Stacks of bones

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have no really good explanation for why I thought of this.

Somewhere along the way I ran across a bit of trivia that (if true) is mind-boggling. It was that if all the gold on planet Earth were collected (even after being dug up from mines yet to be opened) in one place that it would make a cube a mile on a side. That’s either a lot or a little, depending on how you visualize a cubic mile.

Now, this thread isn’t on a fact-finding mission to see how close to true the gold thing is, although some authentication of that rumor might be fun to have. No, this thread is for speculating (I didn’t want to put it in General Questions because I don’t expect anybody has a “factual” answer to it) about what size volume all the human bones now buried somewhere on the planet or else still walking around on it, would make.

Stage one to the quest ought to be a rough estimate of how many human beings there have been.

Stage two would be to develop an average volume for the bones of the typical human (with babies and giants being considered).

Stage three would be to allow the burned and lost-at-sea bones to be disregarded as “lost” to the process and to go ahead and pretend they could be recovered.

Any guesses what size our Bone Storage Facility would have to be?

Hey, if this goes well we could also decide how big a place we’d need to store all the hair that’s been here.

In case this isn’t clear, this is mostly for the fun involved.

2

Wouldn’t Stage 4 be determining the packing density of bones, or can we grind them all up into bonemeal? I’d imagine the inside of skulls would take up a lot of space when multiplied by several billion.

3

Here seems a good starting point as to how many people have ever lived.

Here are some estimates for volume of a skeleton.

The math is left as an exercise for the reader.

Si

4

Excellent point. I can go either way. Maybe we ought to try for both types of facilities or else have a conversion factor from one to the other.

Just for the data’s sake, my mother’s ashes after her cremation were in a little box about the size of a child’s shoe box. I’d guess somewhere between a pint and a quart, so for cubic measure I’d guess maybe 3-4 cubic inches.

One thing’s for sure: we wouldn’t need to use coffin-sized containers. Couldn’t you cram a set of adult bones into a moderate-sized waste basket? That ought to go to maybe a couple of cubic feet at most.

Your point about skulls is a good one, though. Those Killing Fields photos and the ones of the death camps are impressive with the big piles of skulls. But I bet they could be ground up into a much smaller stack.

Ever see the pictures of the buffalo (bison) stacked up after one of Buffalo Bill’s slaughters? Scary and sad.

5

Great finds, si_blakely! Perhaps if I had found and read that second one, I wouldn’t have had to post this thread. Somebody else had a similar thought. Weirdo!

Here are excerpts for the task at hand:

Number who have ever been born 106,456,367,669
World population in mid-2002 6,215,000,000
Percent of those ever born who are living in 2002 5.8

Source: Population Reference Bureau estimates.

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Your primary question is how much bone material are we made up of. If you leave the bones whole, it occupies a box about 3 feet long, 1 foot wide and 10" tall. This then contains all of the long bones and the skull. The skull by volume takes up a lot of the space. But if you crunch the bones up into a powder, it will all fit into a box about 6" on a side (1/4 cu ft). If you burn the bones, it takes up even less.

6

Not sure what counts as “on planet Earth,” since there’s reason to believe that gold’s mass means there would be more of it deep in the mantle or core. If we’re looking at all that’s ever been mined, the estimates are a lot smaller:

This site says a cube 82 feet on a side

Cecil mentions, in passing, somebody else’s estimate as being a cube 18 yards (54 feet) on a side

This site says a cube 19 meters on a side, which is close to that second figure above.

7

Yikes! And I was impressed with how “small” a cubic mile would be. I guess the Gold For Cash schemes running non-stop on TV these days must be onto something. While we’re collecting all those bones, maybe we need to be yanking those gold teeth.

8

Or all the skin! If the skin regenerates itself every month, and most of dust is made up of skin… :eek:

9

Now there’s a definite side-track brewing. What percentage of the Sahara or the Gobi or the other deserts of the world is really just skin?

10

FWIW, at current prices that much gold would have a value of around $400 million for every human on earth.

At current rates of production, the world produces about a cubic mile of steel in 25 years. Total production to date appears to be under 3 cubic miles.