I was looking at some photos today on the weather channel’s website, of all places. Photos of the most crowded beaches on earth. The photos showed throngs of people, packed together like sardines in a can, arranged along ocean beaches at various places throughout the world. These photos were taken from an elevated position and the crowds stretched for as far as I could see. So… I began to wonder just how many people were in those images. From that bit of cogitation my mind wandered off, as it is wont to do, to thoughts of just how big a beach it might take to hold all the earth’s roughly seven billion inhabitants. This required a bit of math. This really isn’t overly precise you understand, just me trying to get a handle on a number that is way too big to think clearly about. Here’s the thing, 7 billion people is a lot of people, in fact if you lined them up in rows and columns like a big marching band you’d have about 84,000 columns and 84,000 rows, give or take a few thousand. If everyone was slender and fit and stood straight and tall you could get each person on a square that was 2 feet on a side. Yes, they’d be shoulder to shoulder and buckle to butt and if the guy in the middle fell over you’d be witness to the mother of all Guinness Book of World Records domino effects. Ponder for a moment: a square block of humanity 84,000 people wide by 84,000 people deep. In our 2 square foot allocation that works out to a block of people 32 miles on a side. What if the guy 30,000 rows back suddenly has to pee? Say you had an elevated platform squarely in the middle of the block of people that was 10 feet off the ground. If you stood up there with your camera and looked all around could you see the edges of the block of humanity? Doubtful. The nearest edge would be 16 miles away. You’d need to be a lot higher than 10 feet above the crowd to get a real feel for how far away the edge is. The math on this one is beyond me but my experience in high mountains leads me to believe you’d need to be a couple thousand feet above the sea of humanity to be able to tell it truly had limits. So, back to the subject of crowded beaches. The beach photos I saw all showed beaches that were probably on the order of 1000 feet from the water to the end of the sand. To put all of our 7 billion people on the same beach the beach would need to be somewhat less than 6,000 miles long or not quite all the way around the equator which is a bit more than 7,000 miles. Now I’m wondering, uh oh, you say? If everyone went to the beach at once and the beach was around the earth’s equator, would the increased mass added by the presence of so many humans around the middle of the sphere cause the earth to spin faster? And what if the spin rate increased so much that all the people flew off into space? Well, good riddance, I say. Now, at least, we’ll have the beach to ourselves.

PP