If you stand each American in a space that is 5 ft on 4 sides (square), you have each one in a comfortable standing space. In other words, each person has a bit of room to the left and right and to the front and rear. Not too many are wider than 3 ft across, nor deeper than 3 ft deep. We add 2 feet in each dimension to get our five feet.
If we then make a row of people one thousand people across, we would stretch about one mile wide. (5280 feet = mile.) If we also make a column one thousand people deep, then we would be about a mile deep. If we fill in each row with a column, then we'd have one thousand people wide and one thousand people deep. Add that up and we've got one million people in that one square mile.
The square root of 300 = about 17.321 OR 17.321 x 17.321 = ~300.
Therefore, if we can get one million people in a one square mile area, then we can get 300 million people in their above-mentioned 5 ft area, in a square that is 17.3 miles wide and about 17.3 miles deep. (Please don't ask why we'd do this? :>)
That is about one fourth the size of the average-sized county in the average-sized state of Ohio in which I live.
In short, MATHEMATICALLY (certainly not practically) we can put the entire population of the USA in an area one fourth the size of an average county in an average state.
Heaven help the guy in the middle of that crowd who has to pee.
I'm claustrophobic. If you put me somewhere with only five feet separating me on each side from even a hundred people, our population will soon be back to 299,999,999. The idea of being around that many other people gives me chest pains just to read it posted.
I like the statistic that says (correctly) that if everyone in the world stood shoulder to shoulder, the entire population of the planet would fit in Jacksonville, Florida.
Also, if everyone were grouped into a family of four taking up a 50 x 150 sq. foot lot, the entire planet would fit into the state of Texas.
Rather an interesting discussion. I have to agree with Bill that I'm not sure were any better off. Both my wife and I salary pushes us in the "high wage" income group on a national average, but we also live in an area that is extremely high cost. Taxes, gas, food, clothing all cost more than the rural areas.
For example, here the average home runs $700,000-$800,000. While these homes might be more fancier than the home I grew up in, my dad only paid $10,000 for his house. Grant it he didn't make the same salary that I make but there is absolutely no way I would be able to aford a house in this area. Even with both our incomes, had we not bought our house when we did, we would have been priced out of the market or had to resort to one of those riskier loan strategy. Somehow these numbers don't seem to tell the whole story.
That being said, could we put all those people in North Carolina rather than Ohio? It too cold. And you better put me on the end of the cube-closest to the bathroom. :O)