There have been quite a few threads regarding human population overpowering the earth and all of her natural resources. Can people’s fears be subdued through straight up geometry? Here’s the theory?
If you take an average human adult and think of them as a block. That block would roughly be (these are generalized averages) a 12 X 24 inch rectangal by lets say 6 feet tall.
**of course there are people who would not fit in this rectangular block obese people and children…but lets just assume one person per block.
So, with that one person per block, you now place each person next to each other forming a grid.
Roughly, what would the total area be if every person on the globe was accounted for in said grid. Would the area be as big as Texas? Or just as big as say Houston city proper?
Lets say the current world population is 6,260,000,000 this is a little over the current global human pop.
Do we in reality have much to worry about. I’d say NO.
Well, the earth has 56,700,000 square miles of land. With 6,260,000,000 people, that works out to 0.0094 square mile per person, or 105.9 people per square mile. At 0.0015625 sq miles/acre its about 6 acres apiece. That’s not a lot of room, especially when you start knocking off places like Antarctica and the Sahara desert.
Slightly longer answer, John Brunner wrote a science fiction story concerning what happens when the Earth’s population becomes great enough so that you can barely fit every person onto the island of Zanzibar. Hint:, nothing good happens.
As people have noted, it’s not the volume that people take up, it’s the total resources it requires to support each person in what we consider a comfortable lifestyle.