8 ms·
A few hints from the article: 810 sq miles mapped, a three year project and lidar flying by helicopter. Another giveaway is the search for MH370. In some dimens
by wjnc 9y ago
A few hints from the article: 810 sq miles mapped, a three year project and lidar flying by helicopter. Another giveaway is the search for MH370. In some dimensions Earth is still huge!
- baron816 9y agoI wonder how much city life biases us to think the planet is smaller than it is. Perhaps it explains fears of overpopulation.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- acjohnson55 9y agoTo me, fears of overpopulation have less to do with how much of the earth serves as living space, but how much human activity currently impacts nearly every corner of the planet. I think it's plausible that we can lessen human impact without actually decreasing population. Not sure it's likely, though.
- mirimir 9y agoI recall a letter to Science from the mid 70s, rebutting The Limits to Growth. I have tried to find it more-or-less lately, with no luck. As I recall, its author argued that the Earth could support well over 10^8 people in Trantor style. He assumed unlimited energy from fusion, and substantial food synthesis. Only humans, pets, crops, livestock, and requisite insects and microorganisms would survive. The planetary surface would support a building ~16 km high. At that height, the surface would be in thermal equilibrium at ~1500°C. But hey, if that were doable, why not just build space habitat's?
- PoachedSausage 9y agoBecause it is cheaper and easier to build stuff down here. Space habitats require thinking in terms of systems, dealing with inputs and outputs. Humans haven't mastered systems thinking yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- mirimir 9y agoI guess. I've been reading Banks' Culture series ;)
- landryraccoon 9y ago10^8 is a hundred million people, so yeah, it's safe to say the Earth can support well over that many humans.
- mirimir 9y agoOops, I was brain dead there. I meant 10^11. Or maybe even 10^12.
- credit_guy 9y agoIn other words 100 billion to 1 trillion. The world’s land area, excluding Antarctica, is about 50 million sq. miles. With a comfortable population density of 1000 ppl/sqm (like in South Korea, Holland, Israel, or the state of New Jersey) you would get to 50 billion (same as Trantor). The population density of Singapore is close to 20k ppl/sqm, that would give you 1 trillion. If you are willing to pad the Earth with buildings 16 km high, you could pack at least 1000 times more people, more likely 1 million times more. Maybe that letter to Science mentioned 10^18?
- mirimir 9y agoI don't remember the number. What I recall is just that it was an absurdly huge estimate. And I'd love to have a copy of that ~1975 letter, if anyone has access to requisite tools. And, in case it's not obvious, it's not a world that I'd care to live in.
- barkingcat 9y agoOverpopulation at a certain level of consumption is a valid concern. If all 7.4 billion people on the planet all consume 3 burger patties a day, all drive internal combustion powered vehicles, and all have a new iphone each, that would very quickly require an extreme amount of resource consumption - it is unsustainable. Of course, if you just want "as high a population at any cost" the earth can probably sustain trillions of humans, but the bulk of those humans would have no clean water to drink, with no access to clean air, no access to a livable wage, no reasonable access to hospital and emergency services, etc. You could have a trillion slaves, all pampering the lives of a the select few hundred billionaires who own everything. That's the real fear of overpopulation.
- jacobolus 9y agoIt’s both bigger and smaller than we often think. In a straight line, it’s smaller than we might expect: People can (and do) walk across continents, sail across oceans in one-person boats, fly all the way around in 2 days, visit every country at least once during their life, etc. But of course the surface is two-dimensional, we can’t see very far at a time. The land surface is about 150 million square kilometers. (For reference, New York’s Central Park is about 3.4 square kilometers.) It’s also “fractal”, in the sense that as we look at smaller and smaller pieces, we keep noticing more and more details. Every little patch of soil is teeming with tiny animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. Or if you like, there are probably at least 10 million restaurants in the world (maybe an order of magnitude more, it’s hard to guess). If you eat at 3 different restaurants every day for your whole life, it will take more than 100 lifetimes to eat at all of them. Then there are the 150 million books to read. Etc.
- jackhack 9y agoI would say quite a lot. A private small-aircraft flight over any populated area (other than the biggest cities) reveals just how sparse most towns are. Travel almost any direction away from a main highway and in a minute or two you'll be looking at trees, trees, trees (or desert/mountains/fields). It helps give one an entirely new perspective when we're used to traveling along roads and seeing unyielding flows of civilization, when the reality is those are mere ribbons of development criss-crossing what is still mostly empty, disinterested nature.
- hutzlibu 9y agoAhem, but the trees you then see are usually very civilized ones. Cultivated and harvested like an ordinary field. There are very few wild areas left. Usually only at far off areas or very steep terrain. see also: https://xkcd.com/1338/ https://xkcd.com/1338/
- irrational 9y agoWhere do you live? I live in the Pacific Northwest and the forests around here are definitely not cultivated.
- maxerickson 9y agoFor scale, the Amazon jungle is a couple million square miles.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoI guess I'll just have to study up on the tech. IIRC there was a fairly quick LIDAR demo put on by a team at MIT that scanned the campus and surrounding areas in a relatively brief amount of time using a drone, I think. My ignorance on the subject of LIDAR has me wondering why we can't use a faster traveling vehicle, or would it be possible to do perform scans with something like a fleet of balloons that stream the data back vs one static device.
- ahi 9y agoSome rudimentary googling, MIT campus is 168 acres or .26 sq miles. So the 810 sq miles in 3 years is still pretty impressive.
- mygo 9y agoMIT also has wifi. And power outlets.
- zo1 9y agoLIDAR data requires precise location-information of the scanning-device, otherwise the data you collect is at best useless, and at-most wildly skewed. This is because all the points are in-reference to the location of the device. A faster traveling vehicle inherently means less-accurate location measurements.