tape in the other.

[Doubleshadow]

I applaud your procrastination skills. That was inspiring.

[Icarus]

Indeed, that was awesome.

However, it seems from your calculations on mass that you assumed Heaven is a solid cube, which would account for the high mass. If we instead assume a meter thick separator ever furlong between levels, the mass of gold would then be :
19281 * (2.41402E6)^2 * 1200 / 10 = 1.34831414E19

Still, awesome thought.

[Sparrowhawk]

u see that? - ur calculations drove me to insanity XD

I am HORRIBLE at math - failed pre-cal in high school and barely passed math for liberal arts in college.

When I fist read your post, I was thinking wow this is funny - in a scary, creepy sort of way (The only reason why its scary and freaky is I have a phobia of math problems - so your calcutlations t me seemed scarier to me than King Kong to a 1930's Pithikosophobic (fear of monkeys - I like long words instead of long problems - english major =D)

In light of the new Iron Man movie, I think I may have to start calling you Tony Stark - and if you built an armor suit while putting off studying you may be able to talk your profs into giving you a lil extra time to study b4 taking the test =)

[chibiphonebooth]

:hits_self u see that? - ur calculations drove me to insanity XD

I am HORRIBLE at math - failed pre-cal in high school and barely passed math for liberal arts in college.

When I fist read your post, I was thinking wow this is funny - in a scary, creepy sort of way (The only reason why its scary and freaky is I have a phobia of math problems - so your calcutlations t me seemed scarier to me than King Kong to a 1930's Pithikosophobic (fear of monkeys - I like long words instead of long problems - english major =D)

In light of the new Iron Man movie, I think I may have to start calling you Tony Stark - and if you built an armor suit while putting off studying you may be able to talk your profs into giving you a lil extra time to study b4 taking the test =)

yah, same here. math is NOT my forte. @_@

numbers + me = horrible horrible death and confusion.
i stumbled across this thread and i couldn't even understand what was happening. XDD

math problems hurt me.

but this is a cool concept, though. i would never be able to do it.
i would be like '...ok..so.. furlong... to convert to .....um... feet? lets see... do i subtract? ...divide? ...multiply? @_______@;; too many numberrssss i dont know what this meaaannssssss!" *collapses*

[rocklobster]

uh, do you realize we don't need to worry about how big Heaven is? Why, because when we get there, we'll be spirits--meaning we'll be weightless! It won't matter how big it is! God solved the potential population explosion by making it possible to leave our heavy bodies behind and give us new ones!
Oh, and Pascal, you are a total nerd!

[animewarrior]

O.O SUCH BIG NUMBERS *anime faint* *wakes up* where am I? oh yeah teh numbers scared me.... *grabs freezie to revive myself* VERY KEWL Pascal... I don't have the mathematical aptitude to think about the dimensions of Heaven.... lol just how awesome It'll be.... Oh yeah..

SHOUT OUT TO EVERYONE ON CAA I'LL TALK TO EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU IN HEAVEN!!! Lol I'm sure the LORD will have this awesome system so you can find me. XD

[minakichan]

uh, do you realize we don't need to worry about how big Heaven is? Why, because when we get there, we'll be spirits--meaning we'll be weightless! It won't matter how big it is! God solved the potential population explosion by making it possible to leave our heavy bodies behind and give us new ones!

But it's... fun. And anyway, Pascal's calculations prove that we don't need to worry about it at all, considering that if we distributed every personal evenly throughout the volume of heaven, you wouldn't even see anyone else XD

SHOUT OUT TO EVERYONE ON CAA I'LL TALK TO EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU IN HEAVEN!!! Lol I'm sure the LORD will have this awesome system so you can find me. XD

You make it sound like Facebook.

[animewarrior]

You make it sound like Facebook.

*Backs away in horror* lol I actually have a growing dislike for Facebook but I'm sure God with have this awesome system somehow set up...like if you want to talk with someone God will automatically let you know the person's actual name(instead of an alias) and then you can telepathically call them and see if they are busy or not...XD

[Debitt]

And I thought I was awesome when I started procrastinating by playing my DS. XD I'm thoroughly amused.

[Tsukuyomi]

Heh heh, most interesting indeed ^__^

[mitsuki lover]

Actually the measurments were based on the angel's measuring,I believe and John just jotted down what the angel dictated.So this leads to the amusing question of how large the angel's hand was.
Disclaimer:My own belief for what it is worth is that Revelation is largely allegorical and so the measurments shouldn't be taken overly literal.

[Fish and Chips]

Actually the measurments were based on the angel's measuring,I believe and John just jotted down what the angel dictated.So this leads to the amusing question of how large the angel's hand was.

The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. 17He measured its wall and it was 144 cubits thick, by man's measurement, which the angel was using.

Read it again.

[Amzi Live]

This is soooooooooooo,exiting!Yo God!Please get here soon K?

Oh,and Pascal,can you be my personal math tutor?

[ADXC]

Plus isn't the gold to be so refined that its transperant(The gold we have now is imperfect, but I will be perfect once God's kingdom comes.)? Then maybe the weight might vary a little. I dunno, I just thought Id say it.

[Mave]

Pascal, this is probably one of the more interesting posts I've read in ages. XD I'm not mathematical in nature and yet, this intrigues my curiosity.

Yup, that is all I have to say.