How many grains of sand are there total, on the planet Earth?

"So how many grains of sand are there in the world? You could start off by trying to guess how many grains of sand there are in a spoon of sand. Use a magnifying glass to count how many grains fit in a small section. Then, count how many of those sections fit in your spoon. Multiply the two numbers together to get an estimate. "Using this same principle, plus some additional information, mathematicians at the University of Hawaii tried to guess how many grains of sand are on the world's beaches. They came up with 7,500,000,000,000,000,000, or seven quintillion five quadrillion grains of sand."

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/539329.html

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/are-there-more-grains-of-sand-on-earth-or-stars-in-the-sk

I was taught that trying to count all the sand in the world is a project at worst frivolous and at best hopeless.

Hosea 1:10--"Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted."

One definition of sand at
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sand

"Geology--A sedimentary material, finer than a granule and coarser than silt, with grains between 0.06 and 2.0 millimeters in diameter."

Where is sand found?
http://geo.msu.edu/extra/geogmich/sand.html

Before you start counting, note this definition of a sand grain (as also mentioned above):

"Sand particles range in diameter from 0.0625mm (or 1⁄16 mm, or 62.5 micrometers) to 2 millimeters. An individual particle in this range size is termed a sand grain."

I also agree that this question ranks among the most impossible asked on Funtrivia, along with "How many trees are there in the world" and the like.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand