Comment by somenameforme
8 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, the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed! Very insightful!
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.