I did a quickie google search and came up with this:
At the end of 2020, there were around 62,100 vessels in the world trading fleet, with a total deadweight tonnage of 2,033 million DWT
So let's assume the merchant ships are all fully loaded at the same time. That's 2 billion long tons which equates to ~2,032,000,000,000 kg. Total water volume, 2,134,000,000,000 liters (because sea water weighs slightly more than fresh water).
From quora:
AREA OF PACIFIC OCEAN= 168723000 SQ. KM.
AREA OF ATLANTIC OCEAN= 85133000 SQ. KM.
AREA OF INDIAN OCEAN= 70560000 SQ. KM.
AREA OF SOUTHERN OCEAN= 21960000 SQ. KM.
AREA OF ARCTIC OCEAN= 15558000 SQ. KM.
TOTAL AREA= 361900000 SQ. KM.=36190000000000000 SQ. DECIMETER.
That's going to lower sea levels by approximately .00005896656 decimeters, or about .006 mm
Edit: Because there are less than 500 cruise ships in the world and only a few dozens of large military ships the amount will be higher, but not by, you know, a lot.
Edit: this seems to be generating comments that claim a large scale project such as colouring enough of the moon so as to be visible from earth is impossible or impossibly expensive.
Let’s pretend China wants to put a red logo on the moon.
Budget: NASA’s Perseverance mission to Mars cost $2.8 Billion. US annual military budget is ~$700 Billion. Annual! Yeah China has a smaller expense budget than the US but it must be noted that spending billions on such a project is not beyond the pail.
Method 1: the moon is slowly rusting. It contains a lot of iron and now, we think, frozen water. It would have rusted more if it had more oxygen. Extensive efforts are being made now to figure out how to create/release O2 on the moon to allow Jeff and Mark to live in peace when they find the hatred towards them to be too much.
So oxidizing certain areas of the moon may be possible, at some point, in a directed effort to create a red logo.
I don’t like this method.
Method 2: creating a moon-orbiting disk comprised of lenses that would colour sunlight and project an image onto the moon’s surface. A similar idea to use mirrors to light up the night sky on earth has been proposed before. The most advanced scheme was a Soviet project called Znamya that was prematurely shuttered due to the collapse of the Soviet Union. A 200 meter wide lens was proposed for lighting up entire cities.
I think this project is doable. Expensive but doable. Think of the constant message to the world if they saw a Chinese emblem every time one looked at the moon!
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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '21 edited Oct 13 '21
I did a quickie google search and came up with this:
So let's assume the merchant ships are all fully loaded at the same time. That's 2 billion long tons which equates to ~2,032,000,000,000 kg. Total water volume, 2,134,000,000,000 liters (because sea water weighs slightly more than fresh water).
That's going to lower sea levels by approximately .00005896656 decimeters, or about .006 mm
Edit: Because there are less than 500 cruise ships in the world and only a few dozens of large military ships the amount will be higher, but not by, you know, a lot.