In the middle of the night, tossing and turning in my bed, one question has been raging in my mind: are there more wheels or doors in the world?
This question seems to have emerged out of nowhere, sparking furious, seemingly informed arguments in households, offices and group chats across the country. Of course, there's always a source: Ryan Nixon, who himself acknowledged it as the 'stupidest debate'.
Alas, a few likes and votes snowballed into thousands, and somehow, the question has spread like wildfire. My dad has asked me, my girlfriend has asked me, my friends and colleagues have asked me - all unprompted by me, I'd add. However, we might actually have an answer to the debate. Watch below:
Over on TikTok, Tom (@tomgw_) sought to put an end all this palaver once and for all.
He says in the video: 'Right, today we're finding out whether there's more doors or wheels in the world so you lot can stop arguing.'
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With a quick Google, he finds out there's an estimated 2.3 billion houses across the world, 'so there's gonna be a door on the front of each of them,' he says.
'If we estimate that maybe a quarter of those 2.3 billion houses are flats and apartments, that means 75% of them have a backdoor as well,' he continues, which would amount to roughly 1.7 billion, and around four billion doors in total already.
Think about all the rooms a normal house has: a kitchen; a bathroom or even two; at least one bedroom, if not more; closets and wardrobes.
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If the average size of a household, according to Tom's research, is 2.6 people, it's likely most will have two bedrooms. By Tom's maths, this amounts to 11.5 billion doors.
After some other considerations - think of all the cupboards in your house - he believes there's an estimated 36.2 billion doors in homes alone, and that's before you look at any other doors.
The TikToker then makes a rough approximation of 144.8 billion doors in total.
What about wheels, then? Well, think of everything that has wheels: cars, lorries, bikes, motorbikes, trains, shopping trolleys (Tom estimates there's 22.5 million of them across the US), office chairs, and how can we forget Lego?
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With the latter, there's an estimated 400 billion pieces in the world, and even Tom isn't certain of how many bits have wheels - he settles on 1%.
By the end of Tom's sums, he estimates there's 67.6 billion wheels - even if you doubled the wheels, you still wouldn't have as many doors. Then again, he didn't seem to count cheese wheels...
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Cameron Frew