A Football Stadium of Farts

April 10, 2008 – 9:50 pm

I was reading an article about farts in which flatulence expert Dr. Michael D. Levitt (a.k.a. Doctor Fart) was quoted as saying that the average human male farts 110 milliliters of gas.

There's an urban legend about a man who suffocated on his own farts. It states that he farted so much one night in a little enclosed space that his farts replaced the good air and he died. That got me thinking about big enclosed spaces. So our first calculation today... The interior volume of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, home of the Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings, is roughly equal to how many guy farts?

While you may think of milliliters as an arcane metric measurement, a milliliter is merely one cubic centimeter (or cc). At 30.48 centimeters per foot, a cubic foot's Rough Equivalent is 28316.84 milliliters. And since its own publicity materials state the Metrodome has an interior volume of 60 million cubic feet, we can say that the Metrodome has 1.699 trillion milliliters of volume or the Rough Equivalent of 15,445,552,686 guy farts.

If the stadium had a sell-out crowd of 64,000 guys at a Vikings game, each and every guy would have to fart 241,336 times to fill the stadium. Given that the average person farts 10 times a day, that's roughly equivalent to each guy doing 66 years worth of farting during one Vikings game.

According to the U.S. Census, the population of the world will be 6,677,602,292 people on July 1, 2008. That's roughly equivalent to 2.33 guy farts per man woman and child on earth. And a rough equivalent for 2.33 guy farts is a beer can 3/4 full of fart gas.

Here are some other things that are Rough Equivalents for the 60,000,000 cubic foot volume of the Metrodome:

• 339,802,159,104 teaspoons of cough medicine
• 1,437,403,380 forties of malt liquor
• the cubic displacement of 368,967,971 Ford Mustang 4.6 liter V8s

What other rough equivalents can you come up with?