Taking into account general climate and potential natural disasters, what is currently the healthiest/safest place to live in the world?
And why don’t we abandon all the rest of the land (except for purposes of exploitation of the natural resources), shave our numbers down, and just live there?
First, tell how you plan to do this.
The numbers will just grow back darker and bushier.
Antarctica is probably pretty safe. You have to stay inside most of the time but it is very dry, cold enough so that most microbes and viruses don’t do well there, and I don’t know of any natural disasters if you move to one of the flat, inland areas.
To stop having kids in relatively rotten/unsafe places.
How do you figure?
I believe it is an old wives tale that we have debunked here before. Shaving numbers doesn’t really make them come back darker and bushier like many people think although it may appear that they do.
IIRC Cuba has one of the better lifespans/overall health despite the occasional hurricane.
My understanding (based on Victorian England) is that people living in deprived conditions have more children in the hope that at least some survive.
Also (as Qadgop said), suppose you decide Switzerland is a lovely place to live (all that fresh air and decent housing).
How do you slim 6,000,000,000 people into somewhere that can hold 6,000,000 comfortably?
The Scandinavian region is a desirable place to live. Norway, Sweden and Finland are all far from natural catastrophes, economic crises and terrorist attacks.
Layers. I get top bunk!
Yes, but don’t the Scandinavian countries, especially Sweden, have higher suicide rates than the rest of Europe?
That doesn’t stop them being healthy and safe. It just means they’re boring as well.
Who’s going to “exploit the natural resources”? We live where we live to a large extent because that’s where most of the resources are, or were originally. You also have to get those resources to where they need to go, which is why most cities are along rivers.
Beside, I like where I live.
I’ve heard that the inhabitants of Tristan del Cunha have an average life expectancy in the 80s. But then you run into the boringness problem again: The only thing to even talk about on Tristan del Cunha is sheep.
It’s Tristan *da * Cunha, and it isn’t all that safe, being volcanic. The entire population had to be evacuated for a year or two because of an eruption sometime in the 1960’s.
Okay, here’s the plan:
First, we engineer the human lifespan so that it can extend into hundreds and even thousands of healthy years. Sound implausible? It isn’t. Aubrey de Grey, leading the Strategies for Negligible Human Senescence (SENS) project, is getting tons of money dumped at him by rich people to do just that. Eventually, we’ll do it, probably well within the next 30 years.
Then, we pare down the population by not having so many children for a few centuries and concentrate ourselves in the areas of the Earth that are healthiest/safest, so far as we know. Living so long at this point, some people will have to agree to spend a few hundred years or so in the less desirable areas if procuring resources in those areas is necessary. Then others can take their place for a few more centuries, by mutual agreement.
We get ourselves to the point that we know how much each of us needs, minimally, from the planet in order to survive. Then, we can start bulking up the population again if we wish. Some estimates state that, with current resources, Earth could sustain up to 29 billion people. But we’ve only got 6 billion now, and we’re fouling up our environment very severely. Pare down first, build up later.
With the extension of human lifespan, the playing field alters irrevocably. Suddenly it will matter if you badly screw someone over when you’re 35, figuring you’ll both be dead anyway in a few decades. Would you want to meet up with that person again in a few hundred years? We’ll be valuing our own lives much more, and treating each other much better, like each of us matters as much as we’d like to think we matter.
If we all move to somewhere else, aren’t we taking the problems with us? It’s not like it’s the geology that’s the real danger (well, apart from extreme weather, and earthquakes, and volcanoes, I suppose).