Futurama Quote on Largest Buggalo Ranch on Mars

Quote of the Day

A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.

— Albert Einstein

Figure 1: Buggalo Ranching on Mars' Western Hemisphere. (Source)

I am a big fan of Futurama – its going off the air was as disappointing for me as discovering Firefly a few years ago and having only 14 episodes to watch. I love the fact Futurama often includes small bits of real math and science in its scripts. My all time favorite piece of math includes a blackboard showing an actual proof using group theory by Sweet Clyde in the episode "The Prisoner of Brenda."

Today, I was watching the episode "Where the Buggalo Roam," which mentioned that the area of the Wong ranch encompassed the western hemisphere of Mars.

Here is the exact quote:

Farnsworth:	This is quite a large ranch you have.
Mr. Wong:	17.9 billion acres. We own entire western hemisphere. [whispering] That the best hemisphere!
Farnsworth:	It's the same on Earth.

I did the following calculation that confirmed that Futurama got the Mars hemispherical area calculation correct – these folks take their science and math seriously.

Figure 2: Calculations Showing that Futurama Computed the Hemispherical Area of Mars Correctly.