Habitable land/Number of people= 2.3 Acres a person

reply to post by Danbones


"shrink the wrinkles out"

If we're lucky, we'll all shrink to dwarf size, and we'll only need 4 foot ceiling heights.
That should hold lots of us in the tower style cities, in both outer earth, and middle earth

reply to post by LaHaver


So what? That statistic means nothing. You are putting out a false sense of entitlement by supposing that there is an imaginary reset button and when pressed will automatically have every person with 2+ acres like a fresh start. That is almost as ridiculous as that other statistic about correlating so-n-so number of foreclosed houses with so-n-so number of homeless people, and everybody gets a house and a half to live on!

How about taking into consideration how someone got to own more property than the other person? But no.... everybody want the convenience of communism once capitalism has filled the fruit basket.

reply to post by LaHaver


Cool I can take that estimate. Now I wonder how much land a single person can be self sufffient on.

Others have covered the idea that some land currently considered uninhabitable will be made habitable in the future.

There are plenty of places considered uninhabitable that people already inhabit. Swamps, deserts, mountainous and arctic regions around the world have had people living in them for thousands of years. Just because it doesn't suit the average urban dweller doesn't make it uninhabitable.

Population Growth advocacy should be considered a mental illness.

When you look at the evidence available, apply simple logic and remove your emotions from the equation, it is clear as day that the one thing this planet does not need is more people.

As there are mountains to build into, and deserts to build on, and the continental shelf to build down to, I think that there is plenty of room for building, have not the Chinese built cities that are so far nearly empty?
In any case, I feel humans are due for a culling, just like 1919, new bugs coming along that are very resistant to the latest
drugs, such as MRSA, and necrotising fascitis( that's the flesh eating bug) bit like gangrene, they have to chop off the 'bad' part, very quickly too, hence 'chop'.

ZeussusZ
reply to post by LaHaver

 

Cool I can take that estimate. Now I wonder how much land a single person can be self sufffient on.

I too can take that estimate. It is workable.

As to how much land a single person can be self sufficient on ...

A British man by the name of John Seymour (author) wrote a book called ... The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency (1976). London: Faber & Faber.



In it he describes how to live of 1/4 acre of habitable land [NOTE: Not including the house]!



BUT he also deeply details how to live more comfortably off of the more traditional 1 acre of land [Note: Including the house]!



Both 1/4 acre (house extra) and 1 full acre (house included) fall way inside the OP's reasonable rough estimate and proves to me that they were in the ballpark statistically speaking.

IF we take the OPs figures at face value AND we assume 1 full acre per person THEN we haven't even reached 50% use of the theoretically available land.

This seems a reasonable figure to me.

However it does point out that we would run out of available land in the future under projected population increase!

How soon?

I am working on it and I will post that rough figure and the data sets I use asap.

reply to post by ZonedOut


Thanks good post. Eventually room on the ground must run out. But with technology today, solar lights(some people have big harvests and big pay outs with them) strengthened building materials etc, that we can't in the future have massive skyscrapers with 1 acre blocks on each level dirt and all.
Thanks for the book link, going to have a read.

reply to post by ZeussusZ


Here are the figures for projected world population growth from wiki ...

Population Growth

According to UN's 2010 revision to its population projections, world population will peak at 10.1bn in 2100 compared to 7bn in 2011. However, some experts dispute the UN's forecast and have argued that birthrates will fall below replacement rate in the 2020s. According to these forecasters, population growth will be only sustained till the 2040s by rising longevity but will peak below 9bn by 2050.

By 'peak' they mean after reaching that peak that the world population growth reduces to a minimum and therefor plateau's or goes into decline.

This suggests that others have already worked out what planet earth can actually sustain.

If we are generous with the future of projected growth forecasts then we can use the 10 billion figure.

If we want to play conservative with the future, then we can use the 9 billion figure.

The former figure equates to 1.5 acres max per person and the the latter figure equates to 1.3 acres max per person.

Neither of these figures, using the OP's max 2.3 acres per person figures, max out the potential available land to use.

I wondered why this may be and I discussed this thread with my gf and she pointed out that we need to leave some land for mother nature herself.

I suggest this is the reason that human growth maxes out at between 9 and 10 billion people some 36-86yrs in the future.

9-10 billion people = 9-10 billion acres used.

This equates to about 67% (2/3rds) of the habitable land, as used by mankind, compared with the roughly detailed 100% habitable surface area outlined in the OP (15.6 billion acres) leaving 33% (1/3rd) the remaining land for mother natures use.

That is a very large footprint!

However one could simply employ a combination of vertical farming and hydro/aqua/air-ponics schemes to seriously increase the amount and types of food produced and reduce ones footprint.

I recommend viewing the following ATS threads which detail such things more deeply ...

The Great Awakening

Guess Who Leads The Future Of Food? Surprise!

I hope this helps!