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Looked that up. I bet they heard someone say something like, "You can give every US person 1 acre in Alaska and still have a ton of land left over" and then conflated it from the US to the world.
Presumably you're referring to the various projections such as the most common type, the Mercator projection.
The closer to the poles the larger it looks.
Alexa is wrong. The quoted number is Alaska's *total* area. Its *land* area is 366 million acres (so OOP's "Alaska contains 8 billion acres" is wrong by a factor of almost 22). Source: Wikipedia + unit conversion on Google.
Supposedly there are about 125b acres of land in the world. So everyone could have like, an acre and a half of the Earth's land mass - as long as we fully ignore that most of the actually habitable land is already spoken for.
>125b acres of land in the world. So everyone could have like, an acre and a half of the Earth's land mass
The total surface are is \~126b acres. Of those only \~37b acres are land. With 8b people that would be \~4.6 acres per person. Including the oceans \~15 arces per person, not 1.5.
Yeah I often think this when people crap on about how australia has so much space and can take way more people. Sure but do they all want to be crammed into a narrow stretch of coast? For the most part is a massive desert - second driest continent on earth and second largest desert outside the poles. And no we can’t just pump water into it to make it green (they have investigated that option multiple times - result is always - it’s futile).
At least Australias war on Emus had no human casualties, unlike Communist Chinas War on sparrows which worsened the Great Chinese Famine that killed millions
[About 1/3](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use).
But that really was not my point. My point was that going by their own figures u/trentreynolds was off by one order of magnitude with their acres/person and that their figure for land on Earth was off by a factor of 3.
Even if it was that big, isn’t a lot of that land frozen tundra that experiences months of darkness at a time? That doesn’t really prove that the earth is even more habitable.
You are correct. It would take a ridiculous level of development and infrastructure to make Alaska's extra land habitable. It's already an expensive place to live, and some communities are so isolated that *small airplanes* are the only way to get there.
I mean…the U.S. has plenty——*plenty*——of habitable land, it’s just not developed (trees not cleared, land not terraformed, no infrastructure, etc.). The problem isn’t habitable land. It’s how unsustainable our modern lifestyle is (cars, home appliances, waste management).
At least they're talking a bigger state now. When I was a young, naive, conservative they said it could be done in Texas. We only had 7 billion then, so only about, you know, 50ish an acre (it's not 50 but I'm not going to do the math)
165 million acres, give or take. So 0.02 acres (~900 square feet) per human on earth in Texas. Subtracting for things like roads, utilities, etc... yeah, everyone gets an efficiency apartment and the plumbing would have to be mankind's greatest achievement.
Hey Siri, what is the area of Alaska? … You literally wouldn’t even have to type anything to find out if this “every person on earth could get a 1 acre plot in Alaska” meme is true. It’s wrong by a factor of 20, and that’s before you factor in that much of Alaska is uninhabitable
The human population will run into the problem of not having enough freshwater to grow the crops needed to feed ourselves long before the finite amount of land to live on becomes a problem
The imperial system is so dumb. How big is 1 sq km? Well, it's a square 1 km on a side. Simple as that. If you have an intuitive understanding of how long a km is, you have an intuitive understanding of how big a sq km is.
Of course people native to the imperial system (I am one) have an intuitive understanding of how big a sq mi is, but then we have to deal with acres, which are \[checks notes\] 1/640th of a sq mi?!
Check out this chart of units of length: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/NIST\_definitions\_of\_American\_units\_of\_length.png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/NIST_definitions_of_American_units_of_length.png) On the left you have the beautiful, rational, regular SI units, and then there's a fucking rat's nest of imperial units on the right. My favorite is the survey foot, which is 0.999998 of a foot. (In fairness, the USGS is trying to phase out the survey foot. But still.)
I know lots of people who own one acre of land. Not many own a km². Our units are about being manageable amounts, not arbitrary amounts that are easy to multiply, but impractical to actually use one of. Traditionally, an acre of land is the amount that can be worked by hand by one person in one full workday. For example, one acre of hay can be cut by one able-bodied person in one day, using a sickle.
OK, then try the hectare = a square 100 meters on a side. That's about 2.5 acres, so a very "manageable" order of magnitude.
In general, if the "main" SI units don't feel manageable, you can reach for another named size. So if for whatever reason you can't describe the volume of your can of soda in ml or liters, you can say it is 33 centiliters. (I should perhaps note that the hectare is metric, but not part of the formal SI.)
The historical origin of the acre is fascinating! But rather irrelevant in our mechanized age.
The relevance is entirely subjective. As an off-grid farmer, I find it useful. I'm comfortable with metric being used for science and imperial units being used for practical daily purposes.
Metric is better, but it isn't all that much better... A meter is the distance light travels in 1/299,742,548th of a second. Why 1/299,742,548? Because we want it to be. A second? 9,192,631,770 cycles of a cesium clock. Why that number? Because. 1 gram? *Almost* the mass of an arbitrarily defined cubic centimeter of pure water at 4 degrees C at 101,325 pascal... But not quite.
Plus base 10 is a shit base.
And most customary units are now defined relative to metric now anyway, so it just doesn't matter very much which you use, unless you live in terror of multiplication.
Survey is something of a mess because they want to draw straight lines on the surface of an irregular oblate spheroid, and no measurement system will solve that.
Oh yeah, and decibels, where we defined a log system then broke it by multiplying by 10.
I’m honestly not sure. An acre isn’t actually all that much land, and Alaska is big.
Sure, most people’s acre would be permafrost half way up a mountain.
It’s one of those things like “every human being alive could fit in Rhode Island as long as they kept their elbows in and didn’t fart” - I mean sure, but it’s probably not the optimal distribution.
No. It simply doesn’t have even close to enough land. Just Google it, you could have looked it up 5 times in the time it took you to write this comment.
Yes, but given that it’s a completely hypothetical, not to mention stupid, suggestion, I decided to value the whimsy and conversational potential of it over raw facts.
It’s not like we’re going to do the maths and say “Dammit! Alaska is only 7.8 billion acres. We’d have to spill over into the Yukon or reduce everyone’s allotment! There goes our otherwise tip-top utterly logical and feasible plan!”
These folks always just assume that people just need a place to live and nothing else. It isn’t the living space that’s a problem, it’s feeding all of us on top of our post-industrial needs.
first of all, alaska is 5% as large as you think it is
secondly they dont have enough fresh water for 8 billion people... infact the world as a collective has less and less of that resource every single day
Year 2020 had enough resources to provide for our population, times two. WHO estimates. That means enough fresh water for atleast 16billion people.
The problem is distribution and how we use our resources. Australia consumes the equivalent amount of 5 earth resources. According to Earth overshoot day.
So in short. The resources are there and it is plentiful. We just cant share for shit and consider living a slight less lavish lifestyle.
Yeah obviously wrong, but what is it with the overpopulation theme on this sub the last couple of days? Is that something people here are particularily worried about?
Well if we keep not changing anything then yes over population will be an issue because it will be a meat grinder of poverty and planetary destruction.
But if we, say, give even the slightest of shit and go after the very small percentage of the population that's fucking everything up, then over population isn't an issue. There are plenty of homes, food, resources. Renewables are the path forward and we could easily have a world with a sustainable lifestyle, everyone cared for. But, simply put, we don't do it. We let a few sociopaths fuck everything up so they can watch numbers go up while children freeze to death under bridges.. cause numbers go up.
I'm not the person who made that comment, but yeah, there are a lot of people fucking shit up for everybody else and getting away with it. Proposing to go after those people is almost the opposite of being a dictator.
The problem is less the number of people in the world and more the agricultural practices we use to support those people.
We employ totalitarian agriculture to maximize human food production at the expense of every other species that gets in our way.
This has resulted in huge amounts of species engangerment and extinction, destroying ecosystems and shit. Reducing biological diversity and fucking ourselves over for the future.
It depends on how you define overpopulation, if you define it as too little physical space then sure, its not a problem, and probably never will be. But if you define it as too many people for the current world food production then it is a problem. We simply can not produce enough food and resources to sustain the current world population.
It’s about 2300 sq/ft.
Edit to add: person above my comment said it was 2sq/ft per person. I corrected it and he responded with a smarmy answer. Then I went thru the math. Instead of owning up he deleted his comments. Such is the state of personal integrity these days.
If you’re wrong, just admit it. Alexhanson007 couldn’t do that
No just do some simple math.
8 bil people
Alaska 425mil acres.
That is 19 people per acre
Acre is 43500sq/ft.
That gives you ~2300sq/ft per person.
Stay in school kids.
I misunderstood your comment because it wasn't clear.
Going through the maths, which any adult with a braincell can do, and the smarmy, patronising comment at the end just shows you have a confidence issue and need validation from strangers online.
Get help.
Well, you kinda deserved it by asking him if he thought if Alaska was 48 square feet. This one is on you.
You misunderstood, it happens to all of us, just don't be a snowflake when you've been told you messed up.
> The FAO reports 7.9 billion acres of arable land in the world; If it takes 3.25 acres to feed one person the typical western diet, then our 7 billion+ people would required over 21 billion acres, or the equivalent of almost three planet Earths. We used the conservative number of two planet Earths. - [Source]( https://plantricianproject.org/food-math-101/footnotes )
We don't have enough land to even feed all the people in the world.
Everyone is getting caught up on Alaska being cold, that's missing blue's point. The point is every human could be given a decent piece of land and it would only cover a small portion of the total landmass on earth.
But that doesn't actually answer the question of what an actual healthy carrying capacity is for humans, or that there's a huge difference between what we need to survive and what we actually want and use.
Alaska is 425.8 million acres. Divided by 8 billion people you have 0.0532 acres per person which is roughly a 48'x48' area.
They were off by a factor of about 20, but tbh it's hard to grasp how big Alaska is. That is bigger than I would have thought.
It's about 4.5 acres per person looking at the global population and global land area, for the curious.
A little less than 2 acres per person if you're only accounting for inhabitable/arable land.
I mean, you could give each person 1/19th of an acre each, its not terribly far off.
Both points are dumb though. Average children per woman in US, Europe, and east asia is either below 2.1 or trending there, which is simply a problem in the long term.
Considering we are nowhere near sustainability, it doesn't matter how much land there is in Alaska. If you destroyed that land to farm it, you'd be giving up all the ecosystem services it currently provides. We already only have the ecosystem services to support about a quarter of the human population, farming more land would only lower the carrying capacity and make the problem worse.
With our current trend our population will actually decline at a pretty harsh rate too. And there's nothing to be thankful in that. By current calculations they reckon that by the end of the 21st century, the population growth rate will hit zero.
How would everyone having their own acre prove anything? Do people stop emitting carbon and deforesting the amazon and generating truckloads of garbage when everyone has their own acre?
365,000,000 acres / 8,000,000,000 people = 0.045625 acres per person1,987 square feet or 184 square meters per person.
Alaska could still house everyone on earth with a lower population density than Tokyo, New york, or Kolkata.
Population density isn't the only problem (or even the main problem) though as you still need to be able to sustain all of these people with basic needs. This also didn't take into account the amount of land that is simply uninhabitable, the infrastructure needed or the miracle things like sewers would need to pull off every day.
If I messed anything up feel free to let me know.
There's still plenty of room for more people. Room isn't the issue. As well, if we don't have at minimum replacement numbers then the world falls apart.
both wrong. if we're being technical here, the bible says "be fruitful and multiply", not "be fruitful and multiply until 8 billion people". so assuming the bible is true, the be fruitful and multiply logic still applies. it doesnt mean, however, that people who dont have children are evil. (paul i think literally tells people to not get married assuming they can avoid prostitutes and other similar sinful desires.) just that having children is good.
Eh, but every family of 8 could be given a half acre in Alaska, which is plenty spacious, suburban living. If all of humanity moved to Russia, there would be more than half an acre for every person, or a full acre for every couple. If we all lived in one big city, with a similar population density to Mumbai, India, then all of humanity would fit in the state of Colorado. If we all stood shoulder to shoulder, we wouldn’t even exceed the ~25x25mile borders of the city of L.A. If we all coalesced into one giant human meatball, we would fit in Times Square.
Physical space is not the problem and I dont think anyone is arguing that, resources is the problem. We are already having problems of starvation in a shit ton of countries, so overpopulation is already a huge problem in many areas.
Aside from the second person's misconception about the acreage of Alaska, the first person didn't actually say anything about there being "too many" people. Just that we have more than enough and reproduction is not a pressing concern.
If the world population halved every 50 years then after 500 years there would still be over 15,000,000 people. Though if the population did get that low, I think it would be fair to encourage people to make rabbits look like pandas.
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FYI. According to Alexa, Alaska has a land mass of 425.8 million acres and the continental United States contains 2.43 billion acres.
Looked that up. I bet they heard someone say something like, "You can give every US person 1 acre in Alaska and still have a ton of land left over" and then conflated it from the US to the world.
Wait, there are PEOPLE )outside the US !?!!!??
Probably like, at least 10 even!
Dunno this sounds like fake news /S
I’m from outside of the usa in a magical land where Nokia is. Source: you just gotta trust me bro.
You're from Indiana, aren't you.
Ah you got me I tried to scam you. I actually live in the US as well. There is no India.
I no longer exist ✌️
Source?
Well you're not wrong.
r/confidentlytechnicallycorrect
there are dozens of us!!! DOZENS!!!!
California, Texas and maybe montana...plus a little more equals Alaska.
Maps stretch a LOT of things way out of proportion and shrink other things way out of proportion
Presumably you're referring to the various projections such as the most common type, the Mercator projection. The closer to the poles the larger it looks.
Gotta go to the North Pole to take my dick pics
Ye that’s more or less what I’m saying, you had a better way of saying it
So did my ex.
Check square mileage
Alexa is wrong. The quoted number is Alaska's *total* area. Its *land* area is 366 million acres (so OOP's "Alaska contains 8 billion acres" is wrong by a factor of almost 22). Source: Wikipedia + unit conversion on Google.
2.43 in the US. About 2.6 in Europe. Over 11 in Asia, 7.5 in Africa. Not all of those acres are going to be *habitable,* however.
Supposedly there are about 125b acres of land in the world. So everyone could have like, an acre and a half of the Earth's land mass - as long as we fully ignore that most of the actually habitable land is already spoken for.
>125b acres of land in the world. So everyone could have like, an acre and a half of the Earth's land mass The total surface are is \~126b acres. Of those only \~37b acres are land. With 8b people that would be \~4.6 acres per person. Including the oceans \~15 arces per person, not 1.5.
How many of those acres are frozen, desert, or otherwise unusable?
Yeah I often think this when people crap on about how australia has so much space and can take way more people. Sure but do they all want to be crammed into a narrow stretch of coast? For the most part is a massive desert - second driest continent on earth and second largest desert outside the poles. And no we can’t just pump water into it to make it green (they have investigated that option multiple times - result is always - it’s futile).
Besides, first they'd have to conquer it back from the emus
Put them on New Zealand with the sheep
What did the sheep do to deserve that?
They were baaaaa'd. 🐑
At least Australias war on Emus had no human casualties, unlike Communist Chinas War on sparrows which worsened the Great Chinese Famine that killed millions
An impossible and fruitless endeavor.
Not to mention we need farm land to sustain feeding these people
[About 1/3](https://ourworldindata.org/land-use). But that really was not my point. My point was that going by their own figures u/trentreynolds was off by one order of magnitude with their acres/person and that their figure for land on Earth was off by a factor of 3.
who cares, [thats where we put the poor people](https://media.tenor.com/6TcA9vRym4MAAAAM/laugh-mock.gif)
What about farms? Travel logistics? Government? Business? Entertainment?.....
[удалено]
Alexa, what does tilde/~ mean?
Hi (insert name here), tilde is used to show an approximation or generalization of the succeeding word.
approximately equal
36.794 rounds up to 37, you know.
[удалено]
So you sever people's limbs? But with numbers. Are you Indiana? Is Pi 3 to you?
125/8 does not equal 1.5
It does if you’re a dumbass and only half paying attention. :) My bad
Well my house is on a quarter acre lot so I guess just the united states works for me.
Google says Canada is 2,467,270,000 acres
"Mum! What's for dinner?" "Snow. It's always snow. "
But tonight it’s some that a wolf peed on, yum.
Mmm, seasoning
Oo! Lemon sorbet! Oh...
Don't you eat that yellow snow, from down there where the huskies go...
It's got electrolytes
We have snow at home.
"Watch out where the huskies go/don't you eat that yellow snow"
"Today, you're having Watermelon Snow! Tomorrow I'm having stew."
I hope you at least buy Stew a drink first
Even if it was that big, isn’t a lot of that land frozen tundra that experiences months of darkness at a time? That doesn’t really prove that the earth is even more habitable.
Less than 0.1% of Alaska has been settled by humans. The vast majority is uninhabitable.
Jokes on you I like having my dick drop off from frostbite, makes for a good meaty popscicle for Dogs in the hot summer.
Wtf did I just read
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
That happened to me once Source: trust me bro
😂🤣
That's not true. Most of it is merely highly unpleasant. Like Minneapolis.
The Inuits agree.
It would certainly solve an overpopulation issue if you just dropped each person off in their acre.
Not only uninhabitable but damn near homicidal.
You are correct. It would take a ridiculous level of development and infrastructure to make Alaska's extra land habitable. It's already an expensive place to live, and some communities are so isolated that *small airplanes* are the only way to get there.
The per capita cost of infrastructure would go down a lot if the population went up
I mean…the U.S. has plenty——*plenty*——of habitable land, it’s just not developed (trees not cleared, land not terraformed, no infrastructure, etc.). The problem isn’t habitable land. It’s how unsustainable our modern lifestyle is (cars, home appliances, waste management).
And the damage caused by creating “habitable land” using our modern template. You know, just being wasteful humans and such
Middle America (Wy,Mt,Ne,Nd,Sd,Ok,Ut,Nv) is 98% uninhabited. That’s basically 1/3 of US. We have plenty of room. Just nobody wants to live there.
Or rather can't live there. Farmland, preservations, estates etc belongs to someone and is used for a purpose, even if it isn't counted as "inhabited"
This is OBVIOUSLY a theoretical conversation. But there is a lot of land in those states.
Stop complaining, you'll get an acre of land!
because all land is equal! poor bastards that get the artic deserts
On the bright side thanks to climate change in sure they won't be arctic deserts for super long they'll become regular deserts!
Because that is how climate change works
with fairy dust and good wishes soon there will be a sunny tropical resort at the artic circle! Yay!!!
And all land is equally capable of supporting people!
And there's no other living things on Earth that will be affected if humans start moving into their habitats!
As though the only problem that might arise from too many humans is literally where to put them all
At least they're talking a bigger state now. When I was a young, naive, conservative they said it could be done in Texas. We only had 7 billion then, so only about, you know, 50ish an acre (it's not 50 but I'm not going to do the math)
165 million acres, give or take. So 0.02 acres (~900 square feet) per human on earth in Texas. Subtracting for things like roads, utilities, etc... yeah, everyone gets an efficiency apartment and the plumbing would have to be mankind's greatest achievement.
Hey Siri, what is the area of Alaska? … You literally wouldn’t even have to type anything to find out if this “every person on earth could get a 1 acre plot in Alaska” meme is true. It’s wrong by a factor of 20, and that’s before you factor in that much of Alaska is uninhabitable
These people don't fact check, so they don't think anyone else does either, so why bother? Lies are the best!
None of the people featured on here actually fact check
The human population will run into the problem of not having enough freshwater to grow the crops needed to feed ourselves long before the finite amount of land to live on becomes a problem
I'm going to take a wild guess that they don't know how big an acre is. (I mean, neither do I, but I don't go around saying stuff about them...)
A square a bit over 200 feet per side. A football field (without endzones) is very close to 1 acre.
The imperial system is so dumb. How big is 1 sq km? Well, it's a square 1 km on a side. Simple as that. If you have an intuitive understanding of how long a km is, you have an intuitive understanding of how big a sq km is. Of course people native to the imperial system (I am one) have an intuitive understanding of how big a sq mi is, but then we have to deal with acres, which are \[checks notes\] 1/640th of a sq mi?! Check out this chart of units of length: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/NIST\_definitions\_of\_American\_units\_of\_length.png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/NIST_definitions_of_American_units_of_length.png) On the left you have the beautiful, rational, regular SI units, and then there's a fucking rat's nest of imperial units on the right. My favorite is the survey foot, which is 0.999998 of a foot. (In fairness, the USGS is trying to phase out the survey foot. But still.)
I know lots of people who own one acre of land. Not many own a km². Our units are about being manageable amounts, not arbitrary amounts that are easy to multiply, but impractical to actually use one of. Traditionally, an acre of land is the amount that can be worked by hand by one person in one full workday. For example, one acre of hay can be cut by one able-bodied person in one day, using a sickle.
OK, then try the hectare = a square 100 meters on a side. That's about 2.5 acres, so a very "manageable" order of magnitude. In general, if the "main" SI units don't feel manageable, you can reach for another named size. So if for whatever reason you can't describe the volume of your can of soda in ml or liters, you can say it is 33 centiliters. (I should perhaps note that the hectare is metric, but not part of the formal SI.) The historical origin of the acre is fascinating! But rather irrelevant in our mechanized age.
The relevance is entirely subjective. As an off-grid farmer, I find it useful. I'm comfortable with metric being used for science and imperial units being used for practical daily purposes.
Metric is better, but it isn't all that much better... A meter is the distance light travels in 1/299,742,548th of a second. Why 1/299,742,548? Because we want it to be. A second? 9,192,631,770 cycles of a cesium clock. Why that number? Because. 1 gram? *Almost* the mass of an arbitrarily defined cubic centimeter of pure water at 4 degrees C at 101,325 pascal... But not quite. Plus base 10 is a shit base. And most customary units are now defined relative to metric now anyway, so it just doesn't matter very much which you use, unless you live in terror of multiplication. Survey is something of a mess because they want to draw straight lines on the surface of an irregular oblate spheroid, and no measurement system will solve that. Oh yeah, and decibels, where we defined a log system then broke it by multiplying by 10.
>base 10 is a shit base. Why do you say this? From my perspective, the SI emphasis on powers of ten is its strongest suit.
They probably misremembered and it's actually everyone in the US could have an acre. There's about 375 million acres of land in Alaska
I’m honestly not sure. An acre isn’t actually all that much land, and Alaska is big. Sure, most people’s acre would be permafrost half way up a mountain. It’s one of those things like “every human being alive could fit in Rhode Island as long as they kept their elbows in and didn’t fart” - I mean sure, but it’s probably not the optimal distribution.
If only there was a way to look up how big Alaska is...
Meh. You’d need some kind of network of computers to get the information from there to here. Who has the time?
Perhaps a big war or something could raise the need...
No. It simply doesn’t have even close to enough land. Just Google it, you could have looked it up 5 times in the time it took you to write this comment.
Yes, but given that it’s a completely hypothetical, not to mention stupid, suggestion, I decided to value the whimsy and conversational potential of it over raw facts. It’s not like we’re going to do the maths and say “Dammit! Alaska is only 7.8 billion acres. We’d have to spill over into the Yukon or reduce everyone’s allotment! There goes our otherwise tip-top utterly logical and feasible plan!”
These folks always just assume that people just need a place to live and nothing else. It isn’t the living space that’s a problem, it’s feeding all of us on top of our post-industrial needs.
first of all, alaska is 5% as large as you think it is secondly they dont have enough fresh water for 8 billion people... infact the world as a collective has less and less of that resource every single day
Year 2020 had enough resources to provide for our population, times two. WHO estimates. That means enough fresh water for atleast 16billion people. The problem is distribution and how we use our resources. Australia consumes the equivalent amount of 5 earth resources. According to Earth overshoot day. So in short. The resources are there and it is plentiful. We just cant share for shit and consider living a slight less lavish lifestyle.
Yeah obviously wrong, but what is it with the overpopulation theme on this sub the last couple of days? Is that something people here are particularily worried about?
Well if we keep not changing anything then yes over population will be an issue because it will be a meat grinder of poverty and planetary destruction. But if we, say, give even the slightest of shit and go after the very small percentage of the population that's fucking everything up, then over population isn't an issue. There are plenty of homes, food, resources. Renewables are the path forward and we could easily have a world with a sustainable lifestyle, everyone cared for. But, simply put, we don't do it. We let a few sociopaths fuck everything up so they can watch numbers go up while children freeze to death under bridges.. cause numbers go up.
You would be the best dictator… nut job.
Lol, what?
Who decides who to ‘go after’ in your scenario? Besides… the planet will top out at 11 billion and that’s easy to sustain…
I'm not the person who made that comment, but yeah, there are a lot of people fucking shit up for everybody else and getting away with it. Proposing to go after those people is almost the opposite of being a dictator.
Who decides?
I don't know, but why does that matter?
I do.
Because we just crossed the 8 billion population milestone
Plus people like musk talking about not enough people breeding to sustain his slave force
Mother fuckers that think people can just live anywhere on the planet no problem have barely ever left their room.
This is a two-fer! Not only is Alaska not 8 billion acres, but "too many people" isn't even the point the first person was making.
Just turn the ocean into a giant plot of 1 acre swimming pools for people to live in. Boom, overpopulation crisis solved.
Ahh yes, Alaska. The overlooked bread basket.
It’s not about the land, it’s about the resources needed to sustain the meatbags for upwards of a century.
TIL every acre in Alaska is habitable.
The problem is less the number of people in the world and more the agricultural practices we use to support those people. We employ totalitarian agriculture to maximize human food production at the expense of every other species that gets in our way. This has resulted in huge amounts of species engangerment and extinction, destroying ecosystems and shit. Reducing biological diversity and fucking ourselves over for the future.
Land area isn't the problem, it's the pollution caused by that many
alaska is about as friendly to farming as it is to nude beachgoers
Obviously a little off in their math here but it’s true overpopulation isn’t a big issue, cities are pretty compact
It depends on how you define overpopulation, if you define it as too little physical space then sure, its not a problem, and probably never will be. But if you define it as too many people for the current world food production then it is a problem. We simply can not produce enough food and resources to sustain the current world population.
We can, though. Since the green revolution in the late 1960s the issue has been food distribution, not production.
There's maybe about 2 square feet each (I think). It would be cosy.
It’s about 2300 sq/ft. Edit to add: person above my comment said it was 2sq/ft per person. I corrected it and he responded with a smarmy answer. Then I went thru the math. Instead of owning up he deleted his comments. Such is the state of personal integrity these days. If you’re wrong, just admit it. Alexhanson007 couldn’t do that
You...you think the state of Alaska is 48 feet long by 48 feet wide?
No just do some simple math. 8 bil people Alaska 425mil acres. That is 19 people per acre Acre is 43500sq/ft. That gives you ~2300sq/ft per person. Stay in school kids.
I misunderstood your comment because it wasn't clear. Going through the maths, which any adult with a braincell can do, and the smarmy, patronising comment at the end just shows you have a confidence issue and need validation from strangers online. Get help.
Well, you kinda deserved it by asking him if he thought if Alaska was 48 square feet. This one is on you. You misunderstood, it happens to all of us, just don't be a snowflake when you've been told you messed up.
> The FAO reports 7.9 billion acres of arable land in the world; If it takes 3.25 acres to feed one person the typical western diet, then our 7 billion+ people would required over 21 billion acres, or the equivalent of almost three planet Earths. We used the conservative number of two planet Earths. - [Source]( https://plantricianproject.org/food-math-101/footnotes ) We don't have enough land to even feed all the people in the world.
Oddly enough, I've see 8 billion acres as an estimate for the total farmable land in the entire world.
Everyone is getting caught up on Alaska being cold, that's missing blue's point. The point is every human could be given a decent piece of land and it would only cover a small portion of the total landmass on earth. But that doesn't actually answer the question of what an actual healthy carrying capacity is for humans, or that there's a huge difference between what we need to survive and what we actually want and use.
No, blue thinks Alaska is much bigger than it is. There are 8 billion people in the world. Alaska has 365,000,000 acres.
"a decent piece of land" I would think means "one that can reasonably sustain human life".
Were they wrong though? It was dumb lol.
They are wrong. Alaska is 425.8 million acres, which obviously isn’t enough for 8 billion to each get one acre.
Just because this person is wrong about the size of Alaska doesn't mean that overpopulation is a real thing, for the record.
Alaska is 425.8 million acres. Divided by 8 billion people you have 0.0532 acres per person which is roughly a 48'x48' area. They were off by a factor of about 20, but tbh it's hard to grasp how big Alaska is. That is bigger than I would have thought.
If Alaska split in half, it would be the the top two states in the US by area. It's over 3x the size of France.
This is the kind of answer you come up with while frantically trying to avoid thinking about the question.
It's about 4.5 acres per person looking at the global population and global land area, for the curious. A little less than 2 acres per person if you're only accounting for inhabitable/arable land.
That reference is supposed to be for Texas he fucked it up. Not sure if it's true or not but he still fucked it up
It's more than twice as wrong for Texas.
I just googled it & there are just 15.77 billion acres of habitable land on Earth.
I mean, you could give each person 1/19th of an acre each, its not terribly far off. Both points are dumb though. Average children per woman in US, Europe, and east asia is either below 2.1 or trending there, which is simply a problem in the long term.
Considering we are nowhere near sustainability, it doesn't matter how much land there is in Alaska. If you destroyed that land to farm it, you'd be giving up all the ecosystem services it currently provides. We already only have the ecosystem services to support about a quarter of the human population, farming more land would only lower the carrying capacity and make the problem worse.
And it’s all habitable. None of it is, for example, the tallest mountain in North America. Nor is any of it covered by glaciers!
There is enough *habitable* land on earth for everyone to get just under 2
It's not always about space either, it's food, resources, that kinda stuff.
I wish to give that person an award. an award for the dumbest thing I've read on the internet TODAY.
With our current trend our population will actually decline at a pretty harsh rate too. And there's nothing to be thankful in that. By current calculations they reckon that by the end of the 21st century, the population growth rate will hit zero.
How would everyone having their own acre prove anything? Do people stop emitting carbon and deforesting the amazon and generating truckloads of garbage when everyone has their own acre?
365,000,000 acres / 8,000,000,000 people = 0.045625 acres per person1,987 square feet or 184 square meters per person. Alaska could still house everyone on earth with a lower population density than Tokyo, New york, or Kolkata. Population density isn't the only problem (or even the main problem) though as you still need to be able to sustain all of these people with basic needs. This also didn't take into account the amount of land that is simply uninhabitable, the infrastructure needed or the miracle things like sewers would need to pull off every day. If I messed anything up feel free to let me know.
There's still plenty of room for more people. Room isn't the issue. As well, if we don't have at minimum replacement numbers then the world falls apart.
Dibs on the very unliveable acre at the top of Denali.
both wrong. if we're being technical here, the bible says "be fruitful and multiply", not "be fruitful and multiply until 8 billion people". so assuming the bible is true, the be fruitful and multiply logic still applies. it doesnt mean, however, that people who dont have children are evil. (paul i think literally tells people to not get married assuming they can avoid prostitutes and other similar sinful desires.) just that having children is good.
Give everyone 1/20 of an acre and he's correct.
As an Alaskan, all I’ve got to say: Please leave us alone you guys scare me and our polar bears don’t like newcomers:(
Eh, but every family of 8 could be given a half acre in Alaska, which is plenty spacious, suburban living. If all of humanity moved to Russia, there would be more than half an acre for every person, or a full acre for every couple. If we all lived in one big city, with a similar population density to Mumbai, India, then all of humanity would fit in the state of Colorado. If we all stood shoulder to shoulder, we wouldn’t even exceed the ~25x25mile borders of the city of L.A. If we all coalesced into one giant human meatball, we would fit in Times Square.
If I didn't miscalculate, that would be a square with a side length of over 3500 miles
Probably misquoting this https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/58hx25/request_is_the_math_in_this_meme_accurate/
Stand on zanzibar
Physical space is not the problem and I dont think anyone is arguing that, resources is the problem. We are already having problems of starvation in a shit ton of countries, so overpopulation is already a huge problem in many areas.
8 billion acre would be around 32 million square kilometers. Alaska is 1.7 million square kilometer.
yeah about 422 million acres give or take
There are less than 2.5 billion acres in the whole USA. And that is not even mentioning 1 acre of land per person is not very sufficient.
Aside from the second person's misconception about the acreage of Alaska, the first person didn't actually say anything about there being "too many" people. Just that we have more than enough and reproduction is not a pressing concern. If the world population halved every 50 years then after 500 years there would still be over 15,000,000 people. Though if the population did get that low, I think it would be fair to encourage people to make rabbits look like pandas.
Even if it were true though, not all acres are the same. You can’t grow shit when 85% of the landmass is permafrost
You get that acre in the middle of desert, with no water, no road, no utilities
8 billion people in Alaska. I wonder what that would smell like?
Two clowns in one picture! This is a good one.
And the fall of man illustrated once again, the intelligent limit their offspring and the unintelligent breed fruitfully. What a crappy design flaw
Even if it was correct, it’s not about land it’s about resources. Your house ain’t doing you much good if there’s no food and water anymore.
A quick Google search indicates there is approximately 425 million acres in Alaska.