What If All 7.1 Billion People Moved To Tunisia? | Hacker News Reader

What If All 7.1 Billion People Moved To Tunisia?

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63 pointslouthy37 comments

There's a lot of land out there. My father in law has acreage in west Texas. You only see people if A) you drive 30 miles to the nearest town. B) migrants are traversing the land to sneak into the us. Or C) the border patrol enters your land looking for migrants.

I would say we have a way to go before we fill the earth with people. Now, water, food, energy, and providing a certain quality of life will hit a wall much sooner than that.

The US is mostly fields of dust, rock, and sometimes grass. States, cities, and geological structures get named after people we've long conquered and run out.

I didn't realize how true this was until I drove from Chicago to the northern Nevada desert for Burning man and back again.

My favorite east-west flight I've ever done happened to be in Spring, just after all the farmers had plowed, but before anything they had planted had come up yet (or very much). Farmland was brown, cities were cities, everything else was green. You could look down and it was a life-size graph of basic land utilization.

There's a lot of farms in the US... but there's a lot of wilderness, too. Not to mention when you're flying over the Rockies, you've essentially left civilization... mountain after mountain after mountain of absolutely nothing human. Even the "dense" parts of the mountains are just thin skins surrounding our roads, followed by wilderness just one mountain over (or two in the really dense areas).

The great Isaac Asimov spoke of this back in his day, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.h...

"Well, the earth's population is now about 3,000,000,000 and is doubling every 40 years. If this rate of doubling goes unchecked, then a World-Manhattan is coming in just 500 years. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!

There are only two general ways of preventing this: (1) raise the death rate; (2) lower the birth rate. Undoubtedly, the world of A>D. 2014 will have agreed on the latter method. Indeed, the increasing use of mechanical devices to replace failing hearts and kidneys, and repair stiffening arteries and breaking nerves will have cut the death rate still further and have lifted the life expectancy in some parts of the world to age 85.

There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently."

Asimov is fantastic, but he wasn't always right. The population growth rate is roughly half (1.1% vs 2%) what it was in the mid-sixties when that piece was written, and it continues to trend downward as more countries with lots of people advance their development. That's a bit more than "slackened", IMO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_ra...

As it turns out, developed societies trend toward a lower growth rate. We're not 100% certain why, but no great propaganda machine is required.

For a little while, modern civil engineering drops the childhood death rate much faster than cultural expectations can catch up. Gotta pop out ten kids if eight of them are going to die before age 5. Whoops turns out they're all going to live till they're 80.

Now the modern equivalent is "Oh man, how are we going to pay for college for all these kids we're planning on? We'd better have fewer of them or we're going to go broke long before we die or they're able to support us."

Possibilities for why: -Access to better medical care (lower mother/child mortality rate) which means children are more likely to survive unto adult hood. Also includes birth control (pill, condoms, hysterectomy/vasectomy, etc). If parents (or individually potential mothers or fathers) don't want kids, they have choices to prevent. - Women have better education and choices: can work, can be stay at home mom, work at home mom, working mom, mom/not a mom, married/not married (and so many other mixes and situations I won't go on). - Children in developed countries take more resources and time to raise. Education mostly, but also socially pushed 'toys' and activities. Also take into account the 'emerging youth' trend which includes the 20-30 somethings that stay with their parents during/after highschool/college trying to find work/purpose. This costs parents money and can delay their retirement or other goals. More kids there are, more $ and more delay of goals. - Parents are no longer relying on their kids during retirement. Retirement funds, pensions and savings no longer require relying (as much) on the adult children (of course that's the ideal, but not always what happens). -Children are no longer needed to mind the farm/family business. -Adults are getting married later in life. Less time to have lots of kids, and having kids later in life can result in fertility issues and health complications. I list these mostly since as an educated woman who recently married in her mid-late 20's, I've thought of these and relate with these and how they work in my life. While I like the idea of a large family, like my parents had, it doesn't make sense for my husband and I. We plan only 2-3, closer to 2 kids. We're waiting to finish schooling (my second bachelors and my masters and my husband's schooling after jumping around trying to figure out what he wanted to study). We're both working full time, so no money due to school, no time due to work and school. While my parents rely on their children due to the economy, I know its more of an exception now than a rule. We're in the US, but I've sometimes considered moving to European countries that encourage families due to a stagnant/low birth rate (but of course don't like immigrants).

> The rate of increase of population will have slackenedbut, I suspect, not sufficiently."

imho, far more interesting thing to look at would be the second-derivative of the rate-of-increase. if that shows a decreasing trend we are ok, no ?

Bad title, but interesting post. Better title: If everyone lived as densely as they do in Manila, the human race could fit in Tunisia

Actually, Tunisia used to be the breadbasket of the Roman empire. These days it's chiefly an olive basket, not improbably after having been degraded by centuries of unsustainable clearcut monoculture in an already relatively arid climate.

I happened to be there for a full month at the start of the revolution a couple of years ago (by accident) and found it an interesting country. It was absolutely full of Roman ruins, and is reportedly the only source for red marble in the Meditteranean, a fact the Romans took great advantage of. There is also a spectacular surviving castle or two, as well as some interesting WWII history, a remnant Jewish population (most moved to Israel), and some nice islands. Pity about the dictator, and too bad they couldn't keep the human rights activist president in they elected after throwing him out.

The Manhattan / New Zealand comparison is interesting to me, having lived and worked in and around NYC all my life. New Zealand is not that much bigger than the US Eastern Seaboard metro area, which extends from Washington DC to Boston. If you extend that a bit further, from Virginia Beach VA to Portland ME, and extended it inland about as wide as New Jersey for the whole stretch, that's a pretty good match.

A NYC-density city that large would be interesting. It would need rapid mass transit throughout with high-speed lines connecting with local hubs. That would be doable if you're rebuilding the entire area. (Amtrak hasn't been able to build high speed rail because they're stuck using the existing railways which aren't straight enough.) Presumably a lot of traffic could be reduced by replacing all of the highways with mass transit, which would be feasible if the whole area was that densely populated. Again, it hasn't been done now because all public transit around the big cities is designed to get you into and out of the cities; if your destination is anyplace else you have to drive yourself. It's much better within NYC where public transit goes everywhere.

NYC, dense as it is, still has lots of open parkland. I think it would be quite livable even at the scale we're talking about. Of course people would still need to be able to get out of the city for a break; I imagine the whole western edge of the giant city would be public nature reserves with plenty of mass-transit access.

Of course not everyone would live within the city; there would need to be farms and farmers to feed everyone. Most of the US and southern portions of Canada would be farmland (much as it is today, in fact) and there would be plantations scattered around the rest of the world too wherever the weather is suited to various crops. Much of the world would still be left to nature, I think. If we're at the point technologically and socially where we can move nearly everyone into a megacity, we should also be able to create very high efficiency hydroponic farms that could produce many crops much more densely than a standard farm can. Large areas would only be needed for animals and crops that can't be grown hydroponically.

We'd need power too... lots of it. Keeping everyone in a relatively small area would help, but I'll bet the average power usage per-person across the globe is less than the average usage per New Yorker today, and in the megacity everyone would be moved to the New Yorker level. Maybe all of the unfarmable areas in Canada can be filled up with Nuclear powerplants.

> A NYC-density city that large would be interesting.

I'd hate to live in a place that large and dense, it sounds like an excellent place for the next avian flu or ebola outbreak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infec...

It's all about the surface, the number of uninfected people in the pool that are susceptible x the interactions with infected people. In a place like that this would be a massive lurking danger. (and there are cities that get pretty close to this and I really wonder how long that lottery will hold).

NYC is already that dense, and much of Asia is even denser, and those epidemics haven't wiped out populations yet.

Part of the assumption (mine, at least) is that we're talking about NYC-quality infrastructure too: water, waste management, health management, law enforcement, emergency services, etc. The megacity would have the resources and facilities to identify a disease like that as soon as cases started to show up, and contain and treat the problem before it got out of control. Those diseases would also be less likely to show up in the first place because of better living conditions for everyone.

Here's a drawback: what would everyone do for a living? NYC doesn't have much manufacturing anymore, and industry like that takes up space. It would have to be outside the city, and people working for manufacturing industries would have to live near the factories. Farmers would live outside too, as I mentioned before. Fishermen too. There's probably a bunch of other activities that would require people to live outside the city, so not everyone would be a city dweller. Probably a good 80%+ would be able to stay in the city though.

The density of Manhatten, NY would take up all of New Zeeland put into perspective how many freaking people on the world there is. Manhatten is DENSE, and NZ is not small.

Wow.

His red-gray map could be made even more striking, as the northern & western parts of China are sparsely populated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Populati...

Here's another comparison in that vein: If Franz Josef Land [1] were as densely populated as Manila, it would be an archipelago nation of about 700 million people. But can you guess why it does not have 700 million people?

The use of Russia, Canada, and Alaska as examples ends up being similarly hard to gain much from, because all it really says, in three different ways, is that the Arctic region does not have large human populations. True, but not very surprising or enlightening.

One attempt at a different kind of comparison could be to first exclude land that is below some threshold of reasonable habitability, and then make the comparisons regarding the remaining land.

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

are other folks also reminded of the beautiful john-brunner's novel "stand on the zanzibar" by this post ?

I live in Manila, and it really can get insufferable at times.

It'd be interesting to see how many miles of roads would need paved, power and water lines run, and houses would need built if you took everyone from Manilla and spread them across Wyoming.

The population difference is a factor of 20, so superficially it would be less than a factor of 20.

There is a practical concern that Wyoming is already full. So a lot depends on either keeping or eliminating federal land, national parks, farm/ranch land, that sort of thing.

In practice I think you'd be talking about making Cheyenne a factor of a thousand larger, rather than paving Yellowstone national park. Cheyenne is about 20 square miles, so we're talking 20K square miles. Wyoming is about 100K square miles, so we'd only need 1/5 of Wyoming to move Manilla into a Cheyenne-like sprawl.

I find it hard to believe that Manilla can feed itself now, so moving to WY and not being able to feed itself is probably not a new problem WRT the plan?

>There is a practical concern that Wyoming is already full.

Full? It's mostly empty!

Nope, its full as in 100% allocated. Go ahead, try and build a house in Yellowstone park, or take over a random spot on someone's ranch and see how well it turns out.

And if you kicked all the ranchers and parks away, you'd have to find space for them outside the state.

Its a close cousin of urban sprawl vs municipal zoning designed to prevent urban sprawl.

>Nope, its full as in 100% allocated. Go ahead, try and build a house in Yellowstone park, or take over a random spot on someone's ranch and see how well it turns out.

Well, the "allocated" part doesn't matter much when you have "a factor of 20 population difference" coming to get your land.

>And if you kicked all the ranchers and parks away, you'd have to find space for them outside the state.

Well, they could always do to them what was done to the native Americans, hack them up, let them starve and move the rest to concentration camps and reservation areas.

If everyone moved to one location, would the weight shift affect Earth's rotation or orbit?

No. People are a massively insignificant part of the Earth's mass.

Yes, absolutely. Any change in the distribution of the density of mass will change the mechanics of Earth's rotation. I'm unsure if the orbit would be affected, but I assume so - since the rotational energy will be different, I expect the orbit would be too.

Could we measure those changes? Not sure. The changes are probably too small for us to detect, but on the other hand, we have some pretty incredible instruments.

Our collective weight is insignificant next to almost anything else. If I recall correctly, even the biomass of ants is greater than of all humans.

Take a few moments to read [1]. It should answer your question.

[1]: http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

The fact that there are more people living in South-East Asia than anywhere else is a little less astounding (but still amazing & unbalanced) if you take away the deformation of the Mercator projection.

Large areas like Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and Australia are pretty stretched out when compared to SEA on our world maps.

Related: http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

(Munroe has us all living, or at least standing on rhode island.)

Very interesting but I feel like the data would be more useful if categorized by city rather than country. America, for example, is shown as being very sparse, but in reality the major urban centers are dense while the rest of the country is sparse.

Technically its fractal in that no matter what your scale / zoom lens setting is, about 90% of the population always lives on 10% of the land in the USA. Applies to small rural faming villages, entire Midwestern states, everything west of the Mississippi river, the whole country, etc. Or rephrased you can't automagically tell the scale of a map by looking at a population density graph unless you cheat and memorize shapes. The county I grew up in has about the same graph as Rhode Island has about the same graph as the whole country, more or less.

I found the "If everyone lived as densely as..." hard to parse. A better way to say it is: "To give everyone as much space as the average Alaskan has, we'd need 108 Earths."

This is totally flawed. Canada is given as an example presumably based on the population density across the entire country, completely disregarding that a lot of it is virtually uninhabitable tundra. Russia, Alaska, and Iceland have the same factors involved.

It would be better to base it on actually inhabited areas in any country, using the representative population density for a given urban area.

Pure bullshit.

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