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I read this today - it was just too good to keep to myself. For some reason, I cannot make my text move down by hitting the return/enter key, so the enlightening articles begins here >>>>>> Is it true that if everybody in China jumped at the same time it would knock the Earth out of orbit? If people weighed on average 1000 lbs, a billion people would weigh a trillion pounds. The earth "weighs" about six sextillion tons. That is more than a trillion times the weight of all the people on earth. So, if all the people on the earth jumped the same direction at the same time, the earth would move less than one trillionth as far in the opposite direction. For example, if everybody jumped two feet directly toward the north star, the earth would move less than a millionth of a millionth of a foot away from that star.The real kicker is that as soon as those people jump, they start falling back toward the earth and the earth falls back toward them and the net effect is immeasurably close to zero. The earth running into hydrogen atoms, cosmic dust and the occasional meteor as it moves around the sun has a greater effect on its orbit than the mother of all coordinated jumps ever could.