this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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I feel like a mathematician would go a step further and not even assume a specific geometry. Maybe a human is just a subset of points in a measure space, with a measure fixed at 1 human-unit.
To be fair, the result of this calculation only depends on the area/volume ratio of the human. I used the specific cylinder, because humans are roughly cylindrical, and have a volume of roughly 100 L. The surface area of a regular human is probably a bit larger than that of a cylindrical one though.
That's true, and in this case where the layer is a single molecule thick, pores and even cellular structure will add to it quite a bit. Hell, at that scale it's probably hard to define any solid boundary to the body at all, since you'll have things like the surface of evaporating sweat. Once again, we need to know a bit more about how the magic works to give a single answer.
Our mathematician would have to add a measure on subset boundaries I guess. Or maybe just hand the problem off to a big boy who can handle things in the real world (zing!).