My title is clumsy; I am asking how large a population of people could live inside the U.S., given its geographic size and current population density.
A year and a half ago, I moved from South Florida to Denver, Colorado. Because of bad flooding in the Midwest, my caravan hugged the gulf coast before cutting across Texas and into New Mexico, and then drove north through most of Colorado. Much of the trip was accompanied by wide swaths of empty land, with only a random shack or barn for miles and miles.
Then, just last weekend, my family went camping along the front range of the Rockies, stopping at various parks for a long weekend. Again I was treated to miles and miles of rolling hills, with barely a building in sight.
Now, I realize that much of what I saw was farmland, so it is being put to use. But if we “urbanized” the countryside, how many people could live here? As it stands, there are about 325 million people. In 1960, for a contrast, there were only about 179 million. So, how many do you think we could fit? I’m thinking we’d be a little crowded, but not unsustainably so, at a billion. But that is just a wild guess. What say the Dope?