If everyone on Earth stood on one continent and everyone jumped at the same time, would the resulting impact be enough to knock the Earth out of Orbit?

According to my calculations, no.

The resulting impact would accelerate the Earth about 0.0000000000017 meters per second per second. To put this in perspective there are about 31,500,000,000,000 seconds in one million years. That acceleration would have to sustain for a very very long time to get the Earth moving at any noticeable speed away from the Sun.

It seems, though, that I’m a little late on this one! Last year a fake scientist by the name of Hans Peter Niesward proposed that we solve global warming by bumping the Earth to a bigger orbit (i.e. farther from the Sun.) A “world jump day” was organized for July 20 2006 and word apparently spread all over the internet (I’m a huge dork and I certainly never heard of it.) The official website is here. It turns out that this Niesward character turned out to be the figment of the imagination of a German artist living in Scotland. I’m not going to mention his name because I don’t really condone people posing as scientists even when the result is hilarious.

Of course, I’m not going to pretend to be a physicist either. I did my “calculations” with my trusty TI-82 and high school-level physics.