Tomorrowland
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One of my favorite writers notes how some places on the earth are uninhabitable. He then asks whether man should leave such places alone, let nature have dominion over them, or try to improve those places and make them into something where people might live. He wrote that in 1856, when the world population was about 1.2 billion. From then until now, 2013, the population has grown to 7.1 billion, which is about 600 percent. Most of what he considered uninhabitable, six or seven generations later, has been improved. Deserts have been piped water from dammed up rivers. Swamps have been drained and levies added to contain the water and build roads. Cities are stacked upward, the buildings built ever taller, and closer together.
People are everywhere, in places no one ever thought could be peopled, and the growth continues. People simply like making more people. By the year 2050 we will have between 7.5 and 10.5 billion people in the world. The largest growth countries will be China, India, and the United States. We reached 7 billion on October 31, 2011. Happy Halloween!
The other day I was playing around with some statistics about people and places to see how I might answer that writer's question. I don't seem to have come up with much of an answer, but had some fun thinking through these numbers. I imagine that our current trend to spread out and develop marginal lands for living will continue until we hit a natural resource limit, such as water or oil.
Estimates are that about 108 billion people have lived on the planet since people began. Six percent of the people who have ever lived are alive today. The places least populated are the countries closest to the Arctic: the USSR and Canada. Australia's population is still light, and there are other smaller regions around the world that also are not over-populated. Several small countries in both South America and Africa have much less than the average number of people.
When I begin wondering about people and populations my thoughts seem to turn to the number of stars. The best estimate on number of stars in the universe is 40 sextillion, which is 22 zeroes behind the number 4. The number of planets estimated to be in the universe is 10 with 24 zeroes behind it. There is plenty of room for our population to expand if we could only figure out how get there. I have an idea I'm working on that might get us there.
About 370 billion planets are estimated to be available in the universe for habitation. Maybe when each of us dies we become a new star, or we land on a planet that has our ancestors living on it. A tough thing to confirm in this life. Where in the world did all the 108 billion people go who have lived here? If they've gone to any of these other planets, maybe they've told people there about our crowded world.
Earth has 36.7 billion acres of land on it. If we all stayed here, didn't go to other planets, we could each have 5.18 acres of land, providing that we split it up evenly, and learned how to get along with each other. Inhabitants with superior abilities might come here from other planets to help us move there, if they could trust that we be kind and courteous toward each other. If I was an alien, I wouldn't want to bring a warring people back to my world. Maybe compassion is all that's holding up space travel. I should send NASA a suggestion and a note of encouragement, since the space exploration is dwindling.
The most populous buildings on earth have about 6,000 people living in them. With buildings that size, you could put all the people alive in the world today into 1.18 million buildings. Hong Kong is one of the densest cities in the world. More people work and live here above the fourteenth floor than anywhere else in the world. Seven million people live in Hong Kong. The density is 18,176 people per square mile, or about 1533 square feet per person, which is a box about forty feet square.
If we all packed in together, at the same density as Hong Kong, all the people in the world could live on about 25,000,000 acres, which is about the size of the state of Kentucky. If we built tall apartment buildings all over the state of Kentucky, the rest of the earth would be free of people. We could leave much of the earth unpeopled. There'd be a lot of Kentuckians. Kentucky in the Iroquois language means "land of tomorrow". Sounds like a Disneyland ride.
People are everywhere, in places no one ever thought could be peopled, and the growth continues. People simply like making more people. By the year 2050 we will have between 7.5 and 10.5 billion people in the world. The largest growth countries will be China, India, and the United States. We reached 7 billion on October 31, 2011. Happy Halloween!
The other day I was playing around with some statistics about people and places to see how I might answer that writer's question. I don't seem to have come up with much of an answer, but had some fun thinking through these numbers. I imagine that our current trend to spread out and develop marginal lands for living will continue until we hit a natural resource limit, such as water or oil.
Estimates are that about 108 billion people have lived on the planet since people began. Six percent of the people who have ever lived are alive today. The places least populated are the countries closest to the Arctic: the USSR and Canada. Australia's population is still light, and there are other smaller regions around the world that also are not over-populated. Several small countries in both South America and Africa have much less than the average number of people.
When I begin wondering about people and populations my thoughts seem to turn to the number of stars. The best estimate on number of stars in the universe is 40 sextillion, which is 22 zeroes behind the number 4. The number of planets estimated to be in the universe is 10 with 24 zeroes behind it. There is plenty of room for our population to expand if we could only figure out how get there. I have an idea I'm working on that might get us there.
About 370 billion planets are estimated to be available in the universe for habitation. Maybe when each of us dies we become a new star, or we land on a planet that has our ancestors living on it. A tough thing to confirm in this life. Where in the world did all the 108 billion people go who have lived here? If they've gone to any of these other planets, maybe they've told people there about our crowded world.
Earth has 36.7 billion acres of land on it. If we all stayed here, didn't go to other planets, we could each have 5.18 acres of land, providing that we split it up evenly, and learned how to get along with each other. Inhabitants with superior abilities might come here from other planets to help us move there, if they could trust that we be kind and courteous toward each other. If I was an alien, I wouldn't want to bring a warring people back to my world. Maybe compassion is all that's holding up space travel. I should send NASA a suggestion and a note of encouragement, since the space exploration is dwindling.
The most populous buildings on earth have about 6,000 people living in them. With buildings that size, you could put all the people alive in the world today into 1.18 million buildings. Hong Kong is one of the densest cities in the world. More people work and live here above the fourteenth floor than anywhere else in the world. Seven million people live in Hong Kong. The density is 18,176 people per square mile, or about 1533 square feet per person, which is a box about forty feet square.
If we all packed in together, at the same density as Hong Kong, all the people in the world could live on about 25,000,000 acres, which is about the size of the state of Kentucky. If we built tall apartment buildings all over the state of Kentucky, the rest of the earth would be free of people. We could leave much of the earth unpeopled. There'd be a lot of Kentuckians. Kentucky in the Iroquois language means "land of tomorrow". Sounds like a Disneyland ride.
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