Welcome to brain Stuff from house stuff works dot com, where smart happens Him Marshall Brain with today's question, how many regular sized helium filled balloons would it take to lift someone off the ground. Here's how you could figure it out. Helium has a lifting force of about one gram per leader. A normal balloon at amusement park might be thirty centimeters or about a foot in diameter, so
it holds about fourteen liters of helium. Therefore, a normal amusement park balloon can lift about fourteen grams if you assume that the way of the balloon itself and its string is pretty negligible. If you weigh fiftys are about a hundred and ten pounds, then you weigh fifty thousand grams. Divide your fifty thousand grams by the fourteen grams per balloon, and you find that you need about three thousand, five
hundred balloons to lift your weight. You might want to add five hundred more if you actually would like to rise at a reasonable rate, So you need roughly four thousands and balloons to lift you if you weigh fiftys, and you can adjust that number according to your weight. So if you weigh more like a hundred ms. You would need to double the number of balloons to eight thousand. Let's say that instead of going to the amusement park, you go to an army surplus store and you buy
a three meter or roughly ten ft balloon. It can hold about fourteen thousand liters. It would take only five of those to give you the same amount of lift. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.