Recreational MathJust For Fun |
How can people calculate their age and weight on other planets? |
It’s certainly possible to find a person’s age and weight on another planet without having to travel there. To figure out weight, one just needs to know the amount of the gravitational pull on another planet, moon, or other space body. For example, based on the chart below, if a person weighed 100 pounds on Earth, he or she would weigh 38 pounds on Mercury (100 × 0.38).
A person’s age on Earth depends on how many times the planet has orbited the Sun during his or her lifetime. For example, a person 30 years old has traveled around our star 30 times. In order to work out how old a person is on another planet, the person’s age has to be divided by the period of rotation (in terms of Earth years). Thus, if the same 30-Earth-year-old person lived on Saturn, he or she would be just over 1 Saturn-year-old (30/29.5 = 1.02 Saturn-year-old). On Mercury, he or she would be 124.5 Mercury-years old (30/0.241 = 124.5).
Space Body | Time to Orbit around the Sun* |
Gravity (Weight) Compared to Earth |
Mercury | 87.9 days | 38% |
Venus | 224.7 days | 91% |
Earth | 1 year | 100% |
Moon | 1** | 17% |
Mars | 1.88 years | 38% |
Jupiter | 11.9 years | 254% |
Saturn | 29.5 years | 93% |
Uranus | 84 years | 80% |
Neptune | 164.8 years | 120% |
Pluto | 248.5 years | 0.01% |
Sun | N/A | 2800% |