Organizing by religion, putting Jews and Muslims in one neighborhood. There is no way this can ever go wrong. :D

They only truth I care to know, is that the entire universe exists in my mind, and it's not what anyone thinks they know or is told to believe. However, like all of us, being human, on this planet is far more engaging and beautiful when you get out there and simply experience love and kindness between others, rather than getting shoved in a random box in Manhatten. I truly know nothing about this planet or anything else, only what I've been told. It matters none though, I care not to exist in my head, but rather my heart, and in doing so, I can connect in a manner that gives an undeniable dimension of existence I call the soul.

I know you're just trying to fit everyone in, but I chuckled when organizing for religion, you decided to put Jews and Muslims together in Brooklyn.

Haha I think he hates Brooklyn

Well, they do get along inside Israel

Elon sent me here

me too...🤭

The human basal metabolic rate is, if google doesn't mislead, about 100 watts and therefore the human race produces around 7.3e11 watts (730 gigawatts). So the 1 km cube containing it, with a total dissipating area of 5e6 square meters (leaving out the side on the ground), is having to get rid of some 146 kilowatts per square meter. If it did that via blackbody radiation, it would have a surface temperature of close to 1000 C, 1800 F. (Assuming i did the Stefan-Boltzmann thing right.)

Genius! Could you please work a little bit with Tim on a post or another, that would add just a little more scientific nerdiness to WBW!

Dats one hot M&M

It would definitely melt in your hand.

Who votes that everyone in the world gets to their nearest airport one day and flies to a 729 square km field somewhere and stand as close as we can to each other, just so we can see this in real life...

As someone who designs buildings for a living, I have to comment that the live load of billions of humans standing shoulder to shoulder would require some pretty significant structural consideration. The structure of each floor in your building would have to be rather substantial, and would significantly increase the height of the required building. Also you'd probably need some intermediate columns, which would take up even more space.

And let's not forget about the heat load created by billions of people and their filthy metabolism. Ever notice how the air conditioning in your house can struggle to keep up if you have a couple dozen people over for a party? Billions of people would warm up those spaces very quickly, so you'd better leave plenty of space for mechanical systems. Or everyone will end up very uncomfortable and/or dead of heat stroke and/or carbon dioxide poisoning.

And let's not even get into the bathroom and egress requirements for that sort of occupant load...

Also, let's remember that it's really hard to get 7.3 billion people in the same place, and that probably many of them would die while you're getting them organized and new ones would be born, and that the cost of that building would be huge (who's going to pay for it?), not to mention that it's a sizeable amount of land it would take up (who's going to give up that land?), and also we must consider that people will get bored so maybe we should add some TVs.
Oh, I almost forgot that this was a hypothetical building. Disregard my reply.

" it's really hard to get 7.3 billion people in the same place, "

They've been in the same place for decades, dude.

Carbon dioxide just squeezes out all the life sustaining oxygen. And sorry, there is no egress. No one outside to issue permits.

so the space ship that we are all going to hop on to escape the Kaboom will have some very interesting engineering challenges that maybe even the legendary Scotty won't be equal to. Although it seems to me that it isn't the mass that is the problem so much as the motion (i.e. life).
But if the imaginary box is basically a tin can of humans for some peckish human eating entity, then you wouldn't need all the fancy stuff at all, just some holes for the decomp gasses to seep through

Naw, no holes needed, just fill the in-between spaces with pickling juice.

I'll alert Paolo Soleri that you're ready to help out!

What happens when you try to expand it so that each human has a (semi) comfortable room to live in? Sort of like a massive, humanity-encompassing apartment. How much power would it need for lights? What about the plumbing!?

you wouldn't even need to do the math that bad. look at the single building picture. devide that up by say 100 buildings . then devide those 100 buildings up by another 100 and i could see people being to comfortably live. essentially if everyone earth lived in an apartment, a couple thousand apartmant buildings could hold everyone without any squeezing needed

How about a building that every human (including the close to 500 million added since this article was written) could actually live in,as opposed to be squeezed into for a photo op and then starve?

That's kinda what I meant when I put my search into Google and this came up, yeah...
Still cool article though!

Hey I'm Carlos!

yes

this is as cool as it is terrifying. I started laughing (either in shock and possibly terror I'm not sure) upon realizing the scope of the m&m

That one guy on the "How’s everyone doing down there?" picture who is perfectly happy.
I was looking for him, and Tim, I know you drew him because you knew someone would be looking for him.

Oh, I just went and searched for him. He is actually _winking_!

Did anybody else spot the sole smiling and winking dude amongst that sea of desperate and angry stick figures?

Nice touch, Tim.

Oh! Actually I had skipped the drawing assuming that it was just a bunch of people. Now I am coming back to the picture, it is so rich in details, so full of expressiveness... I cannot stop looking at it.

Ha yes, I was looking for a while on a hunch that tim would do something like that. Of course he didn't disappoint.

We'd want a more realistic calculation, using the space needed to support all human beings alive with all the supporting ecosystem; I would guess that the building size would still be small enough that we could envision building a space ship capable of bringing the whole humanity to another planet.

Not if you look at all the supporting ecosystems. Food is not that big an issue, depending on what you want to eat of course, however I don't think we even have an idea of the needs for maintaining the carbon / oxygen balance, and you might want to also read up on water catchments, and what it would take to produce enough fresh water over time. Not even the death star would be big enough!

haha if 7.3 billion people were in a building there goes six feet social distancing :)

Can still not fit your mom in there

Really good post :)

I guess I’m in a big cube with everyone in the world now.

Or maybe I’m in an M&M. I don’t know.

If you're willing to ignore the space taken up by the electrons and the Pauli Exclusion Principle to shove us all into an M&M, you may as well just compress us further into a black hole, forming a singularity. Then bam, no space at all!

I'm disappointed that there was no mention of a Dyson Sphere of people linked to each other by their limbs.

Few things I found striking...

"You could fit all 13.9 million Jews into Central Park"
Is that all there are? I live in NJ so it's hard to imagine that they only make up 0.2% of the world population

"You could squeeze all 320 million Americans into a 5.7km x 5.7km (3.5mi x 3.5mi) square"
So (assuming he means Americans as in US Americans) Americans make up 4.4% of the world population. So only 1 in 23ish Earthicans are American.

What really irks me is if you can fit the ENTIRE US into a small rural town center...how the f*ck is there so much traffic on my way to work?!! JFC people you have a whole god damn 3.8 MILLION square miles to live on and have to been on the same damn road as me at the same damn time!!??

Of course he means citizens of USA. America has almost a billion inhabitants. Also even I know that the population of the US of A is around 300M.

It's because cars vastly increase the human profile and decrease the mean free path accordingly.

Wondering how much space it will take if every human in the world is in sleeping position .

good post

Has anyone read Riverworld, by Philip José Farmer? All humans that have ever lived are reincarnated on the banks of a very long river.

I have read. Judging by these calculations, this should be *a VERY* long river, given that aliens have given a lot more space for each person than a 1 m squared. :)

20 million miles long in Farmer's books, but the figure he uses for all the humans who ever lived is 36 billion.

Except, according to Arthur C. Clarke, the number of humans who have lived and died on this planet in totality is around 100 billion. And he came up with that figure almost 60 years ago.

cool writeup, can you also do all living animals too? :)

I'm appalled you put us on Staten Island, lol.