5 ms·

What If All 7.1 Billion People Moved To Tunisia?

63 points by louthy 13y ago

signa11 13y ago
are other folks also reminded of the beautiful john-brunner's novel "stand on the zanzibar" by this post ?
kylelibra 13y ago
Bad title, but interesting post. Better title: If everyone lived as densely as they do in Manila, the human race could fit in Tunisia
goingbananers 13y ago
I live in Manila, and it really can get insufferable at times.
S_A_P 13y ago
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.
- seiji 13y ago
  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.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    I didn't realize how true this was until I drove from Chicago to the northern Nevada desert for Burning man and back again.
    - jerf 13y ago
      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).
munificent 13y ago
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."
- astrodust 13y ago
  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.
bluedino 13y ago
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.
- VLM 13y ago
  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?
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >There is a practical concern that Wyoming is already full. Full? It's mostly empty!
    - VLM 13y ago
      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.
      - coldtea 13y ago
        >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.
keiferski 13y ago
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.
- VLM 13y ago
  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.
DougWebb 13y ago
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.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  > 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_infectious_disease 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).
BigChiefSmokem 13y ago
The great Isaac Asimov spoke of this back in his day, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html 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."
- bradleyland 13y ago
  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_rate_1950–2050.svg 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.
  - VLM 13y ago
    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.
    - DougWebb 13y ago
sspiff 13y ago
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.
ggchappell 13y ago
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#Population_density_and_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Populati...
chatman 13y ago
Pure bullshit.
geetee 13y ago
If everyone moved to one location, would the weight shift affect Earth's rotation or orbit?
- richardwhiuk 13y ago
  No. People are a massively insignificant part of the Earth's mass.
- cryptoz 13y ago
  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.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  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.
- alcari 13y ago
  Take a few moments to read [1]. It should answer your question. [1]: http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/
contingencies 13y ago
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.
JonnieCache 13y ago
Related: http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ (Munroe has us all living, or at least standing on rhode island.)
_delirium 13y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Josef_Land
jebjoob 13y ago
Then they would use http://jebjoob.com http://jebjoob.com to find a job.

63 points by louthy 13y ago

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

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

goingbananers 13y ago

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

S_A_P 13y ago

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.

seiji 13y ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  I didn't realize how true this was until I drove from Chicago to the northern Nevada desert for Burning man and back again.
  - jerf 13y ago
    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).

munificent 13y ago

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."

astrodust 13y ago
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.

bluedino 13y ago

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.

VLM 13y ago
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?
- coldtea 13y ago
  >There is a practical concern that Wyoming is already full. Full? It's mostly empty!
  - VLM 13y ago
    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.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >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.

keiferski 13y ago

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.

VLM 13y ago
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.

DougWebb 13y ago

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.

jacquesm 13y ago
> 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_infectious_disease 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).

BigChiefSmokem 13y ago

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

bradleyland 13y ago
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_rate_1950–2050.svg 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.
- VLM 13y ago
  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.
  - DougWebb 13y ago

sspiff 13y ago

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.

ggchappell 13y ago

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

chatman 13y ago

Pure bullshit.

geetee 13y ago

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

richardwhiuk 13y ago
No. People are a massively insignificant part of the Earth's mass.
cryptoz 13y ago
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.
ricardobeat 13y ago
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.
alcari 13y ago
Take a few moments to read [1]. It should answer your question. [1]: http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

contingencies 13y ago

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.

JonnieCache 13y ago

Related: http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ (Munroe has us all living, or at least standing on rhode island.)

_delirium 13y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Josef_Land

jebjoob 13y ago

Then they would use http://jebjoob.com http://jebjoob.com to find a job.