Achievement Unlocked: Stats in the blood...

Sometimes I think about blood...

Assuming there are closing in on seven billion people on the Earth and the average blood volume per person is 4 litres/1 gallon of blood.

A gallon equates to 0.133 cubic feet. So if we multiply 7,000,000,000 x 0.133 we find that there are 931,000,000 cubic feet of blood on the earth.The cube root of 931,000,000 is 976.4 feet.

So all the warm fresh human blood on earth can be contained within a cube whose dimensions are less than 1000ft on each side and would be perhaps the greatest modern art masterpiece ever. Except nobody would be alive to appreciate it. Obviously.

Subsequently someone asked for the measurement in Olympic swimming pools, so naturally i was happy to work this out. One Olympic swimming pool holds 660,000 gallons | 7,000,000,000 gallons / 660,000 gallons is 10,606 swimming pools of blood. but why stop there?

What area would these 10,606 swimming pools cover? The measurements given for an OSP are 164x 82x 6.6ft. Unfortunately 10,606 doesn't break down into factors very well, in fact it only has four divisors; 1, 2, 5303, 10606. So we'll need to lay our pools out in a strip 2 pools wide (164ft) and 5303 pools long (869,692ft). So our 6.6ft thick slab of blood covers an area of 142,629,488 sqft.

Finally, someone else also pointed out that none of these figures take in to account the blood kept in stasis at banks and hospitals around the world for use in transfusions etc. Nobody publishes those numbers so i can't factor it in and anyway, including all that blood would just be silly....

References
World Population http://www.worldometers.info/
Blood Volume http://www.enotes.com/science-fact-finder/human-body/how-much-blood-average-human-body
Gallon to volume ratio http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+Gallon+in+cubic+feet
Olympic SP Dimensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement#Olympic-size_swimming_pool