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A Valuation of Earth, Inc.

Stock speculation is a big business. Trillions of dollars are exchanged on a daily basis in the stock market. If you're savvy, you can make some serious cash buying and selling stock, either short or long. What is stock? Well, it's ownership in a company. If you own 1 share of stock in a company that has 100 shares, then you own 1% of that company. That's easy to understand, right? 

Real estate is really the same idea, except that your company is The Planet Earth. So, how much stock is available in Earth, Inc? Let's start with a unit of stock that would represent a detached home on the planet. For this, let's say is a quarter of an acre. 

There are 148,939,100 square kilometers of surface land on Earth [1]. Now we need to find out how many acres are on the Earth so that we can determine the number of shares in the company. 

1 acre = 4046.85 sq meters [2] 
1 sq-km = 1,000,000 sq meters 
1 acre = 0.00404685 sq km 

For simplicity, let's create 1 share of surface as 0.25 acres. That gives us: 0.25 acre = 0.0010117125 sq km Using this value along with the 149M sq km of surface area on Earth gives us about 147,214,846,115 shares. 

This number is about 472 times the number of outstanding common shares available in google on 6/20/2007, just for perspective. 

In the USA, there is 3,537,441 sq miles of land [3]. This comes out to be about 9,161,972 sq km [2]. Using our handy formula, the number of shares in the USA is 9,055,904,904, or about 6% of the Earth, Inc. float. 

The average home price in the USA is 185,200 US [4], using numbers from 2004. One house, remember, is one share of Earth, Inc. What we need, though, is a world-wide average home price to make this analysis more balanced. Let's take a look at some numbers: 

USA: 185,200 [4] 
New Zealand: 350,000 (265,979 US) [5,10] 
South Africa: 911,800 (127,515 US) [6,10] 
UK: 210,000 (417,900 US) [7,10] 
Australia: 391,000 (330,125 US) [8,10] 
Ireland: 310,632 (416,395 US) [9,10] 
Mexico: 86,143 US [11] 

The average of these 7 countries is $261,322 US. This puts a value of about 38,470,541,108,540,937, or about 38,471 trillion US dollars. 

Now when the Vogans come to blow up the Earth, we can ask for remuneration in the order of 39,000 trillion US dollars, or something of similar value. Maybe a signed picture of William Shatner and Patrick Stewart together? 

A better valuation of Earth, Inc., would be a weighted determination of mean stock price using the average home price per region, rather than per country. For instance, the average home price in California is 450,550 [12]. The land area in California is 155,959 sq miles [13], or 403,933 sq km [2]. This is about 399,257,506 Earth, Inc., shares, or 0.27% of Earth, Inc. 

That means 0.27% of the stock price should be calculated using the $450,550 median home price. More countries should be used in this analysis. I could only find average home sale prices for a few countries. I am sure home sales in Croatia, Uganda, and Uzbekistan are significantly less than the average California home price. 

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