Comment by T-A
1 day ago
Depends on how you measure it. Do you subdivide all land in 1 cm squares and only count the ones with somebody standing on them as populated? Then almost all land is unpopulated. With 8.2 billion people in the world, each one occupying a 0.5x0.5 meter square, you have 2.05e9 m^2 populated land, out of Earth's total land area ~1.5e14 m^2 [1]. That's less than 0.0014%.
As you increase the size of your subdivisions, the unpopulated fraction goes down. In the limit of all land being in just one subdivision, it's obviously 0.
These type of calculations don't really work for things like skyscrapers, high-rise apartment complexes, or the slum-towns of Asia and South America, and conversely for very sparsely populated regions like the fringes of the Sahara. Antarctica has people too but it doesn't make any sense to count it as "populated".
I think we can just draw an outline around cities, towns, and villages and count that area as populated, no matter how many people are actually in there.
For long stretches of land where there's just a single highway going through and a few gas stations, motels and shacks, totaling maybe <100 people for many miles around, we can count that land as unpopulated.
Isolated islands with indigenous/uncontacted tribes, not sure.. We may have to consider their population growth and see if they're in "equilibrium" with "nature" and so on.
A simple glance at Google Earth shows large parts of Russia as clearly unpopulated/undelevoped, then there's the deserts of China and Africa, and some natural land in the Americas, and finally of course there's Antarctica, until the Elder Things awaken.