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Comment by netrus | Hacker News Reader

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netrus·

This picture put it into perspective for me [0].

We use most of the Earth's dry surface to feed ... What ever that picture shows.

Disclaimer: I did not check their math, but it is in the right ball park.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/p0qws3/self...

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"a sphere of human goo just under 1 km wide. I made a visualization of how that would look like in the middle of Central Park in NYC."

You may want to pass on that, it's right at the top of that reddit page.

> We use most of the Earth's dry surface to feed

We don't even come close to using 10% of the earth's dry surface for food production, let alone most of it.

This is wrong, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, we currently use ~38% of the earths surface for agriculture.[1] Most of that is used for pastor lands. But crops alone are 10%. Now imagine how much of the earth's surface is actually suitable for agriculture and livestock. We use most of the earths surface for ourselves. In fact it's estimated that only 23% of the land on earth, excluding Antartica, is devoted to wildlife.[2]

[1] https://www.fao.org/sustainability/news/detail/en/c/1274219/ [2] https://theconversation.com/five-maps-that-reveal-the-worlds...

And about 1/3 of earths surface is deserts. (While they're not devoid of life or agriculture, they provide very little support for flora and fauna compared to most non-desert areas).

We'll be squeezing out pretty much all remaining wildlife in a few hundred years,

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