The Misappliance Of Science

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If everyone in China brewed tea at the same time, would the USA suddenly want some biscuits?

Impossible: If the entire population of China jumped up at the same time, either the Earth's orbit would be disturbed, or the US would be swamped by a tidal wave, or some other bad thing would happen.

Joern Wilms ran some napkin math here and concluded that a liberal estimate of the force produced by a nation of jumping Chinese would be around 10^12 joules, several orders of magnitude less than the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which was around 10^20 joules. The 1906 quake, obviously, did not change the Earth's orbit.

Also, to perturb the orbit of the Earth, you would have to change the momentum of the Earth, which cannot happen by jumping up and down. You're not transferring momentum doing this.

Impossible: If all the Chinese screamed at the same time, people in the US could hear it.

This defies logic. If two random Chinese villages each yelled as loud as they could and could not hear one another (a certainty), then their voices are not aggregating to become a monolithic sound that could be heard around the world.

If we assume the entire Chinese population to be a perfect sphere that yelled with one voice, some more napkin math, this time by Clive Feather, shows that this billion-strong voice would be about 190dB and could be heard almost two whole kilometers away.

In short, it's impossible.

References:

• Joern Wilms does the math