Deep Thought for the Day

I occasionally have one. Here's something to think about:

Ever think that there are just too many people on the planet? Like we're running out of space? Well guess what. If you took the entire world's population (6,602,224,175 est) and put them in Texas (268,601 square miles), you'd have a lower population density (24,580 people per square mile) than that of NYC (25,925 people per square mile).


But think of the traffic!!

 

That's all sorts of impossible.

 

Every square mile of Texas is totally habitable.

But think of the lines at the DMV!

 

How do you figure?

 

As in, NYC can sustain such a density because it's the size of...NYC. If the world becomes not even Texas, but let's say, collections of Maine sized NYCs, we're screwed.

 

To do that, we'd have a world population of roughly 66 billion. 90% of the world's population occupies about 10% of the land. The point wasn't that we should live like NYC, just that there's a ton of space.

 

I think we should forget about all that wilderness and farmland.

 

Extremes--in any form--are usually a bad idea.

 

For now...

 

For the foreseeable future. The world population seems to be leveling out and will likely stabilize at no more than about 10 billion or so.

 

I hear baby boomers reminisce about how some demographers thought that the U.S. population would continue growing at the rate it had in the 50's and early 60's until urban sprawl and shortage of resources caused everything to go to hell.

10 billion is still quite a lot of people, though-- perhaps too many for even a good percentage to live anywhere close to comfortably.

 

What about fresh water supplies, farmland - will we be able to sustain that population indefinitely?

 

The poor in Africa and Asia will likely bear the brunt of any resource problems as they are now (although there technically shouldn't be any significant problems with food/water supplies in 2007).

 

Aren't there going to be wars for water in the future?

 

Lots. Be afraid.

 

Seriously guys. The problem isn't resources. It's resource distribution. There is no shortage of resources on the planet to feed the entire world's population. The US literally throws away tons of food every year for price stabilization purposes (you can thank the government for that). For about $50 billion, you could solve world hunger.

No. There's no shortage of supplies. I make fresh water on my submarine every day (out of seawater). It's not hard. It's actually pretty cheap. Problem is, no one's going to fund that to make sure a bunch of corrupt people in Africa make tons of money while their people die of thirst.

 

Won't do much good for anyone if farmers go broke.

 

Yes it will. If farmers go broke under the current system, other farmers will have the opportunity to more efficiently produce the same things. I could talk long and hard about this (and perhaps I will later, but it's late and I'm going to bed) but propping up farmers with subsidies directly contributes to world hunger.

 

No matter, masses of farmers going bankrupt from low prices only helped cause the economy to crash.

 

And yet this ends up, politically, being equivalent.

 

Helped? Past tense? To what, dear sir, are you referring? Careful when you answer...

Well, yes and no. Resource distribution problems can be fixed easily enough, if we actually have the will to do it. The truth is that, despite our protestations to the contrary, we rather like being able to buy cheap chocolate bars so we don't care that the majority of world cocoa beans are picked by african child slaves.