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All the land in our solar system
(imgs.xkcd.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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I guess it's easy to forget just how much smaller Mars is until comparisons like this help put it in perspective.
mars' surface area is approximately as big as earth's land surface area, i.e. everything excluding oceans. since oceans cover a large part of earth's surface, there's that.
I can't readily recall the Earth's actual sq. km surface area, and can't remember ever having heard the figure for Mars. Time to drop into Wikipedia and take a gander, I think.
EDIT: I'll be damned, TIL that the Earth has an area of 510.06 10^6 km², but Mars' is only 144.37 10^6 km², only about 1⁄3 the size (28.3%).
The circumference is roughly 40,000 kilometers. The original definition for a meter was such that 10,000 kilometers was the distance from the equator to the poles (so a quarter of the circumference). They got the math slightly wrong and didn't want to people to think the process was wrong so they didn't correct it. I forget the actual circumference but that is close enough for very rough estimates.
the distance from the equator to the poles is a quarter of the circumference
Yeah idk why I got circumference and diameter mixed up. Whoops.
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