I've been interested in permaculture and sustainability for a while, and also self-sufficiency, or at least local food production. There's an old book called "

I've been interested in permaculture and sustainability for a while, and also self-sufficiency, or at least local food production. There's an old book called "Five acres and independence" which I think is a reference to the amount of land you need to sustain a family. I don't know anything about the subject, really, but I just jumped off that number. I'm not in America, but we can use it as an example to do calculation. It's probably approximate to a misleading degree, but since I'm a software developer with a degree in an unrelated field making internet comments, that doesn't put me off: According to Wikipedia, the US is 3,796,742 square miles. Wolfram Alpha says that's 2.43 billion acres. Using Wikipedia's stated 2019 estimate of 328,239,523 people, that's 7.5 acres per person. So under forty acres for each family of five, roughly. So if we say 5 acres is a good number, in the US you're at 8x the amount of land needed for everyone to live off the land at a small scale. Is 1/8th of the US even arable land? What about all the other stuff we'd need, like factories, mines, schools, the cold fusion powered mag-lev network etc.? Will that fit in the rest? Maybe the occasional forest would be nice? And then of course we need to consider that the US is no. 145 out of some 200 countries for population density. For the European Union, we arrive at 2.3 acres per person, so you'd need to distribute people evenly over roughly half of the land for each five-person family to have a five acre farm. For Africa, 5.8 acres per person. But maybe that starting number is too high or too low. I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment.