art with code

2010-10-20

How many dwarfs live in Mt. Everest

Dwarfs, those earth-dwelling little buggers, grand masters of volume. What if they burrowed the entire Mount Everest into a big dwarf-warren? Let's find out!

First, some assumptions.

Dwarfs are clearly good at cramped living as they live in mostly closed-off subterranean cities. They have also mastered the art of stonecraft to a magical level, so their buildings may well compare favorably to modern ferro-concrete towers. Let's assume that a dwarven city boasts a similar population density as urban Hong Kong, i.e. 250000 dwarfs per square kilometer with an average building height of 45 meters. A cubic kilometer of dwarvopolis would consist of 20 such layers and have a population of 5 million dwarfs.

Mount Everest is kinda pointy, but not all that pointy. Let's suppose that its slope is 45 degrees and that it approximates a cone. That would give it around 720 cubic kilometers in volume. But don't forget that dwarfs are subterranean, so we could reasonably assume that the dwarven city of Sagarmatha extends an extra kilometer under the surface with dwarven suburbia sprawling in a 10 kilometer radius. With the subterranean suburbs added, our dwarven city would have a total volume of around one thousand cubic kilometers.

From which a simple multiplication leads us to a total Sagarmatha dwarvopolitan population of 5 billion.

But why stop at Everest? Cast your net wider! The entire population of the Great Himalayan Dwarven Realm would be... the area of Himalayas is around 610000km^2, Tibetan plateau height is 4.5km, assume 0.5% of Everest population density for the sticks, i.e. 25000 dwarfs per cubic kilometer, and put it all together for a grand total of 69 billion Himalayan dwarfs.

2 comments:

Blog Archive