We love an interesting fact, and one of the most interesting—and weirdest—we’ve heard in a while comes from Redditor kiwi2703.
They decided to get creative with some calculations and answer a question you might never have asked yourself—if you blended up all the humans in the world, how big would the resulting ball of goo be? Yes, this sounds weird, but interestingly, the human goo ball isn’t as big as you might think.
Taking into account a worldwide population of 7.88 billion people, a human density of 985 kg/m3 (about 61.5 lb/ft3), and an average human weight of 62 kg (almost 137 lbs), the human goo sphere is about 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) wide. That’s a meatball that is about two-thirds of a mile wide or the equivalent of three Eiffel Towers. Or, as kiwi2703 showed in a clever visualization, the sphere would fit quite easily inside Central Park.
Though the idea of a human meatball is a bit gross, the exercise itself is pretty interesting. For as much change as humanity brings to the planet, we are actually a very small part of it. This isn’t the first time that someone has been curious about the space that humans take up on Earth. In 2015, it was shown that the world’s population—at the time 7.3 billion humans—could all fit inside New York City.
So how much could this human meatball grow in the coming years? Redditor IntoAMuteCrypt used information from The World Bank to formulate an answer. “The World Bank and several other sources list a world population growth rate of 1.05% per annum. Let’s round up the sphere’s diameter to 1km (remember, it’s 1km wide, not 1km in radius) for ease of maths, and assume that the average mass of a human does not change.
Across 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 it gets multiplied by 1.0035 (rounded off). Our 500m radius sphere becomes a 501.7439m radius sphere—it’s grown by 1.7439 meters across a year. Converting to seconds, it comes out at a little under 16 micrometers per second. Not a lot, huh?”
