You’ve probably never thought about how big a ball will come out if you put all the people on Earth together into one giant ball. However, a mathematician thought about it and decided to find the answer to the question.
If for some reason we don’t know what’s going on right now, if you put all the living people on Earth into a really big blender and decide to turn the resulting mixture into a human ball, the resulting sphere will likely be smaller than you think. . kiwi2703, who is also a reddit user, decided to do these calculations. The density of a human is 985 kilograms per cubic meter or kg/m3 (closer to water which is 1,000 kg/m3) and the average human body mass is around 62 kilograms. If mixed, probably 16 people could fit in one cubic meter.
So 7.88 billion people in the world can be compressed into only 496 million cubic meters.
This sphere of goo would be just under 1 kilometer wide (about three Eiffel towers) and could easily fit in New York City’s Central Park. Here’s a demonstration of it:
For the number of people on Earth, it’s actually a really small ball, and it’s almost like how such a small mass has such a big impact on Earth, changing the entire planet. It sure is incredible. The world population is increasing every year. In a Reddit discussion, when asked how big this ball would be, u/IntoAMuteCrypt replied, “As a non-algebraic answer: The World Bank and some other sources list a world population growth rate of 1.05% per year. For math convenience, the diameter of the sphere is 1km’. Let’s round it to (remember, it’s 1km wide, not 1km radius) and assume the average mass of a person doesn’t change. For 1 year, the population is multiplied by 1.0105, so the volume will change by the same amount. The radius is proportional to the cube root of the volume, so multiply by 1.0035 (rounded up) . Our 500m radius sphere becomes a 501.7439m radius sphere – growing 1.7439 meters over the course of a year. Converted to seconds, it comes out to just under 16 micrometers per second. Not much, right?”
This is not the first time someone has decided to do these interesting thought calculations. In 2014, it was discovered that when the Earth’s population was slightly smaller at just 7.159 billion, you could fit every human being in the Grand Canyon. Of course, this process did not involve such a sticky mess of human balls as in the new example…
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