Overpopulation?
A White House aide to Hillary says earth is topped off. We have reached the maximum occupancy that God posted on a mountain somewhere, and we're going to have problems if the interplanetary fire marshal stops by.
Are you ready for the scary part of the story?
In 2012, we'll cross the 7 billion mark. Okay, I'm horrible at math, but let's see if we can come up with some solutions that don't require us to implement China's communist birthing policies.
Let's say the population will be so dense in 2012 everyone will have to live in a 35-square-foot sized cubicle. Multiplying those cubicles by 7 billion people brings us to 245,000,000,000 square feet. Let's make that more meaningful. If there are 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile, and we divide them into the number of square feet taken up by our small domiciles, we come up to 8,788 square miles... or roughly the state of New Jersey.
That might not sound like much of a life, but maybe we could stack the cubicles in things like buildings to increase each person's allocated space. Oh, and we could pick a better state. But,
if the entire population of the planet were on an 8,788 mile square, the entire population of the planet could fit on little more than 0.01% of its surface area, since the total land mass of the planet is 57,268,900.
Population limit? Are you telling me we can't find enough land in the other 99.98% of the land area of earth to grow enough wheat for Twinkies? Or enough water in the 139,668,500 square miles of blue stuff to bathe in? Right.
Said another way...
My dear ol' dad points out some more numbers to bring this into perspective, providing more realistic living conditions in a better state. We need between 1/3 to 1 acre per person for food. If we placed singles into 500sq-ft apartments and families into 1,500sq-ft ones, we could fit everyone into the state of Texas with enough room left to feed everyone with Texas-grown food.
Texas spans roughly 268,820 square miles, or 0.47% of the surface of the land on earth. The entire population of earth in 2012 could conceivably survive on less than half of one percent of the brown and green part of the map.
It's nice that God gave us such a big, sustainable planet.
Are you ready for the scary part of the story?
"We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people," Fedoroff said.
In 2012, we'll cross the 7 billion mark. Okay, I'm horrible at math, but let's see if we can come up with some solutions that don't require us to implement China's communist birthing policies.
Let's say the population will be so dense in 2012 everyone will have to live in a 35-square-foot sized cubicle. Multiplying those cubicles by 7 billion people brings us to 245,000,000,000 square feet. Let's make that more meaningful. If there are 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile, and we divide them into the number of square feet taken up by our small domiciles, we come up to 8,788 square miles... or roughly the state of New Jersey.
That might not sound like much of a life, but maybe we could stack the cubicles in things like buildings to increase each person's allocated space. Oh, and we could pick a better state. But,
if the entire population of the planet were on an 8,788 mile square, the entire population of the planet could fit on little more than 0.01% of its surface area, since the total land mass of the planet is 57,268,900.Population limit? Are you telling me we can't find enough land in the other 99.98% of the land area of earth to grow enough wheat for Twinkies? Or enough water in the 139,668,500 square miles of blue stuff to bathe in? Right.
Said another way...
My dear ol' dad points out some more numbers to bring this into perspective, providing more realistic living conditions in a better state. We need between 1/3 to 1 acre per person for food. If we placed singles into 500sq-ft apartments and families into 1,500sq-ft ones, we could fit everyone into the state of Texas with enough room left to feed everyone with Texas-grown food.
Texas spans roughly 268,820 square miles, or 0.47% of the surface of the land on earth. The entire population of earth in 2012 could conceivably survive on less than half of one percent of the brown and green part of the map.
It's nice that God gave us such a big, sustainable planet.
