Have you ever pondered how huge the goo ball would be if all of the people on the planet were merged together? No? I hadn’t either, but some clever mathematician decided to figure it out. If you placed all live humans on the planet in a really gigantic blender, removed all of the goo, and chose to form it into a human meaty ball for whatever reason, the resultant gooey sphere would be smaller than you might assume.
This… ingenious… The calculations were done by reddit member kiwi2703. The typical human body mass is roughly 62 kilos, and the density of a human is 985 kilograms per cubic meter, or kg/m3 (near to water, which is 1,000 kg/m3). You could possibly pack 16 persons into a cubic meter if they were blended (but don’t attempt it to be sure). As a result, the world’s 7.88 billion people might be crammed into 496 million cubic meters. This sphere of goo would be just over a kilometer in diameter (about three Eiffel towers) and could easily fit into Central Park (New York City). Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
This is a very small ball in comparison to the world’s population, and it’s incredible how much of the planet has been altered to feed this goo ball. Every year, the global population increases. When asked how much this meatball will expand, u/IntoAMuteCrypt replied in the reddit comments.
“A non-algebraic answer: According to the World Bank and various other sources, the global population growth rate is 1.05 percent each year. For the sake of simplicity, let’s round up the sphere’s diameter to 1km (remember, it’s 1km broad, not 1km in radius), and assume that the average mass of a human remains constant.
The population is multiplied by 1.0105 throughout a year, therefore the volume changes by the same amount. Because the radius is proportional to the volume’s cube root, it is multiplied by 1.0035. (Rounded off). Over the course of a year, our 500-meter-radius sphere expands to 501.7439-meter-radius sphere. When converted to micrometers per second, it equals little about 16 micrometers per second. “Not much, huh?”
