
What If All 7.1 Billion People Moved To Tunisia? - louthy
http://www.waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/what-if-all-71-billion-people-moved-to.html
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S_A_P
There's a lot of land out there. My father in law has acreage in west Texas.
You only see people if A) you drive 30 miles to the nearest town. B) migrants
are traversing the land to sneak into the us. Or C) the border patrol enters
your land looking for migrants.

I would say we have a way to go before we fill the earth with people. Now,
water, food, energy, and providing a certain quality of life will hit a wall
much sooner than that.

~~~
seiji
The US is mostly fields of dust, rock, and sometimes grass. States, cities,
and geological structures get named after people we've long conquered and run
out.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I didn't realize how true this was until I drove from Chicago to the northern
Nevada desert for Burning man and back again.

~~~
jerf
My favorite east-west flight I've ever done happened to be in Spring, just
after all the farmers had plowed, but before anything they had planted had
come up yet (or very much). Farmland was brown, cities were cities, everything
else was green. You could look down and it was a life-size graph of basic land
utilization.

There's a lot of farms in the US... but there's a lot of wilderness, too. Not
to mention when you're flying over the Rockies, you've essentially left
civilization... mountain after mountain after mountain of absolutely nothing
human. Even the "dense" parts of the mountains are just thin skins surrounding
our roads, followed by wilderness just one mountain over (or two in the
_really_ dense areas).

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BigChiefSmokem
The great Isaac Asimov spoke of this back in his day,
[http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-
fair.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html)

"Well, the earth's population is now about 3,000,000,000 and is doubling every
40 years. If this rate of doubling goes unchecked, then a World-Manhattan is
coming in just 500 years. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D.
2450 and society will collapse long before that!

There are only two general ways of preventing this: (1) raise the death rate;
(2) lower the birth rate. Undoubtedly, the world of A>D. 2014 will have agreed
on the latter method. Indeed, the increasing use of mechanical devices to
replace failing hearts and kidneys, and repair stiffening arteries and
breaking nerves will have cut the death rate still further and have lifted the
life expectancy in some parts of the world to age 85.

There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth
control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have
taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have
slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently."

~~~
bradleyland
Asimov is fantastic, but he wasn't always right. The population growth rate is
roughly half (1.1% vs 2%) what it was in the mid-sixties when that piece was
written, and it continues to trend downward as more countries with lots of
people advance their development. That's a bit more than "slackened", IMO.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_ra...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_rate_1950–2050.svg)

As it turns out, developed societies trend toward a lower growth rate. We're
not 100% certain why, but no great propaganda machine is required.

~~~
VLM
For a little while, modern civil engineering drops the childhood death rate
much faster than cultural expectations can catch up. Gotta pop out ten kids if
eight of them are going to die before age 5. Whoops turns out they're all
going to live till they're 80.

~~~
DougWebb
Now the modern equivalent is "Oh man, how are we going to pay for college for
all these kids we're planning on? We'd better have fewer of them or we're
going to go broke long before we die or they're able to support us."

------
kylelibra
Bad title, but interesting post. Better title: If everyone lived as densely as
they do in Manila, the human race could fit in Tunisia

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contingencies
Actually, Tunisia used to be the breadbasket of the Roman empire. These days
it's chiefly an olive basket, not improbably after having been degraded by
centuries of unsustainable clearcut monoculture in an already relatively arid
climate.

I happened to be there for a full month at the start of the revolution a
couple of years ago (by accident) and found it an interesting country. It was
absolutely full of Roman ruins, and is reportedly the only source for red
marble in the Meditteranean, a fact the Romans took great advantage of. There
is also a spectacular surviving castle or two, as well as some interesting
WWII history, a remnant Jewish population (most moved to Israel), and some
nice islands. Pity about the dictator, and too bad they couldn't keep the
human rights activist president in they elected after throwing him out.

------
DougWebb
The Manhattan / New Zealand comparison is interesting to me, having lived and
worked in and around NYC all my life. New Zealand is not that much bigger than
the US Eastern Seaboard metro area, which extends from Washington DC to
Boston. If you extend that a bit further, from Virginia Beach VA to Portland
ME, and extended it inland about as wide as New Jersey for the whole stretch,
that's a pretty good match.

A NYC-density city that large would be interesting. It would need rapid mass
transit throughout with high-speed lines connecting with local hubs. That
would be doable if you're rebuilding the entire area. (Amtrak hasn't been able
to build high speed rail because they're stuck using the existing railways
which aren't straight enough.) Presumably a lot of traffic could be reduced by
replacing all of the highways with mass transit, which would be feasible if
the whole area was that densely populated. Again, it hasn't been done now
because all public transit around the big cities is designed to get you into
and out of the cities; if your destination is anyplace else you have to drive
yourself. It's much better within NYC where public transit goes everywhere.

NYC, dense as it is, still has lots of open parkland. I think it would be
quite livable even at the scale we're talking about. Of course people would
still need to be able to get out of the city for a break; I imagine the whole
western edge of the giant city would be public nature reserves with plenty of
mass-transit access.

Of course not everyone would live within the city; there would need to be
farms and farmers to feed everyone. Most of the US and southern portions of
Canada would be farmland (much as it is today, in fact) and there would be
plantations scattered around the rest of the world too wherever the weather is
suited to various crops. Much of the world would still be left to nature, I
think. If we're at the point technologically and socially where we can move
nearly everyone into a megacity, we should also be able to create very high
efficiency hydroponic farms that could produce many crops much more densely
than a standard farm can. Large areas would only be needed for animals and
crops that can't be grown hydroponically.

We'd need power too... lots of it. Keeping everyone in a relatively small area
would help, but I'll bet the average power usage per-person across the globe
is less than the average usage per New Yorker today, and in the megacity
everyone would be moved to the New Yorker level. Maybe all of the unfarmable
areas in Canada can be filled up with Nuclear powerplants.

~~~
jacquesm
> A NYC-density city that large would be interesting.

I'd hate to live in a place that large and dense, it sounds like an excellent
place for the next avian flu or ebola outbreak.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infectious_disease)

It's all about the surface, the number of uninfected people in the pool that
are susceptible x the interactions with infected people. In a place like that
this would be a massive lurking danger. (and there are cities that get pretty
close to this and I really wonder how long that lottery will hold).

~~~
DougWebb
NYC is already that dense, and much of Asia is even denser, and those
epidemics haven't wiped out populations yet.

Part of the assumption (mine, at least) is that we're talking about NYC-
quality infrastructure too: water, waste management, health management, law
enforcement, emergency services, etc. The megacity would have the resources
and facilities to identify a disease like that as soon as cases started to
show up, and contain and treat the problem before it got out of control. Those
diseases would also be less likely to show up in the first place because of
better living conditions for everyone.

Here's a drawback: what would everyone do for a living? NYC doesn't have much
manufacturing anymore, and industry like that takes up space. It would have to
be outside the city, and people working for manufacturing industries would
have to live near the factories. Farmers would live outside too, as I
mentioned before. Fishermen too. There's probably a bunch of other activities
that would require people to live outside the city, so not everyone would be a
city dweller. Probably a good 80%+ would be able to stay in the city though.

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ggchappell
His red-gray map could be made even more striking, as the northern & western
parts of China are sparsely populated.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Populati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Population_density_and_distribution)

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_delirium
Here's another comparison in that vein: If Franz Josef Land [1] were as
densely populated as Manila, it would be an archipelago nation of about 700
million people. But can you guess why it does not have 700 million people?

The use of Russia, Canada, and Alaska as examples ends up being similarly hard
to gain much from, because all it really says, in three different ways, is
that the Arctic region does not have large human populations. True, but not
very surprising or enlightening.

One attempt at a different kind of comparison could be to first exclude land
that is below some threshold of reasonable habitability, and then make the
comparisons regarding the remaining land.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Josef_Land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Josef_Land)

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signa11
are other folks also reminded of the beautiful john-brunner's novel "stand on
the zanzibar" by this post ?

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goingbananers
I live in Manila, and it really can get insufferable at times.

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bluedino
It'd be interesting to see how many miles of roads would need paved, power and
water lines run, and houses would need built if you took everyone from Manilla
and spread them across Wyoming.

~~~
VLM
The population difference is a factor of 20, so superficially it would be less
than a factor of 20.

There is a practical concern that Wyoming is already full. So a lot depends on
either keeping or eliminating federal land, national parks, farm/ranch land,
that sort of thing.

In practice I think you'd be talking about making Cheyenne a factor of a
thousand larger, rather than paving Yellowstone national park. Cheyenne is
about 20 square miles, so we're talking 20K square miles. Wyoming is about
100K square miles, so we'd only need 1/5 of Wyoming to move Manilla into a
Cheyenne-like sprawl.

I find it hard to believe that Manilla can feed itself now, so moving to WY
and not being able to feed itself is probably not a new problem WRT the plan?

~~~
coldtea
> _There is a practical concern that Wyoming is already full._

Full? It's mostly empty!

~~~
VLM
Nope, its full as in 100% allocated. Go ahead, try and build a house in
Yellowstone park, or take over a random spot on someone's ranch and see how
well it turns out.

And if you kicked all the ranchers and parks away, you'd have to find space
for them outside the state.

Its a close cousin of urban sprawl vs municipal zoning designed to prevent
urban sprawl.

~~~
coldtea
> _Nope, its full as in 100% allocated. Go ahead, try and build a house in
> Yellowstone park, or take over a random spot on someone 's ranch and see how
> well it turns out._

Well, the "allocated" part doesn't matter much when you have "a factor of 20
population difference" coming to get your land.

> _And if you kicked all the ranchers and parks away, you 'd have to find
> space for them outside the state._

Well, they could always do to them what was done to the native Americans, hack
them up, let them starve and move the rest to concentration camps and
reservation areas.

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geetee
If everyone moved to one location, would the weight shift affect Earth's
rotation or orbit?

~~~
cryptoz
Yes, absolutely. Any change in the distribution of the density of mass will
change the mechanics of Earth's rotation. I'm unsure if the orbit would be
affected, but I assume so - since the rotational energy will be different, I
expect the orbit would be too.

Could we measure those changes? Not sure. The changes are probably too small
for us to detect, but on the other hand, we have some pretty incredible
instruments.

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sspiff
The fact that there are more people living in South-East Asia than anywhere
else is a little less astounding (but still amazing & unbalanced) if you take
away the deformation of the Mercator projection.

Large areas like Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and Australia are pretty
stretched out when compared to SEA on our world maps.

------
JonnieCache
Related: [http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/](http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/)

(Munroe has us all living, or at least standing on rhode island.)

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keiferski
Very interesting but I feel like the data would be more useful if categorized
by city rather than country. America, for example, is shown as being very
sparse, but in reality the major urban centers are dense while the rest of the
country is sparse.

~~~
VLM
Technically its fractal in that no matter what your scale / zoom lens setting
is, about 90% of the population always lives on 10% of the land in the USA.
Applies to small rural faming villages, entire Midwestern states, everything
west of the Mississippi river, the whole country, etc. Or rephrased you can't
automagically tell the scale of a map by looking at a population density graph
unless you cheat and memorize shapes. The county I grew up in has about the
same graph as Rhode Island has about the same graph as the whole country, more
or less.

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munificent
I found the "If everyone lived as densely as..." hard to parse. A better way
to say it is: "To give everyone as much space as the average Alaskan has, we'd
need 108 Earths."

~~~
astrodust
This is totally flawed. Canada is given as an example presumably based on the
population density across the entire country, completely disregarding that a
lot of it is virtually uninhabitable tundra. Russia, Alaska, and Iceland have
the same factors involved.

It would be better to base it on actually inhabited areas in any country,
using the representative population density for a given urban area.

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chatman
Pure bullshit.

