“A roaring ocean of boiling jam, with the geysers of released air and steam likely ejecting at least a few berries into orbit.”
Hey, it’s summer! It’s blueberry season! Can I offer you a thought experiment on what would happen if the Earth were replaced by “an equal volume of closely packed but uncompressed blueberries”?
Anders Sandberg, a researcher at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, wrote a lengthy answer on his blog and then an even lengthier paper that he posted to arxiv.org, a repository for physics preprints that have not yet been peer reviewed.
“It cracked me up,” Catherine Cooper, a planetary scientist at Washington State University, says about why she agreed to read a paper on Earth turning to a giant clump of blueberries. “This would be a fun assignment for a student,” she adds, perhaps by assigning them to sub in another fruit.