Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

blowski

TIL - All humans stood on top of each other would be significantly taller than the diameter of the Sun.

View on HN

Cool.

And yet all humans alive, if packed like sardines, will fit in a 1 mile cube, with room to spare.

Physical dimensions can be an amazing un-intuitive thing.

Gosh, you're right.

Assuming:

- 5,250 can stand front to back

- 3,500 side-by-side

- 750 on top of each other

That's more than 13 billion humans you could fit in said cube.

That would get pretty stinky though.

The "What If?" books by Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) cover topics like this with that kind of thought process.

Also pretty hot, since if I remember correctly, the waste heat of a human is higher per volume (or was that mass ?) than of the sun !

And if you took each atom of all the humans alive and stacked them in a line (assuming 1 angstrom per atom and 7E17 atoms in a human), it would be roughly 60 light years long.

The many ways that protein can fold.

But if you pack the same atoms in a cube, that's 17 centimeters. ((8e9*7e17)^(1/3)*1e-10=0.17)

Late reply but my original numbers were wrong, it’s 7E27 atoms in a human according to wolfram, I think I just misinterpreted its original output when I tried to put it all in one formula: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=how+many+atoms+in+a+hum...

The answer is still close to 60 LY (73.99LY) but it changes the cube size significantly:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%288e9*7e27%29%5E%281%2...

(8e9*7e27)^(1/3)*1e-10 = ~382 meters on each side of the cube.

Give every human an acre of land, and we'd all easily fit into Texas.

There are 8 billion people on earth. And Texas is 172 million acres. I don't think the math works out.

We (the humans) would fit into Texas regardless of whether the land we owned would ;-)

915 square feet is still enough for some solar cells, a bio digester, an aquaponics setup with vegetable garden, a cabinet full of quail, a cot, a rocket stove, and a small shed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com