Quote:
Originally Posted by CDAT
I have a real hard time believing this overcrowding when even the BBC says "Around half of the world’s land currently holds around 2% of the planet’s population, whereas only about 3% of total land supports more than half of humanity." [Article is https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...-out-of-space]. Based on my experience growing up in the middle of nowhere WA, we had a small town of about four by six blocks and lots and lots of open space where people lived unless they were family most did not have a neighbor closer than a mile or so. Now I do hear this overcrowding bit from my coworkers and such who grew up (and still live) in the big cites but even then it does not take long to leave them all in the rear view. |
There are a few issues with what's been said there though, such as large parts of the planet are not particularly suited for human habitation. And it ignores the rationale behind transport economics i.e. it's easier to distribute resources to 200 people in one place than 2 people in one hundred places.
And while parts of rural USA might not be particularly high in population (and I'm speaking as someone from a country with one of the worlds lowest population densities) parts of China, India and Brazil have problems with looking after their population because there's too many in one area for resources to be effectively distributed. Then there's countries like Singapore, Israel, Japan, Belgium, Kuwait and Lebanon with population densities too high for the country to support without importing large amounts of resources.
I am in complete agreement with Raellus that pop density is a different issue but I disagree that it's separate. For ease of resource distribution, it's much more effective to have the population grouped into large lots, obviously the larger your population the more densely packed they will be if you follow that model (i.e. centralization).