Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

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Consider the environmental transparency: instead of utterly devastating an environmental region as does cities, encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres, the high-efficiency home sporting solar roof & rainwater collection, wireless/satellite high-bandwidth internet, home & prolific electric car chargers, optimized Amazon/etc delivery, home/neighborhood schooling, work-from-home norm, etc. Environmental impact? between normalizing practically everything environmentalists call for (I'm not one), and there being not much of an environment to impact (have you seen the Dakotas?), the neo-futuristic American lifestyle can be achieved while minimizing environmental footprint/impact without the hideous expense & annoyance of overpopulated cities.

I think you massively overestimate the rural "subsidies". Make it easy to move rural and "go green" with minimal regulations, and you may find the problems nearly solve themselves.

You still need to give those people roads, maybe even sewer rather than having them use a horrible septic tank. They will probably want internet as well...and not the crappy satellite variety. And schools...ya, that’s a lot of bussing.

Western Washington state subsidizes Eastern Washington state greatly, and that isn’t even as sparse as South Dakota (or as I like to call it, Tropical Dakota).

There are 57.5 million square miles of land on Earth, including mountains, deserts, rainforests, national parks, tundra, and Antarctica. There are currently 7.4 billion people. This works out to ~4.9 acres per person of land of any type.

World arable land is ~26.2 million square miles, or about 2.2 acres per person. At 11 billion people (projection world population peak by ~2100, you get about 1.5 acres of arable land per person. There is literally, physically not enough space on Earth to put your plane into action.

I like nature, but I think you underestimate the subsidies given for rural development and infrastructure and just how unsustainable our development style in the US is.

> encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres

There will soon be 11 billion people in the world.

This is a pipe dream, but if it came to fruition it would wreck the planet very quickly.

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