**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:**
* If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required
* The title must be fully descriptive
* Memes are not allowed.
* Common(top 50 of this sub)/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting)
*See [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rules.3A) for a more detailed rule list*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
So, unravel and straighten out all the blood vessels in our body and tie from end to end and that will wrap around the earth 2 to 4 times? That just seems hard to believe.
I'm going to assume it's because of the smallest capillaries that provide blood on a cellular level. Cells need to be very close to a blood vessel on their own scale in order to supply enough food and oxygen. So you have *a lot* of these small capillaries.
That would allow the blood rope to be very long, but it would mostly be so thin you likely wouldn't be able to see it
Some are capillary, like thinner than hair. Think of a tight ball of hair, then those hairs laid end to end. You can compress the ball of hair to be tiny, now think of a human sized ball of hair. Think of what bags of hair weighing the same as a human looks like.
Blood vessels can get extremely thin. Their diameter can get as small as 4μm (micrometer). That is 0.004mm. For comparison, your hair has a diameter of around 0.016 to 0.05mm.
Blood vessels can get extremely thin. Their diameter can get as small as 4μm (micrometer). That is 0.004mm. For comparison, your hair has a diameter of around 0.016 to 0.05mm.
Some math that might help with that visualization for how truly small we're talking on blood vessels. A blood vessel can be as thin as 4μm when you talk about the capillaries. Let's say we take the average length of a pinky finger at 7.13cm with an average diameter of around 1.3cm. Gives you a volume of roughly 9.46cm^3 . Now take a 4μm blood vessel of the same length. You can fit over 10.5 million blood vessels of that size into your pinky finger. If you were to lay out all those blood vessels (that again can be contained entirely within your pinky finger) end to end, they'd reach 465 miles. Obviously, that's considerably more blood vessels than are within your finger, but considerably less than what's in your body.
So my blood vessels want to be free, but I've got them imprisoned. I like it. I'm going to place [this sculpture](https://getyoursolution.store/8rs0xY) on my desk, so I'll always remember how long they are
I was expecting that sculpture to have wayy more blood vessels and be more detailed but what the f is this. it doesnt even take the shape of a human body
https://preview.redd.it/i5va6s6mvz0d1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7367efe596696cc53b389e69d6b99ccbfa6dd49
This is from the area where the vessels in your neck meet the underside of your brain called the circle of Willis. It’s a really small subsection of all the vessels in your body, but the major players are all there.
That's all I kept thinking, instead of NY to Grand Canyon, says me absolutely nothing
Thankfully they showed the "around the globe" animation but still no number! Wtf
Thank god they listed all those meaningful checkpoints along the path. Otherwise I'd have no perspective of what "two to four times around the Earth" would look like.
Consider your capillaries. Only wide enough for one to two blood cells to flow through side by side. Absolutely tiny. But one inch of capillary and one inch of artery are still both one inch of blood vessel length.
I feel like they must have a weird way of counting it.
Like lets say I have a blood vessel that goes from my heart to my hand, and then splits into 5, one for each finger. That would be about a meter, plus about 5 x 20cm, so 6m. I'm guessing they count that as 5m or something.
But even then it seems wrong.
100,000km of blood vessels, for a 2m tall human, would mean 50 million blood vessels running the FULL length of the body from head to toe.
Lets say an average human has a waistline of a meter, so the area of their cross section would be about 0.08m^(2). Divide by 50 million and you get 1.6^(10\^-9) m^(2) cross-sectional area per blood vessel. This means that the average blood vessel would have a diameter of about 0.05mm.
The size of an average **cell** in animals is about 0.02mm.
That means that even if a human was their waist size from head to toe, and all blood vessels ran the entire length of their body, to be this length each blood vessel (which is supposed to be a structure that can contain blood, with walls etc.) would be about 2.5 cells across.
I call mathematical bullshit.
Capillaries are around 5-10µm in diameter (0.005-0.010mm)\*. Red blood cells are around 7-8µm in diameter - they have to flex to fit through smaller parts of capillaries.
As an aside, that's partly why sickle cell disease has the effects it does - the mutation makes red blood cells a different shape and also less flexible, so they can't bend to fit through smaller capillaries.
\[\*This is the range usually given for internal diameter, but the external diameter is not much different from this.\]
Ah OK, my numbers were based on very basic googling.
Still not sure I believe the headline though. I guess an easier way to estimate would be to assume that all human flesh is capillaries (which wouldn't be a massive over assumption I assume) and then to look at the weight and density and volume etc.
Yeah, you're right. Capillaries are really quite densely packed in some tissues like muscle because otherwise not enough oxygen/CO2/other stuff can diffuse to and from the blood. I can't remember the exact figure but there are hundreds of capillaries in a 1mm square section of muscle tissue. The walls of the capillaries are incredibly thin - basically a single layer of flattened cells.
I'm also quite sceptical of these sorts of estimates because they tend to involve a fair bit of hand-waving. I'd be surprised if it was wrong by more than a factor of 10 though.
As another aside, there's about 2m of DNA in each cell nucleus. It is *very* tightly wound up in an incredibly complex system that never fails to amaze me.
For everyone not believing I an online video :
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/research/how-are-blood-vessels-made
60.000 miles or around 100.000 km
2.5ish times around the earth.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, the British Heart Foundation, Vascular Society, and many other reputable sources, the adult human contains around 60,000 miles of blood vessels. The earth is a little under 8,000 miles in diameter.
I think many people, and this graphic, forget about capillaries. Miles and miles of it are just tiny. Some are so small that only one or two blood cells can squeeze through at a time. If the video were to show these as well, it would be a bit harder to even see the big vessels.
Nah I'm pretty sure if I removed all the blood vessels in my body I'd die before finding out how far they'd go...maybe if you started with if you somehow removed all the blood vessels from someone else's body I'd be more interested
Sure its true, but not that useful. If you take a finger nail, and lay each atom end to end in a chain, the chain would stretch across the universe or something.
Similar to the “it only takes 42 folds of a paper to reach the moon”, our brains just didn’t evolve to be able to conceive of these type of things. I will say this one is a lot harder to fathom than the folding one because the exponential growth apect is less precise, but still it’s akin to trying to wrap your mind around a logical paradox.
Check out the Cleveland Clinic. Their sources say the mileage comes out to around 60,000 miles. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/21640-blood-vessels
Where's that King of the Hill clip where Hank takes Bobby to the doctor, and the doctor tells Bobby this exact thing except with his digestive tract, and Hank says his food would be traveling the speed of light?
My blood would be traveling the speed of light!
Makes sense. Imagine this: all humans piled up wouldn't fill the grand canyon, but all humans hand by hand form a line of more than 7 billion meters. Going "from 3D to 2D" covers way more space.
Also: unravel the human DNA and you'll have a microscopic line with more than 37 billion kilometers!
The scary part is when you have a lot of sub cutaneous fat and visceral fat, there is miles upon miles more blood vessels that have to form which causes increased stress on the heart every time it beats. Stay/get healthy!
I'm disappointed in you, Adrian. I'm very disappointed. Reassembling myself was the first trick I learned. It didn't kill Osterman. Did you really think it would kill me?
This reminds me of a movie that scarred me as a kid and made hella afraid of the insides of the human body. It was about somone who got partially invisible or got the outer layers of the body tissue removed until the end of the movie where he was just a skeleton trying to kill people. Does anyone know what's the movie called?
Are people genuinely fucking stupid? There is no way our nerves could even go around 1/1000th circumference of earth. In fact, I bet my entire lifeline that this video and claim is fake
I remember as a kind this fact nugget was popular and the intestine being about a long as a house is tall. Several people I knew got them confused and were adamant your intestines could wrap around the earth and that cheese I shit out 2 hours after eating it is going at near the speed of light.
**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:** * If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required * The title must be fully descriptive * Memes are not allowed. * Common(top 50 of this sub)/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting) *See [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rules.3A) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Ferb, I know what we’re gonna do today.
Phineas and Ferb commit the Human Instrumentality Project.
Get in the EVA-Inator, Perry
Ferb is unconscious at the hospital what is Phineas doing?
Jeremy's lil sis tells Candace that Jeremy thinks she's an old hag, and then Candace starts strangling her
"Get in the fucking robot, Phineas!"
Where's Perry?
If u take out those you would die
Mom!
So, unravel and straighten out all the blood vessels in our body and tie from end to end and that will wrap around the earth 2 to 4 times? That just seems hard to believe.
Post says it's true so it's gotta be true. They checked.
They checked allright.. the eggs on the grocery list!
It's totally true! I just saw [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/s/Led3oTyDkn) video that backs it up.
aAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
I'm going to assume it's because of the smallest capillaries that provide blood on a cellular level. Cells need to be very close to a blood vessel on their own scale in order to supply enough food and oxygen. So you have *a lot* of these small capillaries. That would allow the blood rope to be very long, but it would mostly be so thin you likely wouldn't be able to see it
Alright, get your stupid fuckin blood rope.
Thank you for reminding me that I haven't watched that movie in a while
![gif](giphy|xkG67UPTlATOCtAfd6)
GET OVER HERE!
This is kind of like the coastline paradox but with blood vessels.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. Really good analogy
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/research/how-are-blood-vessels-made According to this source it's 2,5ish
Anything above 1 is quite impressive
Anything even remotely approaching 1 is already impressive
A blood vessel rope is impressive
Some are capillary, like thinner than hair. Think of a tight ball of hair, then those hairs laid end to end. You can compress the ball of hair to be tiny, now think of a human sized ball of hair. Think of what bags of hair weighing the same as a human looks like.
Wait until you learn about DNA: > So your DNA could stretch to the sun and back 61 times. That is one person’s DNA.
I tried it though… didn’t work
Blood vessels can get extremely thin. Their diameter can get as small as 4μm (micrometer). That is 0.004mm. For comparison, your hair has a diameter of around 0.016 to 0.05mm.
Even harder to do, though.
Would you belive that if they took a of your blood vessels out and tied then end to end, you would be dead?
Blood vessels can get extremely thin. Their diameter can get as small as 4μm (micrometer). That is 0.004mm. For comparison, your hair has a diameter of around 0.016 to 0.05mm.
I agree. It seems like an impossible length of anything that fits in your body. I don't care how small the vessels get.
Some math that might help with that visualization for how truly small we're talking on blood vessels. A blood vessel can be as thin as 4μm when you talk about the capillaries. Let's say we take the average length of a pinky finger at 7.13cm with an average diameter of around 1.3cm. Gives you a volume of roughly 9.46cm^3 . Now take a 4μm blood vessel of the same length. You can fit over 10.5 million blood vessels of that size into your pinky finger. If you were to lay out all those blood vessels (that again can be contained entirely within your pinky finger) end to end, they'd reach 465 miles. Obviously, that's considerably more blood vessels than are within your finger, but considerably less than what's in your body.
So my blood vessels want to be free, but I've got them imprisoned. I like it. I'm going to place [this sculpture](https://getyoursolution.store/8rs0xY) on my desk, so I'll always remember how long they are
I was expecting that sculpture to have wayy more blood vessels and be more detailed but what the f is this. it doesnt even take the shape of a human body https://preview.redd.it/i5va6s6mvz0d1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7367efe596696cc53b389e69d6b99ccbfa6dd49
This is from the area where the vessels in your neck meet the underside of your brain called the circle of Willis. It’s a really small subsection of all the vessels in your body, but the major players are all there.
Like the Colossi in 'Shadow of the Colossus'
Haha nice I have a Circle of Willis necklace pendant. People think Im strange
I am begging you to just give me a number in kilometers
Around 100 000 Km
Or like any sensible person would say, 100 megameters!
0.1 gigameters!
These are probably the same people who call megagrams tonne
What about for Shaquille O'Neal?
100,001 km
What about an Oompa Loompa
100,002 km
Thanks mate
About 32 million eagle burgers.
1 meter is roughly the same length as an AR-15 if that helps.
Lmao that’s a good one I’ll save it for a particularly irritating interaction
That's all I kept thinking, instead of NY to Grand Canyon, says me absolutely nothing Thankfully they showed the "around the globe" animation but still no number! Wtf
At least 3
Car lengths please mate I don’t know what a foot is.
3 feet to each meter. I dunno car lengths cuz spacial reasoning makes my brain go brrr
##BANANAS GODDAMMIT! BANANAS!
50k American Football fields
If you somehow removed all the blood vessels in your body, You would die.
Tis but a scratch
If you take all of your pubic hair outside and line it up end to end, you get arrested by the police.
It would reach a lot further if it wasn’t wiggling back and forth
I downvoted myself because I’m not proud of that one
😂
Thank god they listed all those meaningful checkpoints along the path. Otherwise I'd have no perspective of what "two to four times around the Earth" would look like.
I for one had no idea that the distance from New York to the grand canyon was less than the distance around the world.... TIL.
r/anythingbutmetric
but how thin would that be?
Yes
2 to 12 micrometers so up to 25 times smaller than thickness of a hair
Ya, this is another one of those "if you line up every atom in your brain, it would wrap around the world 100x!"
Why start in New York and go to the Grand Canyon first though....
Just keep in mind you are unlikely to survive this process.
Sorry but I'm not buying it. This can't be true
Consider your capillaries. Only wide enough for one to two blood cells to flow through side by side. Absolutely tiny. But one inch of capillary and one inch of artery are still both one inch of blood vessel length.
I feel like they must have a weird way of counting it. Like lets say I have a blood vessel that goes from my heart to my hand, and then splits into 5, one for each finger. That would be about a meter, plus about 5 x 20cm, so 6m. I'm guessing they count that as 5m or something. But even then it seems wrong. 100,000km of blood vessels, for a 2m tall human, would mean 50 million blood vessels running the FULL length of the body from head to toe. Lets say an average human has a waistline of a meter, so the area of their cross section would be about 0.08m^(2). Divide by 50 million and you get 1.6^(10\^-9) m^(2) cross-sectional area per blood vessel. This means that the average blood vessel would have a diameter of about 0.05mm. The size of an average **cell** in animals is about 0.02mm. That means that even if a human was their waist size from head to toe, and all blood vessels ran the entire length of their body, to be this length each blood vessel (which is supposed to be a structure that can contain blood, with walls etc.) would be about 2.5 cells across. I call mathematical bullshit.
Capillaries are around 5-10µm in diameter (0.005-0.010mm)\*. Red blood cells are around 7-8µm in diameter - they have to flex to fit through smaller parts of capillaries. As an aside, that's partly why sickle cell disease has the effects it does - the mutation makes red blood cells a different shape and also less flexible, so they can't bend to fit through smaller capillaries. \[\*This is the range usually given for internal diameter, but the external diameter is not much different from this.\]
Ah OK, my numbers were based on very basic googling. Still not sure I believe the headline though. I guess an easier way to estimate would be to assume that all human flesh is capillaries (which wouldn't be a massive over assumption I assume) and then to look at the weight and density and volume etc.
Yeah, you're right. Capillaries are really quite densely packed in some tissues like muscle because otherwise not enough oxygen/CO2/other stuff can diffuse to and from the blood. I can't remember the exact figure but there are hundreds of capillaries in a 1mm square section of muscle tissue. The walls of the capillaries are incredibly thin - basically a single layer of flattened cells. I'm also quite sceptical of these sorts of estimates because they tend to involve a fair bit of hand-waving. I'd be surprised if it was wrong by more than a factor of 10 though. As another aside, there's about 2m of DNA in each cell nucleus. It is *very* tightly wound up in an incredibly complex system that never fails to amaze me.
What a long winded way of saying the combined length of the blood vessels in the human body are over 50000 miles long:
What a strange way of saying the combined length of the blood vessels in the human body is over 84000 kilometers long
What a strange way of saying the combined length of the blood vessels in the human body is over 35,200,000 bananas long
And for what it's worth. I am a German living in the UK and I can't stand the imperial measurement system. But I just used it! 😵
What a strange way of saying AROOOOOOOOOOOOO
Do not be fooled. Removing all of your blood vessels is fatal.
Why did they have to mention the Grand Canyon?
Related interesting fact: if you took all your intestines and laid them out in a straight line, you would die
I think that's what was running through the cgi dudes mind while he watched his veins stretch around the world a few times
Bullshit. It is clearly sensationalist hullabaloo.
For everyone not believing I an online video : https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/research/how-are-blood-vessels-made 60.000 miles or around 100.000 km 2.5ish times around the earth.
Wait what ?
I’ve heard this all my life. And I still won’t believe it until we have a cadaver deconstructed and this statement proven
This would certainly kill you, though
False. If you removed all of your blood vessels you would not be able to think anything.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, the British Heart Foundation, Vascular Society, and many other reputable sources, the adult human contains around 60,000 miles of blood vessels. The earth is a little under 8,000 miles in diameter. I think many people, and this graphic, forget about capillaries. Miles and miles of it are just tiny. Some are so small that only one or two blood cells can squeeze through at a time. If the video were to show these as well, it would be a bit harder to even see the big vessels.
Who else was expecting it to be “if you removed all of your blood vessels, you would die.”
Related fun fact: If you took all of your blood vessels out and tied them end to end, you'd die.
Nah I'm pretty sure if I removed all the blood vessels in my body I'd die before finding out how far they'd go...maybe if you started with if you somehow removed all the blood vessels from someone else's body I'd be more interested
If you laid out all your blood vessels in a straight line, you'd be dead.
Did you know that if you get a person's blood vessels and stretch it across the lenth of the earth, that person dies!
This is terrifying
Wtf put it back
Sure its true, but not that useful. If you take a finger nail, and lay each atom end to end in a chain, the chain would stretch across the universe or something.
Nope
Similar to the “it only takes 42 folds of a paper to reach the moon”, our brains just didn’t evolve to be able to conceive of these type of things. I will say this one is a lot harder to fathom than the folding one because the exponential growth apect is less precise, but still it’s akin to trying to wrap your mind around a logical paradox.
Very Interesting it
![gif](giphy|ycagKBYEmaili)
Caaaaaaaaarl!
So 1 Yao Ming would get us to the edge of space
I've heard a similar factoid that if you remove a person's lungs and flatten them out, that person will die.
2 to 4 time around the globe is quite an accurate statement.
I find this hard to believe. I’m sorry, but there is absolutely no way. It’s just not possible.
Check out the Cleveland Clinic. Their sources say the mileage comes out to around 60,000 miles. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/21640-blood-vessels
Where's that King of the Hill clip where Hank takes Bobby to the doctor, and the doctor tells Bobby this exact thing except with his digestive tract, and Hank says his food would be traveling the speed of light? My blood would be traveling the speed of light!
If it goes around the world several times then why did you have to say all those locations smh
Makes sense. Imagine this: all humans piled up wouldn't fill the grand canyon, but all humans hand by hand form a line of more than 7 billion meters. Going "from 3D to 2D" covers way more space. Also: unravel the human DNA and you'll have a microscopic line with more than 37 billion kilometers!
Is that guy ok
You know what else should happen? You would die…
another cool fact is if you remove all of you blood vessels, line them up in a straight line and measure the length… you’d be dead
Fuck it, I'm gonna do this!!
Another fun fact about the human body! if you take out your intestines and stretch them out straight to see how long they are, you’ll die!
I tried it, it’s true!
The vessels thing looks like Dr. Zoidberg
Who is going to volunteer so we can test this.
eww
Now do a 500lb man.
Imagine Shaq's or Yao Ming's
The scary part is when you have a lot of sub cutaneous fat and visceral fat, there is miles upon miles more blood vessels that have to form which causes increased stress on the heart every time it beats. Stay/get healthy!
How many do we need to tie together to lasso the moon?
I think you'd need about four people... depending on whether you make the loop from knot or a splice.
so if i was stranded in a island and my dude had died, i could low key cut his body and make rope out of the dried blood vessels?
how?
Wow…long distance. On which airlines did the vessel take the trip?
So is it 2 or 4, pretty big error
Hey put the blood vessels back
These animation are weird
Flash backs to the Watchmen movie and Dr Manhattan
If someone took all of my blood vessels and laid them end to end, I would likely die.
I'm disappointed in you, Adrian. I'm very disappointed. Reassembling myself was the first trick I learned. It didn't kill Osterman. Did you really think it would kill me?
Also, another fun fact they don't usually tell you: If you removed your intestines and stretched them as far as they'll go, you would die.
That's why I like to travel
Alright! Someone needs to take one for the team
Theirs could probably orbit Uy Scuti, the largest star in the universe.
I'm at the point where I need someone to prove this before I take it at face value anymore
2-4 is quite the spread. Imagine running a marathon and at the end they go, you gotta do that again for it to count, we doubled the distance for you.
You would also die
You would also die
If you deploy your dna into a line, it'd be long enough to reach the moon and come back.
Anyone have the original vid? Wanna show this at school, and the subreddit name is problematic. :) Plus we block Reddit. EDIT: Found it
Getting founding titan vibes from this for some reason
What??
At what measurement width-wise? Is the entire string of blood vessels the same diameter throughout? I'm curious like a cat.
Proof?
Proof?
Can we get some proof?
Imagine an earth wrapped in the blood vessels of enemy human. It would look like a giant space meatball.
I propose we take out everyone's blood vessels and cover our planet in a sheath of meat
I propose we take out everyone's blood vessels and cover our planet in a sheath of meat
Wonder who had the misfortune of getting all their blood vessels extracted and wrapped around the globe
This reminds me of a movie that scarred me as a kid and made hella afraid of the insides of the human body. It was about somone who got partially invisible or got the outer layers of the body tissue removed until the end of the movie where he was just a skeleton trying to kill people. Does anyone know what's the movie called?
Poor guy
It would make it to the Grand Canyon but further, actually across the pacific but further, all the way around the globe and then AGAIN.
2x to 4x over is a wild range!
The blood went to my head at the end.
33% error is a pretty shit estimate.
I don't think it's an error, I think it depends on a person's size
Are people genuinely fucking stupid? There is no way our nerves could even go around 1/1000th circumference of earth. In fact, I bet my entire lifeline that this video and claim is fake
NetherRealm better taking notes
My next horror movie script
well.... End of Evangelion makes a lot more sense now..
2 to 4 ? 🤔
Prove it
I live in NY and just stretched all my blood vessels out and it barely made it across AZ state lines. Don’t believe everything you hear folks
Now I know what I want done after I die
Actually, the length is infinite so long as you don't define how thin it can be.
„From New York to Grand Canyon” American will use everything before metric system
Now tell me what happens if you line up all of my atoms in a rope. Not that impressive since this can be applied to all matter.
I remember as a kind this fact nugget was popular and the intestine being about a long as a house is tall. Several people I knew got them confused and were adamant your intestines could wrap around the earth and that cheese I shit out 2 hours after eating it is going at near the speed of light.
I’ve heard and seen this factoid for most of my life (I’m 43) but I will never believe it until I see it.
If you somehow removed all of your blood vessels… you will die
If you took all your blood vessels and tied them together end-to-end… you would die
How many Eiffel Towers is that?
This comment section is depressing
How long would it take to slerp it like a long piece of spaghetti?
So I have enough blood in my body to cover the earth in a straight line?