I love reading xkcd author Randall Monroe's blog "What If", where people email outlandish questions that can result in a scientific answer, often bordering on the absurd. Since there wasn't an entry this week, I decided to do some research on my own question that I had previously submitted.
“Earlier today, an unknown gentleman offered to give my female friend a 'handful of orgasms.' Sleazy indeed. But suppose he meant that literally. As far as energy to matter transfer, is it possible to give a woman a 'handful of orgasms' in the course of her life? How long would it take?"
This one's actually easier to find than I thought, little more than the application of E=mc^2 and a few google searches.
Energy is commonly measured in Joules, 1 joule = 1 kg x m^2/s^2. The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters/second. The weight of the average man's hand is 1 1/4 lbs, which converts to 0.5669905 kg. By plugging in, you can find the amount of energy contained in the mass of the average male hand. That energy is 5.095 x 10^16 joules, or 50,958,600,000,000,000 joules. Close to 51 Quadrillion. That's a lot of energy. How much energy?
Little Boy, the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima exploded with an energy of 16 kilotons of TNT, equal to 67 terajoules. Chump change, compared to Tsar Bomba, the single most powerful man-made destructive force in all of history in the form of a Russian nuclear weapon. It was physically 6 times more massive than Little Boy, and when tested in northern Russia it yielded an estimated max of 240 pettajoules, or 3600 times the energy of Little Boy. Take 212 Tsar Bombas, and you have your 51 quadrijoules. But please don't.
19,007,543,419 horsepower would be another way to say to describe this energy. That's 325 times the population of all horses on earth. Giddyup!
A woman burns an estimated 3 calories upon full orgasm release. An estimated 50 calories are burned leading up to it, but the margin of error (i.e. what you're into) varies so widely that it's not a reliable figure. Women have different varieties of orgasms (all of which is sorcery to me to begin with), and for the most part they last anywhere from 3-15 seconds.
Let's assume an average period of 8 seconds per orgasm, and an absolute max of energy released by a woman O'ing constantly, one directly after the one before it. There are 86400 seconds in a day, for a maximum possible 10,800 orgasms a day. At 3 calories per, you'd burn through 32,400 cal/day. How about them apples, Michael Phelps?
That translates to 135,561,600 joules/day. Plug in all the numbers, and you find that it would take roughly 1,029,882 years in order for that unfortunate woman to fire off enough loads to burn through the energy in one man's hand.
Let’s put this in a more realistic scenario (seriously? Anything about this is realistic so far?) and refer to the case of one Mrs. Rachel-of-Atlanta. She has a rare disorder that results in her having hundreds of involuntary orgasms each day, as few as one hundred if she focuses all effort on controlling her naughty bits. So if she had 300 involuntary orgasms a day, she'd work off a man's hand in 37,075,752 years, long enough for the Canadian Rockies to be worn down into grassland.
So I hate to say it ladies, but the next time a guy offers to give you a 'handful of orgasms', you deserve to know that he will not be able to keep that promise. Not even I could, it's sad to say. For one, I don't expect to live more than a million years. But more importantly, after roughly 3500 years in, I might start to get a cramp in my wrist.
Thanks for reading!