Sounds like a stupidly easy question to find out with a quick internet search, but it’s not.

I don’t want to know the average surface temperature, or the average ocean surface water temperature, or read another article about climate change.
But that’s all I found in the past hour.

I’d like to know the average temperature of all molecules that comprise earth, or a best guess scientific estimate.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    11 months ago

    That’s a pretty dumb way of calculating average since it’s just the average of the biggest value and the smallest value. That’s neither mean, median, or mode for the whole planet. It needs to be weighted by volume or mass in order to be an accurate average.

    • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      12
      ·
      11 months ago

      I mean OP asked for average, that’s how average calculated 🤷

      Median is impossible to calculate since you need a whole array of data to know what’s in the middle. I think anything other than that is impossible because we need gazillion of data to even getting close to the accurate answer, that’s why all answer out there is usually categorised and in estimate.

      • EvilHankVenture@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        That’s not how average is calculated, that would be the average if there were two particles, one 5200 and one -94. The average is the sum of all values divided by the number of values. Not the max plus the min divided by 2.

      • KnowLimits@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        11 months ago

        If only there were some extensive property of matter we could multiply with the temperature to compute a weighted average. That would be massively helpful.