Space and math

I was thinking about population — overpopulation, that is. I’ve long believed that the problem isn’t that there are too many people on Earth, but that they’re distributed poorly.

People in cities tend to think the world is crowded. People outside cities know better.

So I finally decided to do some math to figure out how much space we humans take up.

Imagine each person on Earth (there are 6.6 billion of us) stood in a square three feet on a side. Not comfortable, but not as tight as a busy elevator.

That’s 9 square feet for 6.6 billion people, or about 60 billion square feet. Sounds like a lot.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t visualize 60 billion anything. So let’s convert.

60 billion square feet is a bit more than 2,152 square miles. Still sounds big.

But it isn’t — 2,152 square miles is a box about 46 miles on a side.

So you could fit the entire population of the planet Earth, standing together (but not crammed) into a space 46 miles square. That’s smaller than the state of Delaware. You could drive around it in less than three hours.

(For comparison’s sake, about one-eighth of the Earth’s land surface is considered habitable — i.e., it isn’t Antarctica or a mountaintop or Death Valley. That’s about 58 million square miles, or a box more than 7600 miles on a side. Pretty big. )

What does it mean? Nothing at all. I just was in the mood to play with math.