The Earth and Our Atmosphere

I started some hand-written notes back in January to understand and explain, in simple terms, how very thin our atmosphere is. During my recent flight from London to Chicago, I noticed that highest that the plane got was 40,000 feet, and the outside temperature at that altitude hovered around negative 50 degrees on either scale. If we were not in a sealed tube, we wouldn't be able to really breathe, and we'd freeze to death. At one point, during the flight, while standing near the lavatories, with my blanket around my shoulders, I chatted with a couple of people waiting with me, and when they remarked on how cold the plane was, I told them that with the temperature outside being so low, I was surprised that they could keep us as warm as it was.

My notes included measurements of the earth's radius from a few sources, and identified things like the radius to sea level at the poles vs the equator, and found a rough average of about 3,900 miles. I had written that this translated to about 20,900,000 feet, but I rounded it down to 20 million, so I could do the math by hand more easily. 40 thousand over 20 million is 1/500.

So, in the spirit of the accurate depictions of how far our planet is from the sun, and from other planets, I want to give you the same kind of visual for our atmosphere, in relation to the size of our planet. 'A' below represents the air between my plane (which includes all of the clouds and weather), and 'G' represents the same amount of ground below sea level until the center of the earth - not even the other side of the planet. You should also note that I rounded the radius of the earth down to get my numbers, so a more accurate depiction would include more 'G's.

A
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G100
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G200
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G300
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G400
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G
G (This is now the center of the planet - double it to get to the other side)

And thank you for scrolling through all of that. I left some of the number markers in there to help you, in case you wanted to count. I hope that you can get the point, because I'm not going to say anything more about it, just that I'm not $#%@ing kidding, not about this.