When No One's Home on the Range

In a small group, we were talking about Adam and Eve and God’s original commands to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth. We wondered how close we are to fulfilling this mission? To be sure, the imprint of man’s presence seems to cover the globe. But here is a visual representation that boggles the mind.

The current population of the world is 7.263 billion people. Let’s say you wanted to put the entire population of the world in one concentrated area to see how much space would be required. Let’s give everyone a rectangle that is two feet by three feet. Just for reference, I checked seating guidelines for a comfortable movie theater – 22" between seats and 36" back to back. So think of our six square feet of area per person as the equivalent of theater seating with an extra two inches between seats.

Now let’s do the math. 7.264 billion people x 6 square feet per person yields 43.584 billion square feet. So where shall we put them? Delaware - the second smallest state in the union! The land area (no sitting in water, please) in the state of Delaware is 1,948.54 square miles. To convert this into square feet, I would multiply 1,948.54 by 5,280 squared (which is 27,868,400) to get a total land area for the State of Delaware of 56,481,638,400 square feet or 56.481 billion square feet.

So here’s the bottom line. If we seat the entire population of the world in theater seating, we would need almost 75% of the State of Delaware. 13 billion square feet of Delaware would remain unoccupied. This equals almost 463 square miles, which we could probably allocate for aisles between sections.

I am under no delusions that, in the real world, we could get everyone seated in my massive statewide theater. But the Delaware plan will make perfect sense to the good folks of Missouri who insist, “Show me!” It gives me some sort of concrete visual representation by which to get my mental arms around a population number of 7.264 billion people. Do you not find it amazing that we can put the population of the world in theater seating in Delaware with room to spare? Does it not shock you that, by doing so, there would not be one soul on the remainder of the planet? Anyone visiting earth who landed anywhere besides Delaware would assume no one is at home.