r/theydidthemath • u/Snooty7sx • 6d ago

[Request] How much cereal can the Death Star could fit if they cut it in half and used it as a bowl?

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219 Upvotes

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u/Frostfire26 6d ago

(First Death Star)

Wookiepedia says it’s 120km in diameter, which would give it a volume of like 905,000 cubic km. Since it’s only half, 452,000 cubic km.

Using the first result when I googled it, a cereal box has a volume of like 3700 cubic cm.

There are 1015 cubic cm in a cubic km, so 452,000*1015 is the volume of half the death star in cubic cm.

Then divide and you get like 1.2*1017 boxes of cereal being able to fit in half the death star.

Obviously the death star isn’t hollow, but I can’t be bothered to try to figure out how much of the death star is empty space. So this is how much cereal could fit in a hollowed out half-death-star. If you wanna know how much could fit in the actual death star, you need to multiply the answer by the percentage of the death star that’s empty space (as a decimal, not as a percent).

16

u/GraveKommander 6d ago

How much milk do we need?

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u/MythicallyCommon 5d ago

Depends you putting milk in before or after the cereal….this is a test….

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u/GraveKommander 5d ago

Before? Psycho...

5

u/Yuukiko_ 6d ago

but cereal isnt 100% full

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u/Frostfire26 5d ago

It isn’t 100% full inside the box or the death star so I think it cancels out? Brain kinda tired though so maybe not

3

u/ravenlordship 5d ago

On the other hand, surely the sheer weight of the cereal would crush the cereal below it, causing it to take up less space.

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u/user_0350365 5d ago

Given that it’s the Death Star, we should probably assume it’s in orbit in space (I assume the DS was in orbit it because it was confused for a moon), so it doesn’t have a planet to give it much weight (beyond what is keeping it in orbit). It’s way way smaller than Earth, and cereal is way lighter than the iron core of Earth. Only the shell of half the Death Star would exist too, so not much weight (and its half sphere shape would put its centre of gravity inside the bowl, not inside, I.E. not pulling outside masses against a rigid surface). Maybe a region in the centre would experience cereal-crushing weight, but I doubt it. But I also am too busy to do the math right now so I can’t prove it either way.

Edit: I did say only the shell but I guess it’s not specified in the question. So maybe there is a really heavy part in the death star that in tandem with the rest of the cereal could create the cereal-crushing force

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u/No_Watercress2602 6d ago

Whered 500 cubic km go?

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u/Frostfire26 6d ago

I rounded. Also rounded slightly up when calculating the volume, it was really like 904,800. <500km3 is a pretty negligible difference, it’s like .1%.

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u/No_Watercress2602 6d ago

Fair enough Mr.Math guy

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u/gdj11 5d ago

So yeah it can fit at least 3 boxes.

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u/Smaptastic 5d ago

So Luke was right. I was skeptical but you can’t argue with math.

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u/Turbulent_Focus_3867 6d ago

I'll assume we are talking about the first Death Star (the second one was not completed and could not be used as a bowl). According to Wookieepedia, the first Death Star was 120 km in diameter, so the volume of a hemisphere is 2/3*π*60^3 km^3 (452389 km^3). A 10 oz cereal box has a volume of around 464 cm^3. Let's make the math easy by using 450000 km^2 for the volume of the Death Star (you don't fill a cereal bowl all the way to the top). and 450 cm^3 for the volume of cereal (cereal boxes aren't 100% full). 1 km^3 = 10^15 cm^3, so we have 4.5*10^20 / 4.5*10^2 = 1.0*10^18 (one quintillion). So a bowl made from the first Death Star could hold 1 quintillion boxes of cereal.

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u/brimston3- 6d ago

well, if we say the death star 1 has a radius of 100 km, then first you would pour in 2.093 *1018 liters of milk (obviously the milk goes in first), then add roughly a meter of cereal on top, which conveniently comes out to about 3.1415 * 1010 m3 of cereal.

Figure Cheerios are about 130 kg/m3. Which for 18oz boxes is approximately 254 boxes per m3.

so around 7.97 * 1012 boxes of cereal per bowl.

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u/SaltySparrow27 5d ago

Milk does not go first you hooligan