If you can, take a ride on a smaller aircraft over California. The first thing I noticed was almost everything is uninhabited. US Forest Service manages 20 million acres of National Forest land in California. Another large portion is state park systems. California State Parks began the 1990s with over 260 park units, 280 miles of coastline, 625 miles of lake and river frontage, nearly 18,000 campsites, 3,000 miles of hiking, biking and equestrian trails, and 450 miles of off-highway vehicle trails on nearly 1.3 million acres. [ii]
>"Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that executive departments and agencies (agencies) immediately review existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources beyond the degree necessary to protect the public interest or otherwise comply with the law."
Who knows to what degree these lands are considered "the public interest" vs. "undue burden" in the Secretary of the Interior's mind. But the rules regarding drilling on public land are specifically called out for review, indicating that the White House believes they are currently too strict.
That would be a very bad thing. California has a serious shortage of housing, and putting a few new cities in this unused land would go a long way towards bringing rents down to something reasonable.
Perhaps doing something to control an overheated housing market would help more than tearing up new land 100 miles away from cities whose prosperity derives from the 'network effects' of geographical proximity.
There are 172 million acres of land in Texas. That means you could give every American man woman and child a half an acre of land to themselves in Texas, with land to spare. The US is really big.
You could also (in theory) put every human on Earth in Texas with a population density of only 26,000 people per square mile, about the same density as New York City.
If it's an equilateral square pyramid, the volume would be about a quarter of a cubic kilometer. If we assume humans have an average mass of 65 kg and the same density as water, that gives us room for just under 4 billion humans.
I'm glad I wasn't the only one. I was very confused for a moment after reading that comment. Never seen the acronym "SF" used for science fiction before.
(And people also want to go to Antarctica... There are multiple "colonies" there, by Chile and Argentina, thousands live there in the summer, and about a thousand people winter over there, and tens of thousands of tourists travel there annually... All this in a place that is illegal to mine, illegal to claim nationally, and even illegal to build new permanent structures by international treaty, thus essentially illegal to build a city or anything like a real economy, which would require mining at least for gravel.)
The interesting thing about people is that there are many different kinds with many different motivations.
Although I do suspect that space settlements will be even more urbanized and centralized than Earth cities. The extra costs associated with living in space are reduced by living in larger settlements/cities (think surface area to volume ratio), and just like on Earth, economic productivity will increase with increasing population density.
I think most people who want to live off-planet have a very romanticised notion of what that entails. Mars isn't going to be terraformed within our lifetimes, even if it was possible. Living on Mars = living permanently in a tunnel. And if you don't get along with the small community you'll be living with, you'll be screwed. And if you don't like living a fairly regimented lifestyle, you'll be screwed as well; there'll be no equivalent of "let's see what cafes are down this alleyway!".
I think far more people actually want a 'holiday' off-planet, than actually live off-planet.
As far as the latter point, that's fine & perhaps expected. That's why we need to make transport cheap enough so people can come and go.
I know what it's like to live life in a tunnel. That's the Twin Cities in Minnesota during the winter. Minnesota is where the modern indoor shopping mall was invented. The entire downtown of Minneapolis is still walkable in the middle of the winter because all the buildings are connected by temperature controlled skyways and tunnels. No reason you can't see what cafes are in the next building or indoor level.
Not all people. No one expects everyone to drop everything and move to Mars but there will be some pioneer types who would probably want that kind of endeavor. If comfort was everything, people would have remained in Africa.
Or how Asimov's "The Caves of Steel", from 1953, was set on an Earth of 3000 years from now, and that was overpopulated, horribly full of people, living on contiguous, adjoining underground cities covering entire continents. And had 8 billion people (which we are actually about to reach in about 7 years from now, somewhere around 2024).
I haven't met many people who have knowledge beyond watching Friends reruns who actually want to live in Manhattan.
The highest population growth places in the US are places like Dallas, TX and Greenville, SC. That's been the case for a long time. NYC and SFO are treading water and are at risk as their economies have de-diversified over the last 40 years.
I could see that that might have an impact as well. It will be interesting to see to what degree people move to metro areas because that's where the jobs are and to what degree they move there because it's a more interesting place to live. While I'd love to have a little more space and pay less for housing I'd get pretty depressed living outside a metro area. If that's what I wanted I could move back to the visit where my parents live, live in their second house or in-law unit and live off a few hours months of remote consulting work. Curious to see how that's the case for others.
A lot of Chicago's population loss is on the South Side where violence is high. Also the elimination of the projects has moved a lot of Section 8 housing to the suburbs, as it gives low income families a chance at a better life in a less dire situation. Investment in new infrastructure is at an all time high in the Loop / North / West sides. Young people are moving out the suburbs and into the core. Chicago's population isn't increasing at the rate of places like Houston because of the lack of annexation, the suburbs in Cook County generally don't want to join the city.
...if this was the only condition for "what city becomes a capital." Looking at Germany, there's Hamburg, Köln, München...all on nice rivers, but none of them were the capital of Prussia when Germany was first unified - since Prussia was the essential driver of that political process, Berlin became the capital. Something of a coincidence in the grand scheme of things, really.
Beijing has multiple rivers traversing the current municipal area, and they were dammed and directed into channels, or directed underground as the city grew (same for London, by the way - London has multiple historical rivers that are now entirely or almost entirely underground, not just the Thames)
London, Rome, Athens, Lisbon, Dublin, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Venice, the list goes on and on (with the last two historic capitals being right in the water, not even coastal; and while I'm aware that Venice is not a capital these days, theirs was a formidable empire)
London used to be the seaport of England (before railways outsourced this to Southampton); whence do you consider the name Docklands (the huge area downriver of the Tower)? The rest is just nitpicking ("modern Piraeus is not part of Athens") and moving the goalposts (first it's "historic capitals", now it doesn't matter because Istanbul is not a de-iure capital at present, even though it de-facto is? Plus, there's a major stretch of history between Constantinople and present day)
Good harbors happen to be full of wetlands. The current reality, where there are practically no wetlands near large coastal cities, is very artificial.
> I'd like to see the same map but excluding national parks/public spaces.
This is a major aspect, I think. A lot of land in the west is federally owned. This NY Times article[0] states that 47% of the land in the western US is owned by the Federal Government. It doesn't look like there's 1-1 overlap between the empty census blocks and the federal land ownership, though.
I grew up in Eastern New Mexico, sparsely populated but also remarkably scant in public land. Noticed a lot of those green spots fell there.
Wasn't for lacking of trying, you drive through and occasionally you'll see the remains of old buildings. Mostly schools I think. For some odd reason the schools were always built with rock while everything else was made out of wood.
Basically what happened is that people came in after the Homestead Act to try and settle, found out that despite all the grasses it's still basically a desert, and gave up after the Depression.
There's also the town of Tolar, New Mexico. That one's special. It got leveled during WWII when a train carrying bombs derailed.
Nowadays I think most of the land between Clovis and Roswell is privately owned by ranchers.
Well twenty eight percent is just in Federal lands. So throw in state, city, and local, properties and we can cover a lot. I wonder how much is considered water way? Not sure if that is defined as federal land, but lakes and rivers eat up a bit too. Top it all off with places no one wants to be
Its an odd article that seems to be more sensational than necessary.
I think it's meant as a response to the election maps that show Trump favorable areas covering about 90% of the US. The fact is very few, if any, people live in much of the US so the map doesn't show what some people think it does.
> Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, no one calls 47 percent of the USA "home".
It's a fairly meaningless number resulting in an arbitrary choice of binning. If I defined "home" as "home is where the heart is" and used bins about the size of a human heart then I could say that no one calls 99.999968 percent of the USA "home".
If you go to a random spot anywhere in the world, there's a good chance there's not a lot of people there.
The site http://confluence.org/ catalogs visits to intersections of latitude and longitude. Drill down into one of the maps and you'll probably find mostly empty spaces.
It'd be interesting to see an overlay of areas that are inhospitable to wild animals, perhaps excluding birds. Mostly because that would be a useful indication of how much inhabitable land is monopolized by humans.
Exactly what wild animals would we be considering? Pigeons live in the wild in virtually every temperate city on earth. I think there are coyotes in New York's Central Park.
So census blocks include federally owned land? That would account for the emptiness, as most of the west is government owned and not open to settlement
The USA is about 40 times larger than the UK in land mass, but only has a population 5 times larger.
You would need to increase your population from 320 million to 2.6 billion to have the same population density as us.
You have so much free space you could absorb the entire population of Europe. Logistics aside. Which makes some US citizens fear of immigration even more laughable.
> Which makes some US citizens fear of immigration even more laughable.
Even leaving aside the fact that much of the U.S. is not easily habitable, that's a straw man. Even if there is land for more people doesn't mean we have the resources to offer a robust safety net for all those people. (Ironically, many so-called progressives in the U.S. defend immigration by asserting that immigrants do below-minimum wage jobs nobody wants to do and don't use social services for fear of being deported. How that's a good thing escapes me.)
Of course, yes. I suspect that as transit, farming and energy technology improves over the next century or two, we'll find a lot more of that space livable.
I think he's talking about how mismanagement of Sydney's growth has resulted in awful traffic and sky high housing market. But I'm probably being optimistic.
The English settlement of the eastern united states was perfectly peaceful. Englishmen are not murderous psychopaths, but immigration inevitably destroys the previous way of life, and most groups (such as aboriginal Taiwanese, American Indians, and Americans today) value their way of life quite a lot thank you very much.
You need to revisit your American history. Colonizers massacred natives through infectious disease (sometimes deliberately, usually not), direct conflict, slaughter of the buffalo they depended on for food, forced relocation to useless land, and other violent tactics. Any natives who were in the way of westward expansion were neutralized, one way or another.
Colonizers destroyed the way of life of those who lived through a deliberate program of "civilization" (reeducation) which included sending native children to boarding schools to be raised in American culture and "rescued" from their own.
Indian removal [0] is a decent place to start reading.
This was not cultural change via the melting pot, this was genocide and reeducation as state policy, with a generous helping of biological warfare.
But come to think of that, immigration doesn't target flyover areas - not so many immigrants come to middle of nowhere places. Instead the (desirable) coast areas get packed.
Maybe the fears of immigration are laughable, maybe not, but your argument doesn't hold water.
That's false. There are lots of immigrants to Minnesota, from places like Laos, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Heck, Minneapolis/St.Paul is one of the largest groupings of the Somali diaspora. Immigrants don't just live in the cities but also small towns.
But anyway, who makes the mort stink about immigrants? The exact place you say immigrants aren't coming: flyover country.
I have no idea about the numbers, but had a coworker whose family was from Liberia and moved to Minnesota as a kid. I know I've heard news stories about groups of Somali immigrants in places like Columbus, OH.
Yeah, those places aren't the least dense areas in the U.S., but I was expecting immigrants to almost exclusively be in port cities on the coast.
Why is it just westerners/whites who are expected to cope with a changing population?
Can you imagine a scenario in which say Beijing, or Tokyo, or Jakarta, or Riyadh, or Nairobi, or Lagos, or Mumbai were filled with a foreign population that was greater than 50% of the total population for the city?
Can you imagine a scenario where any country outside the western world had demographic numbers showing that foreigners outnumbering the founding population group of the country in the sub 25 age group?
These scenarios are unimaginable and quite absurd even to ponder for anywhere outside of white countries. And yet, have you been to London? Have you looked at demographic charts?
People can raise objections to the population displacement you seem to favor without it having anything to do with "racism, scapegoating, and a general inability to cope," or "muh jerbs."
There are plenty of westerners who think, "We've got a pretty good thing going here, we've brought a lot of good to ourselves and the world as a whole. And we'd rather not see our civilization drastically altered, because a drastic altering of our civilization will impede our efforts and abilities to go on doing good for ourselves and the world."
>Jakarta is pluralistic and religiously diverse. The city's population in 2000 was 35.16% Javanese, 27.65% Betawi, and 15.27% Sundanese. Betawi people are a creole ethnic group that came from various parts of Indonesia and intermarriage with Chinese, Arabs, and Europeans
Jakarta is basically a mix of a bunch of populations. Loads of south-east Asia has a lot of immigrants (2nd, 3rd generation too) from China and other places.
Hell, China is not exactly a homogenous population either.
Not to mention lost of Europe had other ethnic populations that were overridden by people of Christendom. All those wars ends with a lot of intermingling. And of course the US committed massive genocide to make everyone "white".
Your complaint lays on some pretty false premises.
Good points. But the fact is when you have a relatively rich country to the north and countries to the south that are poor, gang infested, unimaginably corrupt(bad security, education, and health care), fraught with inequality, and having increasingly desperate people, migration is inevitable. Why isn't more attention paid to helping those southern neighbors out so there is less incentive ? Lots of oil down south !!!!
Regarding Mumbai, it depends on how you define "foreigner". The native population of Marathis only totals 22% in Mumbai. For some in India, these inter-Indian distinctions matter greatly.
It is just pedantic nitpicking. The remainder of your argument still stands and is interesting to think about.
> Why is it just westerners/whites who are expected to cope with a changing population?
I'm living in Shanghai, and I certainly expect the Chinese to cope with my presence. It has been going well so far; at worst I get kids pointing their fingers at me. It probably helps that I'm more a curiosity than part of an invading horde.
Of course if there were a sudden influx of foreigners large enough to significantly alter the population statistics, there would probably be a strong backlash; partly due to the influence on the housing market and partly due to plain racism, but I wouldn't be more accepting of that than if it happens in the west.
Basically, I like having the opportunity of moving to any country I want, so why shouldn't the same hold for anyone who wants to come to my home country?
Can I turn it backwards? I would like to decide who gets to move in around me and who doesn't, and I am content that I will be subject of the same filtering if I would to move.
I am already a subject of filtering anyway (by having to get entry visas for EU & USA).
> Basically, I like having the opportunity of moving to any country I want, so why shouldn't the same hold for anyone who wants to come to my home country?
Why should your countrymen back home, the vast majority of which have no desire to emigrate, bear the cost of you being able to live in China?
I'd gladly give up my opportunity to move to any country if it put a stop to and reverted the disastrous waves of immigration in western Europe of the last two decades.
San Diego was over 90% non-Hispanic whites up until the 50's, now they represent roughly 45% of the population -- and that's excluding many of the major Hispanic enclaves south of the city proper.
People really are concerned about /jobs/. Most of the US is exactly zero percent richer than 20 years ago. Wages are stagnate. Nobody knows a solution.
I don't think anybody disagrees with that, it's just that scapegoating immigrants is a fairly explicit manipulation tactic by the wealthy to control the poor. After all, poor immigrants aren't the ones who engineered an economy of staggering inequality and wage stagnation.
Immigrants don't just "take" jobs. Their presence also creates new ones. It's not as though people come here, go to work, and then never put money into the economy.
but it is true i think, that immigrants do take jobs away from the lower-skilled demographics, because they may be willing to take on a lower wage than their native counterparts. The influx of new demand due to immigrants is going to be slower to materialize as wealth to the upper-eschelons of owners, which is then slower to trickle down to more hires/jobs to meet demand. Therefore, in the immediate future, the natives are less well-off.
I don't know how anyone can look at China's transformation over the last 30 years and think capitalism is a problem. When China altered its policies form socialist to free market, it brought a billion people out of abject poverty in less than 20 years.
The data doesn't show that there's a better solution to innate human corruption than capitalism.
What? Dismantling welfare maybe is the solution that "everybody" knows, but it sure as shit isnt dismantling the only economic system that hasn't turned out to be bullshit within a century of trying jt.
Even democratic countries that rely almost entirely on natural resources end up pretty awful at some point or other.
I'm not going to comment one way or another on how reliance on natural resources does correlate with... unconventional government types and economic policies such as dictatorships and central planning or hypercapitalism
Well, as an outsider always reading about race issues, Ferguson riots, BLM, black people here vs white people there, identity politics, ethnicities only voting for one party etc it doesn't seem like immigration is so desirable.
https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=940