I cant make sense of it in my head.
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The blood vessels branch out into a smaller ones and penetrate almost all flesh. Within a millimeter or two there is a microscopic blood vessel everywhere. If you could separate them and string them together, the chain would be quite long. But I can’t say how many miles. Think how a net is made from a thread or rope. It’s a dense maze, that takes a big spool of thread to weave. A body is 3 dimensional, so it would be equivalent to multiple nets stacked.
Across 0.6m wide space, you can parallely place 60000000 wires of 0.00000001 m thickness each having 1 metre length so that their combined thickness covers the 0.6m.
Now add all their individual lengths. How much do you get? 60, 000 kilometers.
Same with human blood vessels, just tangled with each other left & right.
The vast vast majority of your blood vessels aren’t arteries or veins, it is capillaries. Microscopic vessels barely wide enough for red blood cells to travel through single file that essentially weave between every layer of cells in your body.
You can hold 600ft of twine in your hand. You need a forklift to hold 600ft of hose.
The small part of blood vessels are called capillaries most of them are so small a single blood cell can pass through them at once.
Most living g tissues are within 1-3 cells with of a capillary
The are only 5-10 micrometers wide. Human head hair is 80 to 100 micrometers wide. So if you put them side by side you have 8 to 20 capillaries. Bot both are 3D so the cross section area is 8^2=64 to 20^2×400 times more. If we pick the average of 7.5 and 90 we get 12x and 144x
Lest say 10 x with and 100x area for hair
On average a human body has 100,000 hair on the head.
60,000 miles is 96,560km less say 100,000 km. That means you need to have 1 km long hair for the total length to be 100,000km. But if every hair is replaced by 144 capillaries you only need 1000/144 = a 6.9-meter-long bundle thick as all human head hair.
1-meter long human head hear results in 100km total head hear length and capillaries are a lot thinner.
All hair on the head does not have a large total correction. You look at how small it gets it is when a person with a long hard put comment around it like a scrunchie.
Silk has an average diameter of 10-12 micrometers so capillaries are a bit smaller.
So if you have a lot of very thin fiber and a relativity short rope the total fiber length can still be enormous.
You also have enough DNA to stretch to the sun and back 2000 times, it’s crazy isn’t it?
Imagine your body as a big city with roads and streets that carry cars and people all around. In a similar way, our body has a network of tiny tubes called blood vessels that carry blood to different parts of our body. Just like there are many roads and streets in a city, our body has a lot of blood vessels.
Now, let’s imagine that all the blood vessels in your body are laid out end to end, like a really long road. This road would be super long, even longer than going around the Earth several times! That’s why we say it’s like having 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body.
But don’t worry, you don’t have to imagine all those blood vessels inside you because they are very tiny and hidden. They help the blood, which carries oxygen and nutrients, to travel all around your body and keep you healthy. It’s pretty amazing how our body works, isn’t it?
Who the hell measured these out? Must have been one hell of a tape measure!
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Really tiny things can be stretched out for incredibly long distances if arranged end-to-end on a single axis. But live in a 3 dimensional world and those things occupy far less space when arranged in their natural state filling a volume.
It’s just geometry. There’s nothing particularly special about blood vessels or the human body, you can do it with just about any matter. Theoretically you could tear strips off a piece of A4 paper and make it many thousands of miles long too, as long as those strips were thin enough.
If you take a stack of printer paper ( 500 sheets ) and just place each sheet (21×29.7cm) end to end using it’s longer side ( 29.7cm times 500 sheets ) you’re going to get a sheet of 21cm by 14,850cm (148meters), that’s about two-thirds as tall as the Golden Gate Bridge.
When you look at stack of 500 paper you wouldn’t probably intuitively assume that it’s that long if you place each sheet end to end. Same goes for blood vessels. If you just put everything end to end, each ramification and so forth, you’re going to get something really long.
Another way to imagine is taking each branch/twig/root/etc of a tree and just lay it out in a straight line. It’s going to be longer than what you’d initially think it would be.
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