📎 About how many paperclips can we make out of a human?

380Ṁ100

resolved Aug 15

100%4%

about 10,000 paperclips

about 10 paperclips

about 100 paperclips

about 1000 paperclips

38%

about 100,000 paperclips

45%

over 100,000 paperclips

Asking for a friend...

Assume a normal sized paperclip with a mass of roughly 1g when made out of steel.
Assume an average human weight of 62kg.

The choices are within an order of magnitude.

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I asked GPT-3, and GPT-3 said it could produce about 33,000 paperclips. I think this is reasonable since ice is a particularly poor material for making paperclips out of although that is clever. Also there's going to be material loss depending on the method. I guess I wasn't the clearest but it was mostly for the memes and GPT-3 had a good answer.

@d6e GPT-3: About 33,000 paperclips, not that I've thought a lot about this, just some idle speculation between text-completion tasks.

An unlimited amount of them because

1)You can destroy and remake paperclips.

2)depending on what counts as making a paperclip out of a human you can make any amount of matter from the mass of a human using enough external y supplied energy.

On the other hand, can you deny the aesthetic brilliance of making one really large paperclip?

Should be trivial to make a solid material with one tenth the density of steel. Additionally we can make the paperclip wire thinner while retaining the same normal size.

Nuclear transmutation would make it possible to turn all of the atoms in the human body into aluminum/steel/whatever material is used for the paperclips.

@athenaciara Can you not make paperclips out of plastic?

@d6e Yeah, it would be trivial to convert the carbon and hydrogen in the human body into hydrocarbons, but then... it's still 55-60% water. Some of the oxygen in that water could be used to make acrylic or polylactate plastic (which contain carboxyl groups).

@athenaciara turn the water into very delicate ice sculptures of ultra thin paperclips.

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