How many packets of Kool-Aid would it take to fill the ocean?

Answer 1

1 Making Oceanic Kool-Aid

To make oceanic Kool-Aid we will mix 1 Kool-Aid packet, 4.5 tablespoons of salt, 1 cup of sugar, and 2 quarts of water. I would suggest making this is small quantities, since it will not taste very good, but it is very piratey.

2 Making the Oceans into Kool-Aid

Truly Evil. Mix 732 quintillion packets of Kool-Aid and 91.5 quadrillion metric tons of sugar into all the world's oceans. For a final weight ratio of water, sugar, and salt to Kool-Aid powder of 467:31:16:1. Mix well.

2.1 Recalculate

To compare these approximations to other bodies of water, simply take the size of that body of water, divided by 332,500,000 cubic miles or 1,101,117,150,000 gallons of the oceans, and multiply it by the amount of Kool-Aid packets or sugar.

3 To adjust the salt taste

The salinity of the new body of water will be given as a percentage. In the Ocean salinity averages out to be 3.5%. So to modify the salt you divide the new water salinity percentage by 3.5% and multiply by 4.48 tablespoons.

There are exactly 3 teaspoons for each tablespoon, so you can multiply the number of tablespoons by 3 to get the number of teaspoons. You would want to do this if the amount is smaller than a tablespoon, or you don't have a tablespoon.

4 Computing these figures

4.1 To compute how much Kool-Aid

There are 332,500,000 cubic miles of ocean water on Earth.

There are 1,101,117,150,000 gallons in a cubic mile of water.

There are 4 quarts in a gallon, and one packet of Kool-Aid will flavor 2 quarts of water. So we require 2 packets of Kool-Aid per gallon of water.

If we presume for a moment that we do not need to add sugar, and that the salt in the sea water is of no consequence, and that we are unconcerned about all aquatic life in the ocean, we would need this many packets:

332,500,000 x 1,101,117,150,000 x 2 = 732,242,904,750,000,000,000 packets or approx. 732 quintillion packets.

4.2 To calculate the amount of sugar

You also need to add sugar, 1 cup of sugar per packet. A cup of raw sugar weighs about 250 grams. So if you multiply the amount of Kool-Aid packets by 250 you will have the amount of sugar in grams.

There are 1 million grams in a metric ton so you divide by 1 million and wind up with 91,530,363,000,000,000 (91.5 quadrillion) metric tons of sugar.

5 Finding the ratio of water, sugar, and Kool-Aid powder in a glass of Kool-Aid

Kool-Aid packets vary in weight, several range from 3.6 - 4.5 grams of Kool-Aid powder per packet. A median value of 4.05 grams. So there would be 2,965,583,764,237,500 (3.0 quadrillion) metric tons of Kool-Aid. Dividing 91.5 quadrillion by 3.0 quadrillion, we get almost 31 tons of sugar for every ton of Kool-Aid, a ratio of 31:1.

5.1 Converting 332.5 million cubic miles of water to cubic tons

This is a bit trickier. There is 1 gram of water for every milligram, or cubic centimeter. So we need to convert cubic miles first into cubic centimeters. Then convert from cubic centimeters to cubic tons.

1 mile = 160934.4 centimeters, approximately. By cubing all these numbers and labels simultaneously, we see 1 cubic mile = 4168181825440579.584 cubic centimeters.

332.5 million times 4168181825440579.584 equals 1385920456958992711.68.

This means there are approximately 1.4 sextillion metric tons of water in the world's oceans. We can add this to our ratio by dividing it with the unrounded amount of Kool-Aid in metric tons, this is approximately 467 units of weight of water per unit weight of Kool-Aid.

6 Adding salt

If you wanted to know what this would taste like, you can try making a small sample of Ocean water Kool-Aid. According to the Wikipedia entry for "seawater," every kilogram (1000 grams) of water in the average ocean contains 35 grams of salt. If we want to make 2 quarts of water this salty, we need to first convert quarts into something we can measure the salt with, lets say, tablespoons. So how many tablespoons are in a quart? You can use Google to convert between units, and the answer is 64. So there are 128 tablespoons in our 2 quarts of ocean water, we need 35/1000 of this as salt, so multiply 35/1000 by 384 and we get approx. 4.48 tablespoons.

We can easily make this part of our ratio, 460:30:1, without doing much conversion. Simply multiply 467 by .035, which gives us 16.35671... and add it into the ratio, 467:31:16:1

Now the big question is grape... or cherry...

(There is way too much salt water, so even if you added tons of sugar it still wouldn't be real Kool-Aid. It would be a sweet- n-salty fruity body of water.)