World Population Meatball

About

The World Population Meatball, also known as the Sphere of Human Goo or the Forbidden Meatball, is a photoshopped illustration that originated on Reddit in August 2021, depicting an image of a 7.88 billion-person meatball placed in New York's Central Park for scale. After the post went viral, the meatball was used as an exploitable image macro in memes and other jokes online.

Origin

On August 8th, 2021, Redditor Kiwi2703 posted the original image of the meatball to the subreddit /r/theydidthemath^[1] with a long caption explaining the image's significance (shown below). The "sphere of human goo," as they described it, received roughly 52,400 upvotes and 3,000 comments over roughly five days.

If you blended all 7.88 billion people on Earth into a fine goo (density of a human = 985 kg/m3, average human body mass = 62 kg), you would end up with a sphere of human goo just under 1 km wide. I made a visualization of how that would look like in the middle of Central Park in NYC.

Spread

In the days following, the viral image would be reposted to other platforms and referenced in memes. On August 9th, 2021, Twitter^[2] user @AnAngryOpossum posted the image and its caption (shown below), receiving roughly 28,000 likes and 2,600 retweets over roughly four days.

The screenshot of the Reddit post began circulating other platforms like Facebook,^[3] Funnyjunk^[4] and YouTube^[5] in the days following, as well as being reposted on other subreddits like /r/Cursed_Images.^[6] The image of the meatball would also get re-edited into new memes on Imgur^[7] and Instagram^[8] that formed around the absurd visual and its concept.

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References