If everyone jumped off of the Brooklyn Bridge

"If everyone jumped off of the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump too?"

Teachers (especially when they are nuns) can be terribly annoying and especially when you are of a young and impressionable age.  I mean "everyone?"  I can see all my friends; I could just get new ones.  But if everyone jumped off then I would have to fend for myself all alone in a world and I never studied how to be a hunter gatherer.

Besides, we are talking about a lot of people.  Surely that's got to be a very large pile of bodies.  Perhaps the distance isn't too great.  This is a job for Microsoft Excel!  Let's assume a pyramid of sorts.  In two dimensions it would be like you get with cheerleaders, one on top, two below that, three below that and so forth.  In three dimensions it is more like one cheerleader, four cheerleaders, nine cheerleaders, and so forth.  Assume that they are all lying flat and they have a 1' width each when doing so.

The current population of the United States is 303 million.  When we use the spreadsheet to determine how high the pyramid should be to have 303 million people we discover that we have reached a height of 969 feet.  But the clearance of the bridge to near high water is only 135 feet (or 904,890 people).  But the depth of the river is not all that deep, I can only get the depth of the caissons which goes to the bedrock and is 45' and 78' so let's call it 50' for sake of argument.  The new number when counting piling the bodies in the river is 185 feet or 2 million people.  The population of New York is 8 million people.  The population of Brooklyn is 2.4 million people.

"If everyone jumped off of the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump too?"

"No sister.  If everyone in Brooklyn jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge I would have to climb to the top of the pile!"  (In fact the actual height would be 10 feet and I didn't account for some people flowing down the river, or the compression of bodies because of the weight and so forth.  But still it's April Fools Day so I will end by writing.

Q.E.D.