Illustration of just 2,166 people, 9.81 million shy of Los Angeles County's currently estimated 9.82 million people. Los Angeles Almanac image.
With a recent estimated population of about 9.82 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 it is, in fact, a larger population than the entire state population of any one of 40 U.S. states (or almost 60% of of all the countries in the world*).
With the image above, we though we might attempt to illustrate what 9.8 million people might look like. After computer-rendering just 2,166 tiny person images, however, we discovered that our available time and computer resources were no match for the job. The image above, that we were forced to end with, illustrates a mere two percent of one percent of 9.8 million people. Try to imagine this image multiplied 4,534 times, in order to arrive at an illustration of 9.8 million people.
We next sought to find images that would illustrate a lot more than 2,166 people. We settled on one that many Angelenos are already familiar with - Dodger Stadium. Dodger Stadium, of course, doesn’t accommodate 9.8 million spectators at one time, but it can seat 56,000 people. That still doesn't bring us anywhere close to 9.8 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.
How many Dodger Stadiums it would take to seat all 9.8 million people residing in Los Angeles County? We came up with just over 175 Dodger Stadiums.
Imagine that.
174 Dodger Stadiums imagined across the Los Angeles County landscape, surrounding Downtown Los Angeles. Credit: Los Angeles Almanac-created image from an image by 12019 at Pixabay.com.
* If Los Angeles County were a separate country on its own, its population, according to recent U.S. Census estimates, would rank just a little smaller than Greece, but larger than either Israel, Austria, or Switzerland (see WorldoMeter).
If every Los Angeles County resident were to gather into a tightly-packed crowd (about 18 by 18 inches per person - a bit tight, but not causing anyone to suffocate), everyone in the county would comfortably fit into the land area of Marina Del Rey, or within less than a square mile, with space left over. If that doesn’t seem like much, consider that the entire world's estimated population of 8.2 billion people (February 2025), using the same dimensions per person, would fill about 662 square miles, or just a little less than one and a half times the land area of the city of Los Angeles.
