What is big?
The average hight of a male is between 160 cm in southeast Asian countries to 183 cm in the Netherlands. For women, the average hight is between 152 cm in South Asia and Guatemala and 170 cm in Latvia. Are you big if you are taller than the average? A football field compared to a human is a lot bigger. With a length of 105 meters, it is 58 times bigger than men and 61 times bigger then women. Are you still big, just because you are slightly taller than the average man or woman is?
In this article, we are going to compare the size of ants, football fields and human to the earth.
In order to do so, we have to get the size clear, that we are going to use.
I am going to use an average of 1.7 meters for women and 1.8 meters for men. A football field has a length of 105 meters and a wide of 68 meters and an ant has a size of 1.4 centimeters, which is0.014 converted into meters.
Before I am going to start, I want you to take a minute and write down your guesses for the following questions.
What is the diameter of the earth in humans?
How big is the earth surface in football fields?
How many times could all ants of the world surround our planet?
You think you are close? Lets find it out!
The world has a diameter of 12.742 kilometers or 12.742.000 meters. Since one man is 1,8 meters tall and a woman 1,7 meters, the diameter of the earth is as big as 7.078.888 men or 7.495.294 women. That is not even 10% of the world population. You thought it is more?
Lets check how it looks like with the earth surface. The earth has an area of 510.100.000 square kilometers. A football field has a size of 7.140 square meters. Since we want to compare square kilometers with square meters, we have to calculate, how many square meters the earth has. We do that by multiplying the km2 by 1 million. So the earth surface is 510.100.000.000.000 square meters big. When we take this number and divide it by the square meters of a football field, we now how many football fields would fit on the earth:
510.100.000.000.000m2
At the surface of our earth, would fit 71.442.577.030 football fields. Imagine running one round around a field, that is over 71 billion times as big as a normal football field. How long would you need?
After comparing the area of the world with the area of a football field, there is not much left we can compare. But we still have the circumference of the earth. The earth has an average circumference of 40.030 kilometers. This are also 40.030.000 meters. In the beginning, we said that an ant has a size of 0.014 meters. So how many ants would it take to surround the world? When we divide the circumference of the earth by the size of one ant, we get a total of 2.859.285.714. It would take almost 3 billion ants. Since studies have come to the conclusion that there are over 20 quadrillion (20.000.000.000.000.000) ants in the world, they could orbit the earth not once but almost 7 thousand times. Imagine a 30 meter wide carpet around the whole world. That is what ants surrounding the earth 7 thousand times would look like.
Not only kids think, that the world is the biggest thing existing. And how could you believe, that there is something, that is even bigger, when it is already hard to picture how big the world is. But indeed there is something, that is a lot bigger. And when I say a lot, I mean A LOT. The universe! In order to define the size of our universe, we even had to define a new unit of measurement. The light years. One light year is not a time unit. It is the distance, that light travels in 365 days, which is 9,46 billion kilometers. But for now, I am going to use light years as unit to measure the universe. The universe is approximately 93 billion light years big. Since this article is about comparing the size of the world to different things, we also have to compare it to the universe. But this time, I will spare you from the calculations, because the number wasn’t even in my vocabulary. The earth, that we live on, fits 300 nonillion times into the universe. One nonillion is a 1 with 57 zeros next to it.
I am going to ask you again: Do you still think that you are big, just because you are a little bit taller than the average man or woman? Or do you think, that the earth is big? For me it all depends on what you compare it with. If you compare yourself to an ant, than you are huge. But compared to the earth, you are tiny. The same with our planet. The earth might be big compared to a human, but it is very tiny compared to the universe.
I hope that all the numbers didn’t scare you to much and you enjoyed this article.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/ameisen-weg-rossameise (27.02.2019)
https://www.medicinenet.com/height_men/article.htm (Melinda Ratini, DO, 3/31/2022)
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321132 (By Lana Barhum on March 6, 2018)
https://www.geo.de/geolino/frage-der-woche/13323-quiz-frage-der-woche-wie-gross-ist-die-erde
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/12/how-many-ants-live-on-earth-at-least-20-quadrillion-scientists-say/ (by Shannon Banks on 12 December 2022)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe (10 May 2023)