Could the world’s population stand on the Isle of Wight?

8 comments

1. Population of the world: 7.888 billion (in 2021, according to Google)

   Area of the Isle of Wight: 380.7 km^(2)

   Therefore, each square meter of space would need 21 people to fit into it. Each person would need an area of around 22 cm by 22 cm to stand in. I couldn’t fit into a space that size.

2. A few years ago XKCD investigated what would happen if you had the world’s population in Rhode Island and they all jumped at once: https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/. The trickiest bit is what happens afterwards.

3. Isle of wight is 4,18 billion square feet, earth population is 7.9 billion so that’s slightly less than 2 people per square foot, so I doubt it

4. The ‘stand on the Isle of Wight’ fact was popular in the 60’s, when it was true, as the world population was only 3 billion. There’s a novel by John Brunner called “Stand on Zanzibar” that explores what life would be like on a planet so over-populated that you’d need the island of Zanzibar to fit everyone on.

   World population is now about 8 Billion so you could comfortably fit everyone on Resolution Island in Canada, but that’s neither a snappy nor readily recognisable name. We could go with Martinique in the Caribbean – that would give everyone about a square meter each.

   Average human has a volume of about 75 litres. so 8 billion of them would be 600 billion litres or 0.6Km^3. Loch Ness has a volume of 7.4Km^3 so you could drown the whole of the worlds population in there and still have good odds that you could swim for an hour and not hit a body.

5. They could fit in the grand canyon in a small pile.

6. Only one way to be sure. Meet you in Ventnor?

7. I quite like [this](https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/) hypothetical that looks at what happens next if you’ve got the entire worlds population in one place.

8. What would happen if every single person on the planet jumped at the same time? Would we cause an earthquake?