The Most Optimal Social Distance
If you had people maintaining 2 metres of distance away from every other person’s own personal space and arranged enough of them in a grid, each person on average would occupy a 4 metres by 4 metres square taking up 16 square metres. At the beginning of the US lockdowns in March 2020 the world population was estimated to be 7.8 billion people, so this grid would take up 124.8 billion square metres, or about 125 thousand square kilometres, which means everybody could approximately fit in the land area of the State of North Carolina. Far cry from everybody fitting into Rhode Island for the synchronous jump experiment but desperate times call for desperate measures.
But, say you, the social distance one requires is not a uniform 4m by 4m square, but rather a circle with a radius of 2 meters, and to that I say you are absolutely correct.
The most efficient way to pack 3 circles would be to arrange them in a triangle pattern, not a square, such that each circle is touching the other two. You can then expand this by adding a fourth circle opposite the third touching the other two, and subsequently adding circles onto the chain touching two at the end.
In a large enough area what is important is being able to fill open space as tightly as possible, and the lost area on the edges becomes less significant. Thus packing in a triangle pattern is more efficient in the long run than packing in a square pattern even if it doesn’t look that way at first.
With a large enough area you can ignore the edge cases and say that each circle takes up approximately 4m by 3.5m or 14m², with 7.8 billion people that is ~109 billion square meters or 109,000 square kilometres, or approximately the size of Tennessee, which happens to be right next door so not too inconvenient to get everyone to move over from North Carolina to rearrange themselves.
An astute observer would note that in order to keep people 2 metres distanced, it is actually not necessary for both people to keep 2 metres each away, as that actually keeps people 4 metres apart. The circles need not lie tangent, rather the center of one circle should lie on the edge of another. This approximates into each person only needing to keep a circle of 1 metre away from the edge of another circle provided the other person also maintains 1 metre distance away from all the other circles. This new information means each person would only take 2m by 1.75m or 3.5 metres square, which for 7.8 billion people works out to 27.3 billion square metres or 27,300 square kilometres. By land area that is close to Maryland which is 25,142 square kilometres, but by total area Maryland is 32,313 square kilometres. What is the difference? Well total area includes lakes and other internal waters, while land area is only the stuff you could stand on, which is what we want for our purposes. If you could just take a bunch of boats and stand in the middle of a lake then Massachusetts, with a total area of 27,336 square kilometres is closest, but subtracting water area leaves you with just 20,202 square kilometres.
But say you could stand on a bunch of boats in the middle of the ocean, exactly how much space could each person get in order so that everyone can be the most socially distanced as possible? The surface area of the planet is 510 million square kilometres, which means each of the 7.8 billion people would get their 0.065 square kilometres (65,000 square metres) of it. That is approximately a square with sides of 255 meters each (which for simplicity we are only going to use squares), meaning if we set off a good chunk of the population on dinghies we could get everybody about a quarter kilometre away from each other. If we restrict ourselves to land area, that is only about 149 million square kilometres, which is a humbler 0.019 square kilometres, (19,000 square metres) which is approximately a square with sides of 138 metres. Therefore if we were to be nice and not send people into the ocean and instead only sent people out into the middle of the Sahara or some Antarctica glacier, we could get everybody more than a 100 metre dash away from each other.
Might be a more descriptive to use football fields like the media always likes, but the thing is I don’t actually know how long a football field is so the omnipresent usage of it has never been that helpful. Turns out they are 100 yards which is 91 metres, but get this, a Canadian football field is 150 yards, which is 137 metres long, which is perfect for describing the amount I am trying to get you to visualize, so if you know how long a Canadian Football field is … well we could get everybody that far away from each other. So now you know that as long as any virus cannot travel a Canadian football field it would be theoretically possible to keep everyone far enough apart to stop its spread from literally any people at all. Makes me feel safer already.
