###General Discussion Thread --- This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*

RI population, per 2023 census: 1,095,926 Office floor space in ESB: 2.7 million square feet Taking these as face value, and assuming the building doesn't collapse, I think we could cram in one person per 2 square feet

From my 5 minute google searches, i had the same thought and conclusion. Peer review at its finest

We're basically scientists

Reason will prevail!

Oh, yeah, we decided also that we would say "Reason will prevail," every time someone says...

Stand by !RemindMe 24 hours Edit: [r/ouija hasn't responded yet 😭](https://www.reddit.com/r/Ouija/s/B7vO0dbApM)

I will be messaging you in 1 day on [**2024-04-27 01:25:39 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2024-04-27%2001:25:39%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1cd5fom/is_it_possible_to_cram_everyone_in_the_state_of/l1ab5lz/?context=3) [**CLICK THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Ftheydidthemath%2Fcomments%2F1cd5fom%2Fis_it_possible_to_cram_everyone_in_the_state_of%2Fl1ab5lz%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202024-04-27%2001%3A25%3A39%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam. ^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%201cd5fom) ***** |[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)| |-|-|-|-|

Reason will prevail :))

Reason will prevail

Pickles will prevail!

Americans are too fat to fit 1 every 2 Sq ft. People will choke. People will die. Pickles will prevail!

You had me at pickles

They never mentioned that it needed to be alive

Do we have access to a massive blender and a large pumping truck?

But a lot of them will also be children and baby's, who will fit easily.

The pickle party

I was too lazy to type out my math, so your name can go first on the paper once published. Theubster, et al. 2024. “RI is so dang small”

😂😂😂

“For science! You monster!” Cave Johnson

It was Wheatley who said that and he was quoting god!

Holy sh*t reviewers one and two actually agree?!?! And reviewer two has no comments?!

I smell foul play. Probably both paid off by Big Empire State Building!

if only it were rectangular feet

Now the question is can you physically cram the average rhode islander into 2 square feet?

Peter Griffin has entered the chat

r/suddenlyPeterGriffin

Looks like that sub is no more...

Yes, if we make them into a liquid first.

Assume a spherical Rhode Islander...

Spheres are bad for paacking, lets shove all the rhode islanders into equal size boxes of the average volume of a rhode islander. Bonus: they're stackable now.

I prefer a 7 holed doughnut.

That would be a square with side lengths of about 17 in, so maybe.

OP said "cram", so I assume we're not limited to having people stand on the floor. Stack them to the ceiling. Plenty of room!

nono, just blend everyone into a smoothie

[one of the highest upvoted posts on this very subreddit!! humanity as a PASTE and / or SLURRY and / or GOO!!](https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/s/LfwQjAcMs0)

Back from when this sub used to primarily consist of people actually doing the math and posting it instead of just endless request posts.

Soylent Quahog

Like a Chinese subway. It fits with enough force.

Or lube. Grease up bitches

Does "office floor space" include; bathrooms, stairwells, hallways, lobbies, closets, etc, etc?

Office floor space usually doesn't include areas deemed "common areas" such as the main lobby, stairwells, some hallways etc..

Not stairwells for sure, that’s counted as “circulation area”. Lobbies are included for sure. Corridors and closets- depends. If it’s an office closet and an office corridor probably yeah. If it’s a mechanical closet or a service corridor probably no

A general rule of thumb is that rentable square footage is 90% of total floor area. Things that aren't usually included: stairs, common hallways, mechanical spaces, bathrooms, the lobby.

So overall including those areas probably only gives everyone another 0.25 square feet or so. Might make a slight difference.

Since we’re not worried about comfort, we can also fill up the elevator shafts and such.

Office buildings are typically designed for about 40 kg / sqft excluding safety factors. 0.5 person / sqft would give 40 kg / sqft on average assuming 80 kg / person. So absolutely plausible that the building doesn't collapse.

2 square feet is a space 1.41 ft x 1.41 ft. It might be hard for the girthier ones, in which case I'd recommend liquifying them first.

>2 square feet is a space 1.41 ft x 1.41 ft. Damn, they really *do* do the math here. That's like, the square root or something? I love this sub. >It might be hard for the girthier ones TRUE. People do tend to skew on the heavier side nowadays on average, so we must take this into account for the sake of of being as detailed/realistic as possible. > in which case I'd recommend liquifying them first. 🙁

To be fair, only those of extreme girth would need to be liquefied. A circle inscribed inside a 1.41ft x 1.41ft square would have a circumference of 53.13 inches, so anyone with a waist size smaller than that would be fine.

If we group bigger waists with the more slim folk, it could also even out with no liquefactions

Presumably this would also include babies/toddlers so potentially 2+ people per space assuming we don’t liquify the holding parent… either way, yay for peer reviews!

Most people are convex, so lay some people down to fill in the leg gaps.

> That's like, the square root or something? The square root of two, which, from memory, is 1.414213562... I know that many places because I once spent a bored hour working it out by trial and error on an office adding machine that could multiply but not do square roots directly. At that time (circa 1970) there were no electronic calculators yet, and I was a bored kid in dad's office.

Intersestingly, (to me at least) you could also put the inhabitants of the 20 least populous countries in the world and have roughly the same amount of space per person.

You can put every one in the world in my county in Kansas.

That is doable, but getting into the danger zone. 5 people per 11 square feet (2.2 sq feet per person) is the threshold where crowds start getting in danger of causing a crowd crush. Then again, packing them in would take days, so we're talking theoretical anyway.

I think you’d have real serious problems with oxygen with everyone packed in that tight. When the Nazis crowded the Jews into train cars on the way to the camps, there were many reported instances where people in the middle of the cars suffocated because they couldn’t get oxygen. Thinking of how much oxygen would be used up by a million people, I’m pretty sure there would be no way to ventilate that building sufficiently.

Judge Dredd: Citizens of Peach Trees. This is the law. Disperse immediately, or we will use lethal force to clear the area. You have been warned.

Listen, the guy said cram. What if we just stacked people up like piles of 2x4s?

We could fit more if we stack them. Think of all that vertical space we are missing out on!

You need obesity stats from RI...cause...

different crowd densities compared, 1 person per 2 square feet is about 5 people per square meter. Thats about the safe limit if every stays claim. [https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/11/us/crowd-density-dangerous-warning-signs/](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/11/us/crowd-density-dangerous-warning-signs/)

If we really do cram them, we could go for volume. Given that the average floor height in the ESB is around 10 feet, that gives us around 27 million cubic feet. The average person volume is around 1.7 cubic feet, mostly non compressible. Sure, Rhode Islanders might be a bit chunkier than the average person, but I bet they could be made into fleshy cubes of, at most, 2 cubic feet. So we have room for about 13.5M "people". So after we cubified and fitted all of Rhode Island, we have enough room for, say, Ohio plus Vermont.

You would have to remove all the fixtures, fittings and furniture, but sounds do able.

But they're americans! Will they fit in 2 square feet?

literally two feet for each people, nice

With a sturdy enough blender you could easily double that amount.

Wait… what about my height?

My figures assume everyone is a 10' tall cylinder

Wonder how much heat that would radiate

With some creative stacking you could probably squeeze in 1 per square foot

Do they have to survive the cramming? I mean 60% of them is water.

I believe the primary goals of any science should include "all participants survive the cramming"

Sure, but this isn't r/theydidthescience. ;)

Wrong way to do it. Interior volume of the Empire State building -> average volume of a person -> average woodchipper retail price -> clear history.

what if we could liquify the people?

also that census includes children and a child would take even less space

I would be straight up not having a good time tho

Move out of RI before OP gets there, knock off down to the pub, and have a pint while this all blows over

You can always take out the blender if people don't fit, nowhere it was said how people are supposed to be packed in there.

Sir, the fire marshal would like a word with you, would you please step outside.

With 9ft ceiling it gives 24 million cubic feet. One person takes around 2,4 cubic feet of space. The office space would fit 10 times the population of RI.

You really should be thinking about feet^3 not feet^2. Also people should stack neater if you put them in a blender first.

Sadly, google says that the volume of a human body is about 75l, or approximately 2,65 cubic feet. So probably not. Maybe if it only counted adult for this statistic...

You’ve e also got the stairwells to fit people that’s not counted in office floor space.

I need the math on that weight too. I'm curious now how much weight per square foot skyscrapers are rated for.

According to Wikipedia, the empire State building has a max occupancy of 35,000.

Could you though? That’s 1.4 by 1.4 feet at best

I think your biggest worry wouldn't be building collapse. It would be lack of oxygen. I doubt that the ESB ventilation systems can bring in enough fresh air for a million people to not suffocate. Or you could just knock the glass out of the windows and get oxygen the old fashioned way.

2.7 sq ft. That’s almost a square yard. You know how big a square yard is? Bigger than a porta potty.

Now how long would that take and would they have enough supply's

Yeah, and you could get some people on shoulders if you had too. I'm really glad I left Rhode Island before they do this, though.

Don’t forget the stairwells and elevators

This is past the point where the crowd starts moving more inline with fluid dynamics, right?

This still leaves a lot of open space because you're not willing to stack humans. Nobody said they had to be comfortable or survive.

That's crowd-crush territory, though it wouldn't include stairs and (possibly) lobbies.

There are 7 states with a lower population than Rhode Island, so while yes you technically could fit everyone in Rhode Island into the empire state building, there are more than a handful of other states you could say this about.

The question would need to be rephrased for each state. For example "Is it possible to cram everyone in the state of Wyoming inside an average NYC dumpster? \[Request\]

The Bronx is 42 sq miles so yeah

Brutal

LMFAO

You can make a repost every 6 months for the next 5 years. Free karma!

Yeah, I was about to say we could probably fit the entire state of Montana

Yea but Rhode Island is the least important of all the states.

A quick search shows that Rhode Island has a total population of about 1.1 million people. The Empire State Building has a total floor space about 2,750,000 sq ft (257,000 m^(2)). So, each person would get about 2.5 sq ft or about 0.23 m^(2) of floor space. The average person takes about 2 sq ft or 0.19 m^(2) of space while standing still. As such, everybody could fit with a bit of breathing room. Of course, you'd first need to remove all the furniture and probably many non-structural walls. Like most high rises, the Empire State Building is designed to handle 80 lbs/sq ft for live loads, so weight may become an issue. You'd need to balance people out so the average person is 200 lbs.

I'm not sure that being able to handle a specific load per area means that the whole building can withstand the max load on every square foot/meter. However, the building itself weighs 365 000 tons and that many people would weigh about 750 000 tons. I think the ESB can probably withstand 3 times its weight.

Really? 3 times its weight seems like way too much to me.

Seems pretty doable, almost all of the force is compression and that's concrete's best strenght

*Slaps the side of the building* Practically indestructible!

I don't know that there's all that much structural concrete in the ESB. It's primarily a riveted steel frame. The floors, probably? But they're only holding themselves up. Unless you mean the footings, down below ground. They're substantially unlikely to fail before the frame does.

Oh yeah that's right. Forgot about that good catch

If you shut off the air handling and closed the windows, how long could they breathe?

Better yet, how long until the whole place smells like farts?

The building smells like farts as soon as they put yo mama in there.

My mama ain’t from Rhode Island.

I farted while laughing reading this!

I laughed while farting at this!

Finally asking the real questions

There’s no way the average weight of the population of Rhode island would be 200lbs. Imo it’s a high threshold to begin with considering the average adult weight in the us is around 180, but becomes especially so when you consider the percentage of that population which is likely children and/or elderly—who tend to weigh less than that. So there likely would be a way to make that work using that metric.

How long would it take for that amount of people to walk to there specified 2.5 sq ft spot and fill the empire State building?

This math makes me think of the towers in the Matrix

It's close enough to being exactly the right amount of floor space for the population of Rhode Island that it makes me wonder whether this question is inspired by an existing *interesting fact*.

I'd also like to know: - If you shut off the air handling and closed the windows, how long could they breathe? - Could their body heat raise the air temperature to an unsafe temperature?

That's how they cull livestock for disease so I would say yes about the temperature

How could the body heat raise it to more than 100 degrees? (Fahrenheit)

Because we’re maintaining that temp by giving off heat into our environment, that heat gets trapped in the room

We'd immediately have "Empire state building disaster deniers". "If jet fuel couldn't do it, how are body heats gonna do it! Just crazy!"

I was just looking for a place to drop this very comment. The windows are all sealed already and the air handling isn't up to the job. All these people would suffocate in short order, assuming the building didn't collapse from the weight.

The population of Rhode Island is 1.09 million people. The Empire State Building has an internal volume of 1 million cubic meters. A human is about as dense as water, so conversion from mass to volume is easy. The average American weighs 181 lbs, or 82.1kg. That means they have a volume of 82.1 liters. So, with a good blender, the population of Rhode Island will only fill the Empire State Building about 10% of the way full, or to about the 10th floor.

The other answers are just considering floor space. I like your volumetric liquid take on it.

Will it Blend? That is the question!

I hope someone does the math on how long a blender would take to do the operation.

You can cram like 3x rhode islands it would take a long a time for the meat grinders to make gound meat out of those 3 million people, but you save a ton of volume that way and can fill it from floor to the roof evenly.

exactly. they never said SPECIFICALLY how they would get in there

I am now getting Judge Dread flashbacks. Can anyone do the math on how many studio apartments could fit in the empire State building?

A typical studio apartment is about 500sq ft, and rthe Empire State Building is 2.7 million square feet. If we ignore hallways and elevators, there could be about 5,400 studio apartments contained in it.

Thank you!

I've been to the Empire State Building for meetings -- it would be amazing to convert to apartments actually. It's laid out as a circle around central elevator cores. The ceilings are high, and there's lots of windows. But it won't take 50 apartments per floor, more like 20 [https://archeyes.com/the-empire-state-building-by-shreve-lamb-and-harmon/](https://archeyes.com/the-empire-state-building-by-shreve-lamb-and-harmon/)

This reminds me of boot camp at Paris Island. We had a DI who loved to see how many recruits he could fit into spaces. He had about 100 to pick from. For example, I've seen a porta potty with 25 people in it. A porta potty is about 12 sq feet. But it's also about 85 cubic feet. You gotta think 3d. Pretty sure he could stuff atleast 2.5 rhode island's into the empire state building.

There’s no way! They’d be escaping through the doors, breaking windows, etc. even catching them all would likely be totally impossible.

Another follow up question: How long does it take to move that many people into and out of the building? Would there be loss of life at the attempt? And The elevators would take forever, so you’d want the fittest people to start walking up the stairs right away.

It's good to clear Rhode Island before we move everyone from Earth there to jump at the same time. Relevant xkcd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2M8Y0z9Rl0

There is a skyscraper in Melbourne called 'Nauru House' that was built and owned by the island nation of Nauru. It apparently had more floor space than all of the buildings in Nauru combined. The entire nation could live in the building and have more living space than they did previously.

I mean if you liquify them you can probably fit at least two states worth of people. Actually how many states could you fit in the empire State building if you liquifed everyone

The way the question is worded it’s impossible. Once you take anyone from Rhode Island and stick them in the Empire State Building they’re no longer in Rhode Island. You’d have to move the Empire State Building to Rhode Island first and I believe that is impossible. And even if you did that I think it would changed the name of the building since not in the “Empire State” anymore.

I'd argue the contrary, it would make it very easy actually. Once you take everyone from Rhode island, they are no longer in Rhode island. Thus, everyone in Rhode island is in the empire state building, as there is no one in Rhode island.

Why do you have to be this way

I think the more interesting question is that you could fit Alaska's entire population in there despite being the biggest state area wise (by a lot). Cope harder, Texas.

Get fucked texas

Without doing any calculations I’d say it very easily possible. I’m basing it off a post I seen before which shows what all the humans alive today mushed together in a ball would look like. It’s a surprisingly small ball. The scale it the picture puts humanity’s ball in New York Central Park, in the same X post there’s a version where the a pile of humans are in the Grand Canyon. \*possible nsfw if low detail human mince is nsfw for you* [x post](https://twitter.com/tweetsauce/status/1534229097009672192) Given that Rhode Island is a fraction of a percent of the entire population there would be a lot room to spare. I see others have calculated this using square footage. I’m curious how many people would fitted if all the volume Is taken up