Q My 6-year-old son randomly asked me: How many people can fit into Australia? – Hannah
A This is an interesting question because there are so many different approaches we can take to find an answer to it. Let’s try some different models.
The most efficient way to fit people into Australia – the way we might best fit people into a phone box, for example – is to make them all stand erect together, shoulder to shoulder, back to front, packed in like standing sardines.
According to the body proportions detailed by American sculptor Avard Fairbanks, the adult male has a shoulder width of around 45.7cm and an adult female of around 36.6cm.
Because the dimensions of a male and female adult human differ slightly, we’ve based our calculations on a 50:50 ratio of males to females. Australia is 7.69 million square kilometres in area, so if we use the human sardine model we’d fit 39 trillion – 39,000,000,000,000! – people into Australia (as long as we
