Per XKCD, nothing significant would happen. Even if all the people were standing in roughly the same area, the Earth would be moved by "less than an atom's width." If people were spread out randomly across the Earth, all the forces effectively cancel, and even less happens.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2026
28 points (86.8% liked)
No Stupid Questions
50653 readers
952 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
But that's everyone jumping on land, not into the ocean.
Oh, jumped IN at the same time. I missed an important word there.
Nothing noticeable. Eight billion people times 100kg average mass, divided by 360 million square kilometers of ocean surface equals 2222kg/square kilometer. Or, assuming the density of a human being 1g/cm^2, a ~~2.22mm~~ 0.00222mm height difference. Ah, the joys of metrical calculations.
EDIT: Steve pointed out that I was off with my density calculation. Thanks for the hint, coffee was obviously not yet working...
Actually, I’m a physicist from the world famous ETH in Zürich Switzerland, and my team and I have been working on exactly that question for the past five years! We have created an exciting theoretical model (manuscript has been submitted to PNAS, in second round of corrections). We are now focusing on a series of experiments to substantiate our theoretical findings. Alas, Switzerland is a notoriously landlocked country, due to which such experiments are hard to realize. In addition, strict nudity in public laws apply. As a result, all our grants were canceled, and we are now unemployed.
I hope that you could at least all be nude while doing all that research work in your dark basement offices there beneath the mountains...
If 8 billion humans displace 50 gallons each, thats 400 billion gallons. The volume of all oceans is about 1.5 billion cubic kilometers, which is 3.96258e20 gallons.
Eh, I got tired of trying to do that math, but thats a big frickin difference. I dont think the sea level rise would be measurable.
Try metric, it is way easier. The change will be about 2mm, whatever that in elephant heights or whatever is.
How did you arrive at that number? It's an entire SI prefix away from the estimate I got in a sibling comment, so I assume one of us has something wrong.
Edit: oh I see your other comment with the working. I think you may have the density wrong; if a density of "1" is in kg/m³ it's way off -- the density of water and approximately-humans is usually given as 1 kg/Litre.
Yep, you are right, with 'density of 1' I meant 1g/cm^2. Which is indeed off.
50gal is quite generous; average adult weight estimate tops out around 80kg and that doesn't account for children. Divided by approximate human density 1010kg/m³ gives 0.08m³ or around 21gal. Multiplying that by 8 billion humans and dividing by the ocean surface area of around 361000000 km² gives approximately... 1.8μm of sea level rise.
Hey that gives rise to a new shower thought. If you blended all humans and spread them out evenly across the earth, how many atoms thick would the layer of human be?
Splash.
Have you calculated this before? You came up with an answer awfully quick.
Checks out
Would there be a difference if we voting slowly, one by one?
Could you explain this sentence like I'm dumb?
I assume they're using voice to text and meant to say "go in slowly"
Probably "went in" before a missing space and an autocorrect turned it into "voting".
If you liquefied every human on earth and poured them all into one cube, it would only be about 800M per side. Humans collectively aren't that significant.
For comparison all insects would take up a 1km cube.
As a misanthropic Anti-Natalist that views humanity as the ultimate nightmare creature.. Please tell us more about melting humans and the destruction of all sentient life!
If you liquefied every human on earth and poured them all into one cube, you wouldn't get arrested because the cops would be in the cube.
What an argument for the robocops!
There'd be a lot of piss mixed in.
We would literally never know.
the planet Earth has a mass of 10²⁴ kg (source, Wikipedia), all humans together have a mass of 10¹² kg (source: do the math. 10 billion person · 100 kg/person). make of that what you will.
12 out of 24 — wow, so we are quitte close to absolute majority!