How much energy would it take to part the Red Sea?

[Dov]

While thinking about special relativity again today and the relationship between matter and energy, I came up with some interesting ideas.

First of all, we have the laws of Conservation of Mass and Energy.

This means that there is a finite amount of energy in the universe. This, in and of itself, should preclude speed of light travel (for anything with intrinsic mass) because you would need infinite energy to propel an infinite mass to the speed of light.

Anyway, this got me to thinking - I wonder how much energy it would really take to split the Red Sea the way the story is presented.

I'm going to try to tackle the problem myself, but admittedly, this may be over my head. Still, it will be fun to try it.

I'll lay it out here as I go for criticism and error checking.

So here's my first question:

Is it possible that the answer could equal a quantity so large as to make the event impossible?

I'll lay out my idea for a way to approach the problem itself in a couple of hours.

[MelchyBeau]

You need to know these things.

How wide do you want to part it?

Where are you going to part it?

are you simply going to move one part of the sea in one direction? or are you going to move both parts of the sea equally in opposite directions?

what is the mass of the water you wish to move?

Are you assuming that the water in the red sea is a perfect liquid? I'll tell you right now it isn't.

what do you mean by impossible? The moon creates the tides of the ocean. the Sun forces us to remain in orbit.

The sun produces 3.8 x 10^26 joules per second of luminesence. ( and ours is a relatively small star)

Black holes exist that can pull entire galaxies apart.

Melch

[BZ_Zorro]

It depends on how it was done.

For a rough calculation, work out the amount of mass displace and find the amount of gravitational potential energy it gains.

For example, the Red Sea is 2km wide and 100m deep where it was parted, gOd made a 100m wide path. Thus he would be displacing 100x200x1000 = 20 million cubic meters = 20 million tonnes of water.

He's displacing this say 100m upward. Plug these values into the potential energy equation and you'll get a value in Joules.

This should be trivial to someone like dOg.

[ChromePony]

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Is it possible that the answer could equal a quantity so large as to make the event impossible?

[/ QUOTE ]

Its definitely safe to say that there is plenty of energy in the Universe to make this happen, if thats what youre asking.

[BZ_Zorro]

I read somewhere (not satire) that gOd blew his holy nostril into the Red Sea (i.e. he parted it with his breath). I'm guessing that's how he did it.

[goofball]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Is it possible that the answer could equal a quantity so large as to make the event impossible?

[/ QUOTE ]

Its definitely safe to say that there is plenty of energy in the Universe to make this happen, if thats what youre asking.

[/ QUOTE ]

Last I heard the total energy, along with the total electric charge of the universe is zero.


20M tons = 18 143 694 800 kg. (18 billion).

change in PE is mass times G times chance in height. Your esimate of 100 meters gives about 17.80 terajoules.

According to this webpage

http://www.eia.doe.gov/kids/energyfa...alculator.html

that's around 2942 barrels of petroleum, or 137530 gallons of gasoline.

These numbers all seem high so I encourage people to look for flaws.

[MMMMMM]

I saw or read something a while ago: the hypothesis was that the underlying terrain (ridge, or whatever) and the sea level were such that a wind of a certain force at a certain angle may have been able to part it.

This may have just been a "grab-you" ad for a show on one of the historical channels or discovery or something like that, don't recall.

Anyway to figure something like this you might need a map of the topography under the Red Sea...at that time--and a knowledge of the depth of the water--at that time.

[Spaded]

I don't know if you already know this, but some time ago on the history channel they had a bible scholar on some "history of the bible" show. He was saying that the word "reed" was misinterpreted as "red". So he actually parted a "reed sea" or "sea of reeds".

For what its worth...

[Dov]

Some preliminary assumptions:

Density of Sea Water = 1030 kg/m3 (as per Beicher, Robert J. Physics for Scientists and Engineers. Orlando: Saunders College, 2000.)

Width of the Split = The width of the split is open to suggestions, but I am basing it on the account which says that each tribe passed through in its own column. It is also said that 600,000 males between the ages of 13 and 65 (if I remember correctly) left Egypt. I am going to conservatively assign the total number of people as 850,000 and divide them equally into the 12 tribes.

# of people = 850,000

# of people / tribe = 70,834 (Actually 70,833.33 but we don't have fractional people)

Width of a person = 1m
Space between people in a column = 1m
Total Spaces = 23
Columns / Tribe = 25
Total Width of each tribe = (25 columns*1m)+(24 spaces*1m)= 49m / tribe

Space between tribes = 25m
# of spaces = 11
# of tribes = 12

Total width = (49m*12 tribes)+(25m*11 spaces) = 588+275=863m

I'm going to round it up to 875m to give them some room on the edges.

Now for the length of each column.

Since each tribe has 70,834 people and is divided into 25 columns each column is 5,902 people long. Assigning people a length of 2m to account for strides and putting a space of 3m between people we get:

(5902 people * 2m)+ (5901 spaces*3m) = 11,804m + 17,703m = 29,507m long.

I am going to assume a flat ocean floor and a water height of 30m. I think this height is more than sufficient.

So, what we have now, is basically a cube with dimensions of:

L = 29,507m
W = 875m
H = 30m

Volume = LWH so V = (29507m*875m*30m) = 763,936,230 meters cubed of displaced sea water.

Based on the density of seawater at 1035 kg/m3 we get a mass of:

1035 kg/m3 * 763936230 m3 = 790,673,998,050 kg

I will assume for simplicity that this cube is composed entirely of seawater and that it is suspended vertically at the cube's height of 30 meters. (I understand that it would probably not be this way because the displacement was likely sideways. The sideways displacement causes a serious problem for me as the water at the edges won't move as far as the water in the middle, etc. In addition, some of the water would have to be 'stacked' because it will be higher than it was in its resting state. )

We know that the sea collapsed back in behind them as they moved forward, so it trapped the Egyptians and drowned them.

The normal walking speed of a person carrying things is about 3 km/hr. Assuming that they were in a bit of a hurry (probably not too much of a stretch), let's say that the columns advanced at a rate of 5 km/hr, which probably is a stretch, but I'm going to use it anyway.

Since the cube is 29,507m long, it will take 5.9014 hours to cross it at 5 km/hr. Assuming that the cube caves in behind them in 5m(Long) blocks, then a volume of 129,450m3 of water weighing 133,980,750 kg would fall back down every 3.6 seconds. (The cube of the falling water has dimensions of 5m x 30m x 863m)

So, I guess what's left is to figure out how much energy it would take to hold up all that water for that much time.

Time for some criticism, I guess.

Fire away guys.

BTW, I am deliberately ignoring all the 'stuff' they took with them out of Egypt. I think it will balance some of my other assumptions.

[Dov]

[ QUOTE ]
Its definitely safe to say that there is plenty of energy in the Universe to make this happen, if thats what youre asking.

[/ QUOTE ]

In the UNIVERSE, yes. What about in the small area where it happened?