How many grains are in a bag of sugar?
Tonight I opened a bag of sugar. I asked my older daughter to guess how many beans were in the bag – she guessed 27 million! I couldn’t even think about how many sugar grains make up a kilogram of sugar, never mind everything else in the world. How fascinating and amazing is this world of ours?
There are so many unanswered questions, with so much to think about. How many platelets are there in a pint of blood? How many drops of water are there in a cloud? How many cells is our body made of? How many stars in the universe (known and unknown)? How many species of spiders (more are being discovered all the time)? How many blades of grass in a field? How many grains of sand are there on a desert beach? To be continued…. How many questions about our world?
How do we find the answers to these questions? Back to sugar, I found it on Google! Apparently there are 17.6 million grains of sugar in a 1kg bag! This is derived from the size and weight of the sugar granules, starting with demerara sugar and assuming that 2.2 grains of white sugar = 1 demerara grain! Crazy that this question has been answered.
So can we find the answer to all our questions by using the internet? No one seems to know how many stars there are in the universe, or how many platelets are in a pint of blood (I thought one would have an answer), or water drops in a cloud, or any of the other questions. So many unanswered questions. What can we say to our children, as perceptive as they are, as we kiss them goodnight and they look out the window at the stars and immediately ask how many they are? We make something up and basically tell a story and send them off to sleep with a smile as they close their eyes and think of all the fairies with lanterns flying in the night sky! Then we leave their room, pull the door and wonder to ourselves.
You might go crazy thinking about every unanswered question, but there are so many. The point of this article? Just to point out the wonders of our world, our universe. To ponder the irresponsible and make you think. There are so many phenomenally amazing facts yet to be discovered, I think sometimes we get lost in the everyday and forget the wonders of what makes our world go round and our bodies move and our ecology supports so much life ( the only planet in the solar system – I will not admit the universe because I believe!). We truly live in an amazing place and we should appreciate it.
I guess you could call this a “green” article because if we don’t take care of what we have, all these questions will go unanswered because our world will turn to dust before we have a chance. Take care of this and these and many other questions will be answered, maybe not in our lifetime, but we can pave the way for our children and their children and their children’s children….
As for the question of how many stars there are in the universe – I still like to think of them as fairies with lanterns flying in the night sky, going about their busy lives. What do you think? Do you believe in fairies?
#grains #bag #sugar