5 ms·
Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, no one calls 47 percent of the USA "home". Wow wouldn't have guessed it was that high. I'd like to
by eknight15 9y ago
Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, no one calls 47 percent of the USA "home".
Wow wouldn't have guessed it was that high. I'd like to see the same map but excluding national parks/public spaces.
- thriftwy 9y agoThis reminds me how SF writers were expecting that people will colonize other planets, 50 years ago. We'll somehow go all the way over there and find a way to live in those hostile conditions. Guess what, fast forward, people don't just want to stay on Earth, but will also prefer SF proper, Manhattan and/or Paris within 20 arrondissements. Even smaller cities are losing population. I guess that Spengler's narrative lives on.
- tlrobinson 9y agoTook me a second to figure out your first use of "SF" was "science fiction" and the second was "San Francisco"
- aqzman 9y agoI'm glad I wasn't the only one. I was very confused for a moment after reading that comment. Never seen the acronym "SF" used for science fiction before.
- __s 9y agohttps://google.com/search?q=SF+writer https://google.com/search?q=SF+writer doesn't list writers from San Francico SF straight in the title of https://www.amazon.com/Other-Worlds-SF-Human-Imagination/dp/0307741761 https://www.amazon.com/Other-Worlds-SF-Human-Imagination/dp/... SF also serves to include both 'science fiction' and 'speculative fiction' but that's a whole other debate
- ptaipale 9y agoI've seen it a lot, and the first use of SF was naturally right to me. That's why the second one was so confusing.
- JCharante 9y agoIt took you for me to realize that op didn't mean San Francisco. It made sense for me either way.
- ajmurmann 9y agoI'm curious how improved telepresence will change the desire/need to live in major metro areas.
- thriftwy 9y ago...or basic income.
- ajmurmann 9y agoI could see that that might have an impact as well. It will be interesting to see to what degree people move to metro areas because that's where the jobs are and to what degree they move there because it's a more interesting place to live. While I'd love to have a little more space and pay less for housing I'd get pretty depressed living outside a metro area. If that's what I wanted I could move back to the visit where my parents live, live in their second house or in-law unit and live off a few hours months of remote consulting work. Curious to see how that's the case for others.
- brianwawok 9y agoI think Chicago is the only big city to lose people in the US in the last 10 years.
- goodcanadian 9y agoDetroit has lost something like 60% of its population since 1950 . . . though it might be growing again, now.
- meric 9y agoIt's not a big city, anymore.
- maxerickson 9y agoIt's just a ridiculously massive urban area spanning about 1.5 counties. I guess you can say it isn't highly populated anymore.
- adamgray 9y agoA lot of Chicago's population loss is on the South Side where violence is high. Also the elimination of the projects has moved a lot of Section 8 housing to the suburbs, as it gives low income families a chance at a better life in a less dire situation. Investment in new infrastructure is at an all time high in the Loop / North / West sides. Young people are moving out the suburbs and into the core. Chicago's population isn't increasing at the rate of places like Houston because of the lack of annexation, the suburbs in Cook County generally don't want to join the city.
- pilsetnieks 9y agoNot all people. No one expects everyone to drop everything and move to Mars but there will be some pioneer types who would probably want that kind of endeavor. If comfort was everything, people would have remained in Africa.
- bbcbasic 9y ago> Guess what, fast forward, people don't just want to stay on Earth, but will also prefer SF proper, Manhattan and/or Paris within 20 arrondissements. Yet people live on the ISS, where there are no fancy cafes. How do you explain that?
- vacri 9y agoThey return home after a brief period.
- Robotbeat 9y agoA lot of people /don't/ want to stay on Earth. (And people also want to go to Antarctica... There are multiple "colonies" there, by Chile and Argentina, thousands live there in the summer, and about a thousand people winter over there, and tens of thousands of tourists travel there annually... All this in a place that is illegal to mine, illegal to claim nationally, and even illegal to build new permanent structures by international treaty, thus essentially illegal to build a city or anything like a real economy, which would require mining at least for gravel.) The interesting thing about people is that there are many different kinds with many different motivations. Although I do suspect that space settlements will be even more urbanized and centralized than Earth cities. The extra costs associated with living in space are reduced by living in larger settlements/cities (think surface area to volume ratio), and just like on Earth, economic productivity will increase with increasing population density.
- vacri 9y agoI think most people who want to live off-planet have a very romanticised notion of what that entails. Mars isn't going to be terraformed within our lifetimes, even if it was possible. Living on Mars = living permanently in a tunnel. And if you don't get along with the small community you'll be living with, you'll be screwed. And if you don't like living a fairly regimented lifestyle, you'll be screwed as well; there'll be no equivalent of "let's see what cafes are down this alleyway!". I think far more people actually want a 'holiday' off-planet, than actually live off-planet.
- Robotbeat 9y agoAs far as the latter point, that's fine & perhaps expected. That's why we need to make transport cheap enough so people can come and go. I know what it's like to live life in a tunnel. That's the Twin Cities in Minnesota during the winter. Minnesota is where the modern indoor shopping mall was invented. The entire downtown of Minneapolis is still walkable in the middle of the winter because all the buildings are connected by temperature controlled skyways and tunnels. No reason you can't see what cafes are in the next building or indoor level.
- 9y ago
- Spooky23 9y agoI haven't met many people who have knowledge beyond watching Friends reruns who actually want to live in Manhattan. The highest population growth places in the US are places like Dallas, TX and Greenville, SC. That's been the case for a long time. NYC and SFO are treading water and are at risk as their economies have de-diversified over the last 40 years.
- ptaipale 9y agoOr how Asimov's "The Caves of Steel", from 1953, was set on an Earth of 3000 years from now, and that was overpopulated, horribly full of people, living on contiguous, adjoining underground cities covering entire continents. And had 8 billion people (which we are actually about to reach in about 7 years from now, somewhere around 2024).
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoChina is very similar, more amazing even, check out: http://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/42/105242-004-D8DEDBD1.gif http://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/42/105242-004-D8DEDBD1... That's a lot of area with less than one person per km2. Of course, even the US and China can't beat Canada and Russia, or even Australia probably.
- grenoire 9y agoThat's partially due to the fact that the less inhabited areas are mostly uninhabitable or simply very inconvenient. See this height map of China and see how the less populated areas are simply too high: http://chinatoursandholidays.com/sites/default/files/styles/albatros_colorbox/public/inline/map_china.jpg?width=500&height=500&iframe=true http://chinatoursandholidays.com/sites/default/files/styles/... I'm guessing that there are a lot of inhabitable places in the US that are just... not.
- madeofpalk 9y agoAustralia is like mostly one very large desert. All our population centres are on the coasts.
- bpicolo 9y agoTo be fair, population centers are concentrated on coasts worldwide, if less dramatically
- thriftwy 9y agoBut what's interesting, most of historic capitals happen to be not coastal, and often a bit more to the north than you would expect of comfort zone. Beijing, Paris, Moscow, Berlin. For some reason, coastal cities don't have this push to form a state.
- bpicolo 9y agoMaybe because boats didn't used to be particularly good at seafaring? Dunno!
- repiret 9y agoThere are 172 million acres of land in Texas. That means you could give every American man woman and child a half an acre of land to themselves in Texas, with land to spare. The US is really big.
- baddox 9y agoYou could also (in theory) put every human on Earth in Texas with a population density of only 26,000 people per square mile, about the same density as New York City.
- madengr 9y agoI read you could pile all the 5 billion human bodies on earth in a pyramid and it would only be 1 km square base.
- sulam 9y agoErr, there are over 7B people on the planet right now.
- InitialLastName 9y agoI'm pretty sure that one crosses a comfort vs density threshold.
- privong 9y ago> I'd like to see the same map but excluding national parks/public spaces. This is a major aspect, I think. A lot of land in the west is federally owned. This NY Times article[0] states that 47% of the land in the western US is owned by the Federal Government. It doesn't look like there's 1-1 overlap between the empty census blocks and the federal land ownership, though. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/upshot/why-the-government-owns-so-much-land-in-the-west.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/06/upshot/why-the-government...
- Shivetya 9y agohttps://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state Well twenty eight percent is just in Federal lands. So throw in state, city, and local, properties and we can cover a lot. I wonder how much is considered water way? Not sure if that is defined as federal land, but lakes and rivers eat up a bit too. Top it all off with places no one wants to be Its an odd article that seems to be more sensational than necessary.
- brewdad 9y agoI think it's meant as a response to the election maps that show Trump favorable areas covering about 90% of the US. The fact is very few, if any, people live in much of the US so the map doesn't show what some people think it does.
- derefr 9y agoAnd agricultural land (farms + pastures.)
- frumiousirc 9y ago> Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, no one calls 47 percent of the USA "home". It's a fairly meaningless number resulting in an arbitrary choice of binning. If I defined "home" as "home is where the heart is" and used bins about the size of a human heart then I could say that no one calls 99.999968 percent of the USA "home".
- Bjorkbat 9y agoI grew up in Eastern New Mexico, sparsely populated but also remarkably scant in public land. Noticed a lot of those green spots fell there. Wasn't for lacking of trying, you drive through and occasionally you'll see the remains of old buildings. Mostly schools I think. For some odd reason the schools were always built with rock while everything else was made out of wood. Basically what happened is that people came in after the Homestead Act to try and settle, found out that despite all the grasses it's still basically a desert, and gave up after the Depression. There's also the town of Tolar, New Mexico. That one's special. It got leveled during WWII when a train carrying bombs derailed. Nowadays I think most of the land between Clovis and Roswell is privately owned by ranchers.