![]() Let’s try another way.Ĭarlos, stand on the X again. Okay that kind of annoyed me because it ended up in the shape of spring, not a line. Finally, halfway through the 56th loop, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, we get to the final human, and we’re done. But we’ve only gotten through 131 million people-less than 2% of humans-so we’ll need to wind around the Earth again. Eventually, the line goes around the whole Earth gets back to Carlos. We build bridges over oceans and tunnels through mountains to make a clean line along the equator. So we do this for a while and the line gets longer and longer. Some people will require more or less space than others because people are different sizes, but let’s assume each person we add to the line will make the line one foot (about 30cm) longer on average. 1 Since we’re trying to be efficient, I want everyone to stand as close as possible to the people in front of you and behind you without actually touching. We’ll start near Quito, Ecuador, right on the equator, and the line will follow the equator. The first activity today will be putting all humans in a single file line. Let’s keep going.)ħ.3 billion humans in one-dimensional configurations I’ll try to stay on topic here but it won’t be easy. ![]() (At two steps per second, that would take you 115 years.) (I’m doing that thing where I’m going on divergent math spirals during the post and then just putting what I figured out into the actual post. 0625mm sand grains (any smaller and it wouldn’t be sand anymore-it would be silt) would take up about 1,700 cubic centimeters of space, almost but not quite filling a 2-liter soda bottle.Īlso, walking 7.3 billion steps would take you around the Earth…150 times. 7.3 billion medium-size grains (.25mm in diameter) would fill a medium, 46cm high (1.5ft) cardboard box. 7.3 billion “very coarse” grains (about 2mm in diameter) would fill a large cubic room with a height of 4m (13ft). If each living human were represented by a dry grain of rice, the rice would fill a cube-shaped box with a side of 6.1 meters, 1 or about 20 feet-around the size of a two-story house.Īnd how about 7.3 billion grains of sand? Well according to this delightful chart, “sand” can mean a lot of things. Second, 7.3 billion people is a lot of people. The world population has grown by 194,000,000, or almost 3%, since then. The first thing to note is that when I did a post on population density in August of 2013, the number I kept referring to was 7.1 billion. It’s a question that’s tantalized almost no one through the ages, and today we’re gonna tackle it hard.īut before we ask all 7.3 billion humans to stop what they’re doing so I can arrange and bunch them together at my whim, let’s discuss the number 7.3 billion. How big a building would you need to fit them all in it? And we’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what really matters most in this one, short human life.īut somehow, we made it through all of that discussion without ever asking the most important question of all about humans. We’ve explored what it means to be a human, what it means to be a good human, and whether we’re all alone in the universe. We’ve talked about rich humans and famous humans and baby humans and dead humans and humans from all over the world. Sometimes we talk about where humans came from or where we might be going or how we’re all related other times we look at how we interact and communicate and form relationships. After a year and a half of writing Wait But Why posts, I’ve noticed a theme: humans seem to come up a lot.
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