Global land mass and population: A hypothetical mathematical global utopian problem

Great Debates
1

While reading the paper this evening, I thought of something: with globalisation seaping into everyone’s lives (as in all 6,000,000,000 of us), it will begin to get a little crowded on this island Earth.

I started doing some calculations on scrap paper, then continuing on my TI-86.

Looking of the planet’s diameter and calculating it’s surface area using this equation(4pi(12,753km/2 squared)), I calculated global surface area to be 510,945,515 square kilometers. Now, that appears to be very much for the lot of humanity, but I didn’t factor in land mass and the amound which is covered by water, which is seventy percent. Now, multiply our surface area by the 30% we have left and we get 153,283,654 square kilometers.

In this hypothetical utopian world that I’m working with, you get about 40 square kilometers per person. Of course we have a few rather inhospitable places like Antarctica and Pasadena, CA to deal with, but we’ll assume in this world the industrial forces have paved over such hells upon the earth and made them more habitable through modern technology.

With this, if the whole world were industrialized and every family owns two SUV minivans (utopia?), we have one huge traffic jam on our hands. And feeding all of these people diets that we Westerners (apologize to people in non-Western countries or places not as affluent) are used to, Earth’s agricultural resources will be used up rather quickly. There are many other factors like emissions from these SUV minivans, feeding the pets of these utopians, etc., but we’ll get to that eventually in this thread.

I’m sure many futurists and United Nations comittees have dealt with these problems time and time again with more accurate data and even more precise calculations, but I was just thinking to myself and felt like sharing these thoughts with the Teeming Millions. I would also like some response and debate from them as well (why else would I be posting?).

That’s me story and I’m stickin’ to it. Peace out!

PS - Happy New Year/Decade/Century/Millenium

PPS - Sorry if I offended any people living in Pasadena. I have never been particularly fond of the place.

2

What it comes down to is whether Malthus was right or wrong?

3

The world can produce more than enough food for everyone…in fact, the state Kansas, if used exclusively for farming, could produce enough calories to feed everyone in the world. We have starvation because of distribution problems, not lack of food.

4

Read it and weep:
6 billion?

We’ve done this one. Before you try to debate this, wade through the last one.

5

Badtz, I’m not calling you on it, just wondering where you read that. Interesting. Always liked utopian discussions. I’ll be interested to see where this one turns out.

Living in the city, as far as the OP goes, I’m always happy to dream about open spaces and acres of land.

6

Actually, I’m afraid I can’t give you a cite. I read that in an essay (I believe in Analog Magazine) but I can’t remember the author. Sorry. 8^) But it should be easy to figure out - just find out how much food an acre of land can produce over a year, figure out the caloric content of the food, and divide that by the world population…

7

If you want to know productivity and caloric value of various foodstuffs, I recommend this source.

8

Would the state of Kansas be able to produce that much year after year, without its soil’s nutrients being depleted?

Also, Kansas might be able to produce the minimum, but I was talking about everyone living on our Western diets of thousands of calories a day. In this hypothetical utopian future, people might have to change their diets (telling an American he can’t have three hamburgers every day, oh no!).

Oh, if we only knew the answer to this one…

Personally, I think he was right, but you also have to consider agricultural technology. Population grows, but we have, over the years, been able to get a hell of a lot more crop out of a set amount of land. Eventually, population might catch up with production.

Thanks. I’ll check it out.

9

SpinneZiege writes:

Yes and no.

It is important that any crop (let us take maize as our example) will take certain amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, etc., from the soil. Despite claims on both sides of the discussion, there is no magic fertilizer, hormone, manure, etc., that will allow 100 kg of, say, nitrogen, to act as though it were 200 kg.

(Of course, various micronutrients may be depleted, and thereby prevent the utilization of other nutrients, be they ever so abundantly available. It should be noted, however, that most micronutrients are so designated because of lack of firm knowledge; i.e., it is said, “We don’t know that this mineral has any real function, but a certain amount is found in the crop when it is grown on virgin soil, so let’s be conservative and assume that it is deliberately absorbed”.))

So, can a crop be grown indefinitely with no inputs? No. Can it be indefinitely with inputs. Yes. Will the growing land undergo some mystic “depletion” if it is? No.

I believe that the world now produces about 2700 Kcal/day of food (including animal products). Quite a while back, I did an estimate that 2000 Kcal/day could be produced on about 6 ares (1 are = 10 m[sup]2[/sup]) through growing rice with current agricultural practices. Apply the factors that you think appropriate.

10

Hey, I live in Pasadena, CA and it is one of the nicest places I have ever lived. Yes, it gets hot and smoggy, but it is hardly the worst culprit in this regard (I suggest you go to Phoenix). It is actually quite nice most of the yar, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains, never humid and in the seventies. Some wonderful restaurants, a vibrant Old Town area, culture (Huntington Gardens and The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena Playhouse), and I can walk to many of the places I like to go.

Apology accepted. :slight_smile:

11

So, Akatsukami, you’re saying that Kansas can feed the world? Wow. That takes care of that problem. Distribution and getting this foodstuff from Kansas to Sudan would be our next dilemma in Utopia.

And to Tretiak: It’s not the weather in Pasadena I’m complaining about.

12

SpinneZiege asks:

Hmm, an interesting question. Let’s see…

The FAO gives the world maize area harvested as 138,926,288 hectares (Ha) in 1998. Yield was 44,209 hectograms per hectare (Hg/Ha). This provided 139.3 Kcal/capita/day, when world population was estimated at 5,901,054,000.

Now, it is recommend that even a sedentary knowledge worker such as myself get about 2,000 Kcal/day. Some people, even in the future Utopia, will actually need a higher caloric intake; to the left, some of those people will be little children, who need less. Let us take 2,000 Kcal/day as the goal to shoot for (we note, of course, that more than mere kilocalories are needed in the diet; this is just a first cut at the problem, however). Since we’re going to supply everyone’s caloric needs by cornbread alone, we need about 41 Hg/capita/day of maize. That requires about two thousand million Ha of agricultural land (since, realistically, we need something other than maize, assume that some of that land is planted in soybeans, or rapeseed, or whatever).

Kansas is about 82,276 square miles, or 21,300,277 Ha, in area; for the sake of argument, we’ll assume that all of the area is suitable for growing maize (or will be after we plow Topeka and exile the inhabitants to Vail). So, no, at worldwide yields, Kansas is inadequate to feed the world.

Now, of course, U.S. maize cropland yielded 84,382 Hg/Ha in 1998, almost twice the worldwide yield. Even so, Kansas doesn’t cut it alone. If we grew potatoes, however, we’d only need about 5.6 million hectares (potatoes are a lot more productive than maize), and Kansas would make the grade.

So, a lot of the question is: what are we feeding people?

13

Can I ask what it is then? Just curious.

14

That’s definitely not correct. Do you mean per person?

Muffin

Well, I’d vote for the “wrong” category. There is very strong evidence that when people are given the choice of how many children to have, and women are given opportunities to participate in the economy in ways other than child rearing, people choose to have less than 2.0 children. This means that once we can achieve this situation throughout the world, we will see a population decrease.

15

Oops. Yes, per person. World food production does total a wee bit more than 2700 Kcal/day. :o

16

Not to mention that people want to eat meat…(oops, I mentioned it)…and livestock requires more land & calorie consumption.

17

Yep. As I said, the answer depends on what we’re feeding people.

So do a lot of related answers. What living area is required for people? Well, are they happy living in an apartment and working out at the gym, or do they require long, solitary hikes through the woods? What area is required to provide with construction materials? Will they accept doors made of MDF, or do they insist on “natural” oak – or do they want sheet aluminum, because any use of wood requires killing a tree? How much of their income will be devoted to preventing pollution? Will that answer depend on if we assume per capital GWP is USD 1,000 or USD 100,000? Should it?