I woke up one morning with a thought about the quantity of ancestors I would have if I walk back to Jesus times. Assuming I go back 30 generations there should be close to 1 billion ancestors of mine. This has to be some kind of paradox since I’m certain 1 billion human souls weren’t alive in the yonder of 0-39AD. I decided to work the opposite way and ask myself “How many human beings would it take that, if all were buried in the ground at the end of their happy life it would make the United States a complete graveyard?”. I expanded this though to wonder at what year that would occur, too.
Surface Area of the United States
The United States has a total area of 3,809,525 square miles, encompassing 3,532,316 square miles of land and 277,209 square miles of water, placing it among the five largest nations in terms of area. Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia are contiguous; these along with Alaska, are located in North America.
https://data.census.gov/profile?g=010XX00US
Dimensions of a Cemetery Plot
The average size of a burial plot in the United States is 8 feet long and 2 and a half feet wide. For larger people, a 9 feet long by 4 feet wide burial plot may be available.
https://www.trigard.com/vault-dimensions/
Population of the United States
Currently at 341,257,927. This information isn’t really needed for my computation. The information below, however, is golden.
- One birth every 9 seconds
- One death every 9 seconds
- One international migrant (net) every 23 seconds
- Net gain of one person every 21 seconds
https://www.census.gov/popclock
Cremation vs Burial
From sources, recent statistics make this out to be 2/3rd Cremated to 1/3rd Direct Burial.
https://perfectmemorials.com/guides/popularity-cremation-vs-burial
Math Time
The United States has 3,532,316 mi2 of land, which translates to 98,475,318,374,400 ft2 at 1 mi2 = 27,878,400 ft2.
A Cemetery Plot seems to have two sizes depending on the size of the individual. I’m going to assume that Americans are gonna grow larger and larger and average the two to find out our average square footage on direct burying a human being: ((8 x 2) + (9 x 4)) / 2 = 26 ft2
This would create a possibility of 3,787,512,245,169 plots all across the US.
Assuming our Cremation/Direct Burial ratio remains unchanged for the life of this equation we would need to have created a total population of 11,362,536,735,507 unique individuals. This number reads as 11.3 Trillion.
According to the Census’ population clock we derive our “1 deaths every 9 seconds” to imply that 3,506,400 deaths are occurring every year.
And not changing for any of our previous statistics, such as larger burial plots for fatter people or less usable land due to mountains or water expanding, or people more preferring to be incinerated upon death instead of buried, and with all numbers we’ve calculated before…
It would take 3,240,513 years to fill the US with buried people, and thus turn the entire United States into a cemetery.