why is the average density of human 985kg per cubic meter, when no one weighs 985 kg per cubic meter?
In: Physics
On top of the other answers, the [“database of biological numbers”](https://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/bionumber.aspx?s=n&v=3&id=109718) by Harvard says that the human body mean volume is roughly 65 liters (a cubic meter has 1000 liters).
1 cubic meter is a seriously large amount of space compared to a human. It’s a box roughly 3.3 feet along each edge, but completely filled in. Humans may be twice that high (roughly), but are a lot skinnier and have a lot of empty space around us, like between our two legs.
985 kilos (about 2170 pounds) for a human that completely fills a box that big all the way through… yeah that sounds about right.
Also, 1 tonne (1000 kilos) of water is exactly 1 cubic meter in size, by definition. If a human is made mostly of water, then that also sounds reasonable.
Humans weigh a lot less, but also are a lot smaller than 1 cubic meter. Mathematically it’s more like 0.1 cubic meters, so dividing by 0.1 is like multiplying by 10 making a big number in the end.
People do weigh about 985kg/m3. It’s just that no human has a cubic meter of volume. Ten 98.5kg people would have about 1 cubic meter of volume.
Mainly because no one has a volume of a cubic meter. It seems like a small space, but if you empty lungs, stomach, compress everything down, a human fits in a much smaller cube than 1x1x1 m. So if you found a human that somehow did occupy that much space, he/she would weigh about that much. It’s also not hard to imagine when you realize we are made mostly of water. We have bones which are denser and fat which is less dense… on average you get about the density of water 1000 kg/m3
It’s math, although typically you see it in g/cm^3 which is a little easier.
But yeah, I mean if you got enough humans together and stuffed them in a cubic meter…
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