Originally posted by 911fnord
reply to post by bsbray11

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Thanks brother!! For many years I have seen the principia and book of subgenius are deprogramming tools for religion and the NWO in general...but thats whole other thread. The video I posted is the best quality I have seen to date. The video is very telling I am glad the person that took this decided to release it. FNORD.

Your move.

Various sites give slightly different results but the following figures seem to be generally accepted.

Steel used in the WTC: 200,000 tons (I will use metric tons, not short tons. A metric ton is 1000 kg).
Volume of steel (at 7900 kg/cubic meter): 25,300 cubic meters.
Concrete used: 425,000 cubic yards concrete = 325,000 cubic meters
Mass of concrete (at 2400 kg/cubic meter): 780 million kg or 780,000 metric tons
Dimensions: 415 and 417 meters high by 63 meters square
The "bathtub" - the sunken basement of the buildings, is 60 feet (18 meters) deep.
I will tend to use numbers on the high side since those make the best case for conspiracy theories.

Some Derived Numbers

Volume of one tower: 1.65 million cubic meters
Steel in one tower: 100,000 tons = 12,700 cubic meters
Concrete in one tower: 390,000 tons = 163,000 cubic meters
The concrete in the towers weighed about four times as much as the steel and occupied over twelve times as much volume.
Actually, a lot of the concrete in the World Trade Center was in the base. The floors were about 8 cm thick and supported by steel sheets and a truss system, so the actual amount in the towers was quite a bit less.
Mass of one tower: most people use 500,000 tons, a few use 600,000. The mass of concrete and steel above comes to 490,000 tons and doesn't count elevators, plumbing, utilities, windows and so on. 600,000 is probably closer to the mark, especially if we count internal walls and furnishings.
Bulk density of a tower: If we assume 500,000 tons, 303 kg/cubic meter. If we assume 600,000, 363 kg/cubic meter. The bulk density is about one third that of water. Seal the holes and put them in water, and they would float.
Volume of building materials in a tower: 163,000 cubic meters of concrete, plus 12,700 cubic meters of steel = 175,700 cubic meters. Add windows, elevators, and interior fittings and it's probably around 200,000 cubic meters per tower.
If the volume of building materials was 200,000 cubic meters and the total volume of a tower was 1.65 million cubic meters, then building materials occupied 12% of the volume of the tower. 88% of the tower was air. That's what buildings are for - to enclose the largest open space with the least material.
At peak occupancy there were 25,000 people in the towers or 12,500 per tower. Assuming 70 kg for an average weight, the people in each tower weighed 875,000 kilograms or 875 tons. Since people are about as dense as water (1000 kg per cubic meter), the volume of the occupants in each tower was 875 cubic meters.
A grisly statistic but a necessary one. About 10% of the total occupants of the towers were killed on 9-11. Their combined weight would have been about 175,000 kilograms and their combined volume would have been 175 cubic meters. So searchers were looking for 175 cubic meters of remains in 400,000 cubic meters of debris. Typically 7% of the mass of a human body is bone, so the total bone mass in the ruins was 12,000 kilograms out of a billion kilograms of rubble.
The harsh reality is that remains of many of the victims of 9-11 will never be found. Tiny bone fragments will be turning up on rooftops, in crevices in pavement, and other nooks and crannies for decades if not centuries. Rudi Giuliani has come under fire from New York firefighters for ending the search for remains. FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Riches said “We have the remains of dead heroes at the garbage dump because of Giuliani and his administration and they’re still there today and they won’t remove them.” (Whatever esteem the NYFD won on 9-11 has been pretty much squandered by its conduct since then, or maybe I should say the conduct of its corrupt brass.) Given that many bone fragments were pulverized and picked up by workers' shoes and clothing and vehicle tires, there are probably 9-11 bone fragments in New Zealand by now.
On the one hand, Michael Moore's Sicko deals with the medical problems of 9-11 workers. On the other hand we have people who wanted the site excavated like an archeological dig to locate remains or look for evidence of a plot. Just imagine the health problems we'd have had if we'd spent years clearing the site.
One final note to the relatives of 9-11 victims and every other disaster where questions remain unanswered: you have a right to what can reasonably be done. You do not have a right to the wholly unreasonable like sifting every square inch of lower Manhattan. And you do not have the right to what cannot be done. If our best efforts fail to find remains or the cause of a disaster, then they cannot be found.
Energy

The gravitational potential energy of an object is the energy it takes to raise it to a certain height, or the energy obtained by letting it fall. The formula is U = mgh. U is the standard symbol for potential energy, m is mass in kilograms, g is the gravitational acceleration of the earth and h is the height in meters. Energy is in joules. One watt is one joule per second, and a joule is roughly the energy needed to raise one pound one foot.

For the World Trade Centers, the towers were 400 meters high and their mass was 600,000 tons or 600 million kilograms. So the total gravitational potential energy in one tower was 6 x 108 kg x 9.8 m/sec2 x 400 m x 1/2. The factor of 1/2 comes from the fact that some mass fell 400 meters and some fell only a short distance, and the overall result is as if it all fell the average distance. So we have U = 1.2 x 1012 joules. A kiloton is 4.2 x 1012 joules, so the gravitational potential energy is about a quarter of a kiloton or 280 tons of high explosive, per tower.

The planes that hit the towers were Boeing 767-200's, with a loaded mass of about 140,000 kg. They impacted at about 600 km/hour or 167 m/sec. So their kinetic energy was K = 1/2 mv2 = 1/2 x 140,000 x 1672 = 2 x 109 joules.

The basic 767-200 has a fuel capacity of 63,000 liters, and accounting for fuel burned before impact, call it 50,000 liters. Jet fuel has an energy content of about 35 million joules per liter. So the energy content of the fuel on each plane was 1.75 x 1012 joules or about 0.4 kiloton. An appreciable amount of that energy would have been released explosively, the rest during the fires following impact.

The energy from the collapse of one tower would have been roughly equivalent to a magnitude 3.5+ earthquake and the energy from the plane impacts somewhat less, depending on how much fuel exploded on impact. The impacts of the planes themselves would have been only a small part of the total energy released. The actual observed magnitudes were less because not all the energy was converted into seismic waves.