As for my part of the investigation, I’ve calculated that twenty-six billion five hundred twenty-one million two hundred thousand regular M&M’s candies would fit in the Grand Canyon, give or take. I used a volume of 4.17 trillion cubic meters for the Canyon, from the park’s website, and 0.636 cc per candy, according to a post from NPR’s Science Friday (tp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1703595). I don’t know if the NPR guy took packing effects into account or not. Using the statistic that one hundred million candies can be manufactured per day, it takes roughly 39 weeks to manufacture enough candies to fill the Canyon once. So, I think we can agree that our hypothesis is supported by these calculations: it would take “a lot of M&M’s” to fill the Grand Canyon.

…or 1.16785714 × 10^15 ball pit balls.