Everyone on Earth Could Live in a Single Building

In Whittier, Alaska, an entire town is clustered inside just one high-rise building. The city’s 214 residents all live there, and it’s where the post office, police department, mayor’s office, and grocery store are located. Sure, it’s easy to see how a town of just 200 people could fit inside one building. But what would it look like if everyone in the world did?

In the latest episode of RealLifeLore, the video explainer series explores what it would look like if all 7.478 billion people in the world became neighbors. Clearly, all previous conceptions about building size would have to be tossed out the window. The world’s largest stadium, located in North Korea, seats 114,000. That is big enough to seat the populations of some small cities, but it’s only 20 percent of even the sparsely populated state of Wyoming. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the largest sporting venue on Earth, seats 235,000. The Great Mosque in Mecca is built to hold 4 million people inside and outside. That’s still too small.

According to RealLifeLore’s calculations of how many people can fit in one cubic meter, you would need a building 4416 feet high and 0.836 miles wide. (Note that the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, is 2722 feet tall.) But yes, in theory, if such a building could be built, it would fit everyone on Earth. They just wouldn't be able to move.