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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com,

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Speaker 1: where smart happens Him Marshall Brain with today's question, how

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Speaker 1: many regular sized helium filled balloons would it take to

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Speaker 1: lift someone off the ground. Here's how you could figure

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Speaker 1: it out. Helium has a lifting force of about one

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Speaker 1: gram per leader. A normal balloon at amusement park might

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Speaker 1: be thirty centimeters or about a foot in diameter, so

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Speaker 1: it holds about fourteen liters of helium. Therefore, a normal

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Speaker 1: amusement park balloon can lift about fourteen grams if you

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Speaker 1: assume that the way of the balloon itself and its

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Speaker 1: string is pretty negligible. If you weigh fiftys are about

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Speaker 1: a hundred and ten pounds, then you weigh fifty thousand grams.

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Speaker 1: Divide your fifty thousand grams by the fourteen grams per balloon,

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Speaker 1: and you find that you need about three thousand, five

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Speaker 1: hundred balloons to lift your weight. You might want to

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Speaker 1: add five hundred more if you actually would like to

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Speaker 1: rise at a reasonable rate, So you need roughly four

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Speaker 1: thousands and balloons to lift you if you weigh fiftys,

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Speaker 1: and you can adjust that number according to your weight.

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Speaker 1: So if you weigh more like a hundred ms. You

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Speaker 1: would need to double the number of balloons to eight thousand.

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Speaker 1: Let's say that instead of going to the amusement park,

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Speaker 1: you go to an army surplus store and you buy

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Speaker 1: a three meter or roughly ten ft balloon. It can

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Speaker 1: hold about fourteen thousand liters. It would take only five

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Speaker 1: of those to give you the same amount of lift.

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Speaker 1: Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast?

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Speaker 1: If so, please send me an email at podcast at

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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. For more on this and

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Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.