Comment by somenameforme
12 hours ago
Here's a fun thought experiment for you. If you dug a 1 mile cubic square hole. How many humans could you fit into it? The answer is not only all of us but about around an order of magnitude more on top. I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases.
Some human activities can have an outsized impact, but the overwhelming majority of those activities remain necessary regardless of where people live, and some will have an greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but require complete centralization in urban settings.
> I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases.
It emphasizes neither!
What you've described is a mass grave.
Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed!
Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any arrangement of them cubic squares instead of square miles is highly unintuitive, unusual and unnatural to begin with.
This doesn't say anything about habitable or fertile farmable area (measured in km^2, not in km^3) of the planet, or the number of people (that you've conveniently reduced by taking a square root of - twice! by packing them into a tightly packed cube)
For example, if you took 8 billion people and made them hold hands with each other tightly packed (0.5m per person) it would wrap the circumference of earth 100 times.
Now this actually says something about size of the earth!
If you divy up the land surface of earth by population, you get a rather small parcel of land, something to tune of 140m x 140m (this includes deserts and other mostly uninhabitable lands!)
Arable land would be a much smaller parcel of land still!
If you measure human land use in terms of arable land and living space per person, instead of mass-grave metrics the planet Earth is pretty much squarely over-populated and is very much stretching of what is sustainable.