What if you stacked all 8 billion people on top of each other? How big is the mountain?
There are about 8 billion humans on Earth. We like to think of ourselves as numerous. But matter is dense. The average human weighs about 62 kg. Total human biomass is about 500 million tons. That sounds like a lot.
If you packed every human together as tightly as possible — no air between bodies — the entire human race would fit in a cube about 1 kilometer on each side. That's less than a single mid-sized city. You could dump all of humanity into the Grand Canyon and it wouldn't fill it. You could fit every human who ever lived — about 117 billion people — in a cube about 10 km wide.
The Earth doesn't notice us. We're a thin film of bacteria on the surface of a rock. The planet has been through five mass extinctions, each one wiping out 70-95% of all life. We're not the first complex species. We're not the last, probably. The mountain of humanity is impressive if you're human, but from space, you can't see it. You can't even see a single city at night without zooming in. We're small. That's not depressing — that's humbling.
About 117 billion people. With 8 billion alive today, that means about 7% of all humans who have ever lived are alive right now.
About 1 cubic kilometer. You could fit the entire human race in a cube 1 km on each side. That's about the size of a small mountain.
Humans weigh about 500 million tons. Ants, by contrast, weigh about 10 billion tons — 20 times more than all humans combined. Bacteria weigh 1,000 times more than humans. We're outnumbered everywhere.
An average human displaces about 0.07 cubic meters (we're mostly water, which has a density of 1000 kg/m³). Multiply that by 8 billion people and you get roughly 800 million cubic meters.
That's a cube about 920 meters on each side. You could fit the entire human race into a pile smaller than the Burj Khalifa is tall. All of us — every politician, every artist, every farmer, every child — would fit in a single small hill.
For scale: a single hurricane releases more energy in one second than all humans have produced in all of history. The Earth doesn't even notice us.