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The Number of People You Can Fit in the World's Biggest Buildings Is Staggering

Real Life Lore asks a question that I’ve never actually considered before: what if everybody in the entire world lived in just one building? How big would the building have to be to be able to fit all 7.4 billion of us? Surprisingly, not that big. That red cube up above would do the trick and it only takes up a few blocks of Manhattan.

Sure, the giant cube would be 4,416 feet tall (a little over .8 miles on every side) but the Burj Khalifa measures up at 2,723 feet so it’s sort of in spitting distance. And, yeah, everyone would only have a coffin’s amount of space—but the point is we could probably (eventually, maybe, possibly) build such a structure.

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But that’s just a silly fun thought exercise. An even more silly and fun thought exercise is thinking about the number of people we can cram in the structures we’ve already built, or actually had plans to build. Indoor stadiums top off at 114,000 people (the Rungrado Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea), but Nazi Germany had plans to build the Volkshalle after World War II, and that could do 180,000. Outdoor stadiums could squeeze 235,000 like at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway but again Nazi Germany had plans to make the Deutsches Stadion in Nuremberg, Germany and that would hold 405,000 people.

If you just think of other structures and do some math to figure out how many people can fit in them, that’s when things get crazy:

  • Great Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia - 4,000,000 people
  • Tesla Gigafactory - 2,650,000
  • Crystal Island in Moscow, Russia - 12,500,000 people
  • Boeing Everett Factory in Washington -40,831,000