Can I ground myself to a spoon? Laptop upgrade tutorials advise grounding oneself to metal objects ultimately connecting to literal ground (floor, Earth), such as the laptop's metal case, or a metal door, heater, etc. Is this really necessary? Won't simply touching a charge-neutral conductor such as a spoon suffice? Naturally it has a much lesser "electrostatic capacity" and I may need many spoons, but I don't presume an immense discharge capacity likes of the Earth to be required for a task like this.
 A: Suppose we have two isolated objects with capacitances $C_1$ and $C_2$.  Suppose further that $C_1$ is carrying a charge $Q_i$ (and is therefore at potential $V_i = Q_i/C_1$) while $C_2$ is electrically neutral.  Suppose we then connect $C_1$ and $C_2$ via a conductive path.  It is not hard to show that after connecting these two objects, the potential of $C_1$ becomes
$$
V_f = \frac{V_i}{1 + C_2/C_1}.
$$
In particular, if $C_2 \ll C_1$, the electric potential of $C_1$ does not change much at all.  On the other hand, if $C_2 \gg C_1$, then the electric potential of $C_1$ is greatly reduced.
Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this:  your body is $C_1$, and $C_2$ is the object you touch to get rid of any stray electric charge that has accumulated on your body.  The capacitance of the Earth is much larger than your capacitance, so by touching it, the electric charge on your body becomes much lower.  If, on the other hand, you touch a spoon, the amount of electric charge on your body is not reduced by much at all, and so you still run the risk of frying your electronics.
Moreover, to within an order of magnitude, the capacitance of an "unstructured" body (i.e., one that's not specifically designed to hold a lot of charge, like a capacitor) is directly proportional to its physical size.  Since a spoon is about 1/10 your size (to within an order of magnitude), it has about 1/10 of the capacitance of your body (to within an order of magnitude.)  This means that to effectively get rid of any electric charge on your body, you need to touch a neutral object that is much larger than yourself.
This need not be the Earth, per se, but for most of us it's nearby.  Presumably an astronaut on the ISS could effectively ground themselves by touching a wall of the module they're in;  but as on Earth, simply touching a spoon wouldn't remove much charge from them either.
A: You need to ensure that both you and every object you touch is discharged to negligible potential.
Even if everything is at the same high potential, charge will gather on the high points and spark across to other components when it touches them.
So you would have to ensure that every spoon was suitably discharged in preparation. What would you discharge the spoon to? Earth would certainly be the safest bet, and only if you were somewhere electrically isolated would you need to find an alternative, such as taking your work inside a metal room and discharging to the nearest wall. Having done all that, who needs spoons?
