Numbers

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people. - Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860

[Sharon K. West]

I'm doing a bit of speculation in writing a post for my History of the Bizarre and Mysterious blog http://historybizarremysterious.blogspot.com/ and I'm doing some figuring on the estimated number of people ever born. I am posting this here as I think it is quite interesting when thinking in terms of how many spirits there has been, and of course, every second the population is growing.

As a side note, someone who believes in reincarnation will say that this number would be quite inflated as the same spirits are coming back all the time. But, just for the sake of speculation, let's say that each person ever born is a specific spirit one time around.

According to

http://www.prb.org/articles/2002/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth.aspx

approx. 106,456,367,669 people are estimated to have ever been born.  So according to my speculation, 106,456,367,669 immortal spirits could be around somewhere. (Sounds like the immortal national debt, doesn't it?) Of course, we would have to come up with population growth figures to date to add to this and get it current as this article is dated 1995.

But anyway, that is a whole bunch of possible spirits.

I also wanted to figure out how much blood (in gallons) has been spilled in wars just to see how much blood had been absorbed by our planet in that manner.

The U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs has compiled a list at

http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/44965.html

Total number of Americans who have died during battle was 653,708. This seems very low to me, but this is just battle deaths. There were lots of deaths outside of battle like in prisons.

The average person has 8-10 pints of blood, depending upon their size. Let's say all of the men and women who died in battle were on the smaller side for the sake of easy math. There are 8 pints in a gallon so each person would have had a gallon of blood. This would make 653,708 gallons of blood. For comparison, the typical tanker truck holds about 9,000 gallons. Therefore, the blood spilled onto the earth one way or another only in battle by Americans during war would amount to approx. 73 tanker trucks.

Now if you consider how much blood all the people who were ever born have until 1995, it would amount to 11,828,485 tanker trucks.

How many acres would this amount of blood cover one inch deep?

From wiki answers, here's the formula:

1 acre is 6,272,640 square inches. Since you want to cover it one inch deep you need 6,272,640 cubic inches of water. There are 231 cubic inches in a gallon. So divide 6,272,640 by 231 and you get 27,154.2857 gallons

which would give you 3,920,426 acres. The state of Connecticut has 3,547,692 acres.

Now those of you who are better at math than me, might get different answers, but bottom line, this is a lot of spirits and a lot of blood, not to mention body material which would amount to more substance than the blood.

Side by side, 2000 cells from the human body could cover about one square inch. There is no way to know how many cells the human body has but I found a 50 trillion estimate online.  Oh, my brain is starting to hurt? Does anyone want to tackle the calculation of how many square feet of body parts would 106,456,367,669 bodies take up and how many Empire State buildings this would make? LOL John and Michael, where are you?

OK, so why am I trying to get a picture of all of this. You'll have to go over to my blog and read my ramblings there to find out. I have not written the post yet, but I'll let you know when it is up. I am still formulating my hypothesis. muuuhaaahaaa

[Michael Jones]

106,456,367,669 people to fit in how many Empire State buildings

An average person is equivalent to 20.9454545 US gallons
so

average estimate 21 gallons = 2.807291676 cubic feet
so

106,456,367,669  people take up 2.98854 x 10 ¹¹ cubic feet

the Empire State Building's volume is 37 million cubic feet
so dividing total people cubic feet by empire state building cubic feet you get

8077.14 Empire State Buildings Total

realize this is an estimate because of varying body size.

[Sharon K. West]

Michael,

Thanks so much for doing the math on that.

I do know that at the least, I'll never look at a tanker truck or the Empire State Building quite the same again.

But here's something else interesting to figure out. Someone told me years ago that the entire population of the earth would fit into the State of Montana if you just packed everyone in there side by side, front to back. Can we figure out if this is true?

According to the worldometers site http://www.worldometers.info/ the current population stands at 6,871,649,800. The meter spins so fast that it is impossible to pin it down exactly.

If we get the square feet of the State of Montana, and allow a certain amount of space for each person to stand in, could the whole population of the earth stand inside its borders?

Sharon

P.S. Perhaps we could also figure out how much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood. LOL

[John Rossi]

approximate world population                     6,871,649,800

square footage average person occupies                       2

Montana sq. footage                          4,099,407,206,400

sq. footage required for total population     13,743,299,600

There is still room for                          2,042,831,953,400

[Sharon K. West]

Thanks, John!

This is amazing, isn't it? How big our world is and how small the human presence actually is compared to the size of the planet.

Maybe we don't have so much to be concerned about if there is still room for 2,042,831,953,400 people in Montana. All of the current 6,871,649,800 people would get more than 2 square feet if that much room is left until more people are born.

Based on that, how much more square footage would each person get? And ideally, how much square footage would constitute a comfortable-sized house for each person if everyone lived in Montana?

I doubt if we could get Doug to move to Montana, though, because there are lots of s-n-o-w. Maybe we ought to figure if we can get everybody into the state of Florida.

Sharon

[Doug Kelley]

I doubt if we could get Doug to move to Montana, though, because there are lots of s-n-o-w.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with "snow." Oh wait, is it that funny white stuff that falls from the sky in northern and southern regions of the planet? LOL. July and August would be great months to live in Montana.