How big an area to fit the entire population of the world

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am working on a thought question with my child. If you could fit six average size people standing up in a square yard, and if there are about 3.1 million square yards in a square mile (1760 x 1760), then 18 million people can fit in a square mile.

If the world’s population is about 4 billion, and if 18 x 222 is about 4 billion, then you could theoretically fit the entire population of the world in an area 15 miles by 15 miles, in the San Fernando Valley north of LA, where we live…

Purely as a thought question – is the math about right?

I have never been very good at math, so I assuming I have made some big error here somewhere.

2

My geography teacher told me this semester that the entire population of the world could fit in the area of Rhode island. I don’t know if that’s the lower limit, and I don’t know how that was determined, but there you have it.

3

“Men occupy a very small place upon the Earth. If the two billion inhabitants who people its surface were all to stand upright and somewhat crowded together, as they do for some big public assembly, they could easily be put into one public square twenty miles long and twenty miles wide. All humanity could be piled up on a small Pacific islet.”

–from Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Éxupery
Adjust at will. :slight_smile:

4

I always figured you could get the whole population of the Earth together for a nice picnic in Prince Edward Island.

Of course, you’d have to rent out New Brunswick for parking.

5

I think the answer depends on how many blenders you have.

Reeeeeeally big blenders.

6

Well, the word’s population just very recently passed 6.5 billion [estimated, at least].

7

I once heard the entire population of the earth could fit into the Grand Canyon (piled on top of each other, of course). My impression is that I heard it from a quite trustworthy source, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what that source was.

8

You’re sick, man.

Keep up the good work. :slight_smile:

9

Your calculations are OK but I’m not so sure about your initial assumption that you could fit six average sized people in a square yard.

10

I’d reckon the world’s population would roughly fill an area the size of Zanzibar.

11

I recall this from a math poster in a classroom from my childhood: something along the lines of if a person were a box 2x2x6 feet, you could fit the population of the earth in a mile square box that you could hide in the Grand Canyon. Even as a child I didn’t get the point of that.

Anyhoo, I think more realistic estimate of how many people you can fit into a square yard would be four, maybe five if they got real friendly-like, so let’s call it 4.5. We have almost certainly passed 6 billion mark since 1998, so let’s call it 6.5 billion for argument’s sake.

Therefore we would need 1.44 billion square yards to hold everyone. Which is about 466 square miles, or a square area 21 miles on a side. The population density is almost 14 million people per square mile, kind of like Cudahy.

12

Look at me, providing a cite for my wild-ass claims! According to this site, the volume of the Grand Canyon is about 52 billion cubic yards. If we give each person a rectangle that’s six feet by three by three, or two yards by one by one, that’s 2 cubic yards per person, meaning we could fit 26 billion people in that there hole in the ground.

13

See there, until you said this I was thinking that Hal was offering to make the Margaritas. Now, instead of my happy thoughts, I am going to need the brain bleach.

14

The way I heard it once was that if you gave every person a 2 ft x 2 ft square to stand on, the entire population of the earth could fit inside the city limits of Jacksonville, Florida.

Now, Jacksonville is a really big town, by area. It’s 874.3 square miles, and is the largest city by area in the lower 48. But it’s still the whole world’s population in just one town!

This was in Reader’s Digest, IIRC. (The shit you read in the doctors office!) I checked the math, and it did work out with 6 billion people. To get 6.5 billion in JAX, you’ll have to cram them just a little tighter.

15

You could at least double the population density if you chopped everyone’s limbs off.

Aah don’t mind me, I’m just debugging a management report here.

16

I once heard an explanation of how great an area was required to house the world’s population. It got smaller and smaller according to the populaion density it was compared to. The final one was that the whole world’s population could live in Tasmania if the population density was the same as Hong Kong.

17

I bet the toilets would start to smell pretty quick.

18

Didn’t I read on this very board somewhat recently that the world’s population could be moved into Texas and be at or below the population density of Manhattan? My searchfu is weak today, I can’t remember what thread it was in.

I just can’t wrap my brain around that. Either I can’t comprehend how big Texas is, or how small the world’s population is. There must be an awful lot of open land out there somewhere. (I’m from Chicagoland. This is a very strange concept for me.)

19

Some easy calulations will put that into perspective:

Texas’s area is 268820 mi[sup]2[/sup]. Dividing that into the earth’s population of 6.5 billion gives a population density of 24179/mi[sup]2[/sup].

In contrast, the population density of New York County (Manhattan) is 67000/mi[sup]2[/sup].

So not even close. Cramming everyone into Wyoming or Michigan would almost exactly approximate Manhattan’s density.

20

I should mention that the above areas are total area, not just land areas.

I wondered why Michigan and Wyoming were so close in area. Stupid lakes. Take away the water, and Michigan is just over half the size of WY.

Wyoming makes a better place to cram the earth’s population, anyway. More open space, and it’s nice and rectangular.