An image of a mere 2,166 people, 9,997,834 shy of 10 million. Los Angeles Almanac image.
With a population of more than 10 million people, Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the United States. Not only is this is a lot of people for a single U.S. county, but is, in fact, more people than who reside in any of 40 U.S. states (or 144 of the 235 countries in the world*). We tried finding a way to illustrate what 10 million people might look like in a single image, but the best we could come up with (we ran out of time and computing power) was the image above, showing a mere 2,166 people. Imagine this image multiplied 4,617 times to arrive at 10 million people.
So, we thought of finding images of a lot more than 2,166 people. We decided to use one that many Angelenos are already familiar with - Dodger Stadium. Of course, Dodger Stadium doesn’t accommodate 10 million spectators at one time, but it can seat 56,000 people. That still doesn't come anywhere close to 10 million people.
Game day at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, 2012. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive at the Library of Congress.
We did the math to see how many Dodger Stadiums would be needed to seat all 10 million people residing in Los Angeles County.
We came up with 179. 179 Dodger Stadiums.
Imagine that.
179 Dodger Stadiums imagined across the Los Angeles County landscape. Los Angeles Almanac-created image from an image by 12019 at Pixabay.com.
* Los Angeles County's population, according to the 2020 U.S. Census, is just slightly less than that of Sweden and a bit more than, for example, either Honduras, Austria or Israel.
If every Los Angeles County resident were to gather into a tightly-packed crowd (about 18 by 18 inches per person - tight, but not killing anyone), they would fill the land area of Marina del Rey. If that doesn’t sound like much, consider that the entire world's population of 7.9 billion people (August 2021), using the same dimensions per person, could be comfortably packed within 638 square miles. That would be approximately the area within the boundaries of the cities of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Glendale, Pasadena, Torrance, Burbank, Santa Monica, and Carson combined.
