Jun 21, 2025 23:00:00

If you mashed every person on Earth into a giant meatball, how big would it be?

In 2021, a calculation was posted on Reddit asking, 'How big would it be if you kneaded all the people on Earth together to make one giant meatball?' Science Alert, a science media outlet, explains the results of the calculation.

A Mathematician Calculated The Size of a Giant Meatball Made of Every Human : ScienceAlert

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-mathematician-calculated-the-size-of-a-giant-meatball-made-of-every-human

The question, 'How big would it be if you kneaded all the people on Earth together to make one giant meatball?' was posted by a user named kiwi2703 to Reddit's r/theydidthemath community in 2021. The post received a huge response, with 62,000 likes and 33,000 comments.

According to kiwi2703, if all the people on Earth were mixed into a paste, assuming a human density of 985kg/ ^m3 and an average weight of 62kg, the paste would form a sphere just under 1km in diameter. The world population as of 2021 is approximately 7.9 billion people.

The image below was created by kiwi2703 using Adobe Photoshop and Autodesk 3ds Max . The meatball is too big to eat, but if you piled 7.9 billion people together, they would fit in Central Park in New York City, or about the size of the Imperial Palace in Japan.

In 2016, a Reddit post was

published asking how tall all of humanity would be if they were stacked on top of each other. Assuming that the average human height was about 163 cm and the world population was 7.13 billion at the time, the total would be about 11.6 million km. This is roughly 30 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

However, stacking people on top of each other naturally puts pressure on the people at the bottom. Reddit user hilburn argues that 'Generally, the limit of gravitational acceleration that a human can withstand for a long time is about 10G, and the maximum pressure that can be withstood from above is 8.21kPa.' Therefore, even if you stack people alternately like Jenga for stability, the realistic limit is 40 feet (about 12.2m) in height.

by Amotoki

According to Science Alert, if all the insects living on Earth were made into sausages, they would weigh about 1 billion tons, which would be about twice the size of a meatball made up of all of humanity. In addition, the total mass of bacteria on Earth is about 70 billion tons, and if it were liquid, it would cover Manhattan, New York. Science Alert commented, 'The fact that our biosphere is contained in such a compact area is truly thought-provoking.'