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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading something interesting, in a good way, but I'm not sure whether it's fully accurate: That the majority of the planet (land, not counting water) is still unpopulated by people.

Can someone verify?

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Depends on how you measure it. Do you subdivide all land in 1 cm squares and only count the ones with somebody standing on them as populated? Then almost all land is unpopulated. With 8.2 billion people in the world, each one occupying a 0.5x0.5 meter square, you have 2.05e9 m^2 populated land, out of Earth's total land area ~1.5e14 m^2 [1]. That's less than 0.0014%.

As you increase the size of your subdivisions, the unpopulated fraction goes down. In the limit of all land being in just one subdivision, it's obviously 0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density

These type of calculations don't really work for things like skyscrapers, high-rise apartment complexes, or the slum-towns of Asia and South America, and conversely for very sparsely populated regions like the fringes of the Sahara. Antarctica has people too but it doesn't make any sense to count it as "populated".

I think we can just draw an outline around cities, towns, and villages and count that area as populated, no matter how many people are actually in there.

For long stretches of land where there's just a single highway going through and a few gas stations, motels and shacks, totaling maybe <100 people for many miles around, we can count that land as unpopulated.

Isolated islands with indigenous/uncontacted tribes, not sure.. We may have to consider their population growth and see if they're in "equilibrium" with "nature" and so on.

A simple glance at Google Earth shows large parts of Russia as clearly unpopulated/undelevoped, then there's the deserts of China and Africa, and some natural land in the Americas, and finally of course there's Antarctica, until the Elder Things awaken.

The US has only used 25% of its land. Overture published a land use dataset a while back that could go some way to verify how much land on earth is urban, covered in forest, etc.. That might only need a single SQL statement given how they structured their data.

I have some analysis around that topic in the middle of this post: https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-land-cover.html

I remember the same thing. I don't have any sources, but I've come to understand that a lot of land is on hills/mountains and is therefore an inconvenient/dangerous place to build.

I think the "overcrowded planet" scenario is not very plausible, except if we're talking about resources. There is plenty of land for everyone, especially if we start to construct efficiently.

> There is plenty of land for everyone, especially if we start to construct efficiently.

I was afraid someone will get it the wrong way: I hope it STAYS that way; that the majority of the planet remains unpopulated, but humans learn to make better use of the space we're already occupying.

Does Agriculture land count as "populated" or not? If not, most of the land is empty in most countries (even in Japan). A quick search shows Singapore "built-up" area around a third of its total surface.

The only exception might be the vatican, if you consider it a country.

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