Ever wonder how big the goo balls would look if all the people on Earth were merged together? No? No, I didn’t either. But a fun mathematician decided that it was worth trying.
You could put all the living beings on the planet into a blender and extract all the goo. The result would be smaller than what you might think.
Reddit user kiwi2703 was so creative that he did the calculations. The density of a human being is 985 kg per cubic meter or kg/m3. This is close to water which is 1,000kg/m3. Also, the average human body weight is 62 kg. You could probably fit 16 people into a cubic meter if you mix them (but please don’t do this to verify it). For the 7.88 billion people on the planet, this means that they could fit into 496 million cubic meters.
This sphere of goo would measure just 1 km (about three Eiffel Towers) and could easily fit into Central Park (New York City). This is an example of it:
This is a small number compared to the population of the planet. It is also amazing how much the Earth has been altered to feed this ball.
The world’s population grows each year. Reddit users were asked how big this meatball would grow.
As a non-algebraic solution: The World Bank and other sources indicate that the world’s population is growing at 1.05% annually. For simplicity of maths let’s increase the diameter of the sphere to 1km. (Remember, it is 1km in diameter, not 1km in radius). Let us assume that the average human mass does not change.
The population multiplied by 1.105 over a year will result in a change of the volume. The radius of a volume is proportional to its cube root, so it gets multiplied with 1.0035 (rounded off). The sphere with a radius of 500m becomes a sphere with a radius of 501.7439m. This is an increase in size by 1.7439 metres over a single year. It comes out at just 16 micrometers per second, which is converted to seconds. Not a lot, huh?”
These are not new ideas. In 2014, the population was slightly lower at 7.159 billion. However, it was discovered that every person could fit into the Grand Canyon.
