If the world’s population lived like... (infographic)

http://persquaremile.com/2012/08/08/if-the-worlds-population-lived-like/

by thibaut_barrere • 14 years ago

129 55 14 years ago

persquaremile.com

rheide• 14 years ago

Scary thought.

It would be interesting to see this compared to how much of the world's resources we were using x years ago.

njharman2• 14 years ago

You can compare US (or other post industrial, consumer based countries) with India and other countries heading towards post industrial consumerism. They being example of resource usage X years ago

ginko• 14 years ago

I would love to see this infographic with the Kowloon Walled City at its heyday.

masklinn• 14 years ago

With the density of Kwoloon Walled City (~1,255,000/km^2 in 1987 according to wikipedia), the earth's population would comfortably fit in Delaware[0]: 6.9 billion people would fit into 5498km^2, DE is 6447km^2

Worldwide, the best match would be Olt in Romania (http://goo.gl/maps/i8I02) which is precisely 5498km^2

For full-fledged countries, Brunei[1] at 5765km^2

[0] US map for scale: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Delaware_in_United_States_...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunei

OoTheNigerian• 14 years ago

I did not know paris was so dense!

I wish people could input their own cites and of course other type of dynamic data. e.g water consumption. I guess that kind of dynamic infographic is what Erick Schonfeld was talking about. [1]

[1] http://erickschonfeld.com/2012/06/28/infographics-broken/

ovi256• 14 years ago

It's surprisingly dense given it has had a prohibition on tall buildings since forever. Of course, some buildings are more equal than others and their project went through: tour Montparnasse, some residential projects. If this restriction was removed, I'm pretty sure new developments would resemble dense asian cities and real estate prices would drop. But hey, falling housing prices are bad in political economics, 'mkay ?

leyfa• 14 years ago

Many European cities have height restrictions for buildings within the old city center to preserve the traditional architecture. The financial district just outside the center has no height limit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_D%C3%A9fense

Evbn4• 14 years ago

NYC and Tokyo are very tall and dense and mor expensive than Seattle which has height limits. You are overlooking the factor of how density begets density.

SudarshanP• 14 years ago

http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

zanny2• 14 years ago

Why didn't I know about this. My evening has been forfeited for my Randallicious overlord.

michaelochurch• 14 years ago

Animal meat, which has an enormous ecological footprint, is on its way out. I'm not a vegetarian, so I'm not saying this on top of some moral high horse, but it's inefficient and the way animals are raised and slaughtered now is insanely cruel. We'll have credible plant-based meats in 20 years, easily. In 150 years, eating actual animals will be this nostalgic and slightly goofy thing that rich people do, like fox hunting in England, because cow steaks will cost hundreds of dollars (rarity) while plant steaks that taste exactly like the real thing (or better) will be effectively free.

No one knows when Peak Oil will hit or how it will play out, and I'm concerned about it, but I think the long-term outcome is that (a) we'll be fine (although we may get hurt bad by it in the short-term) and (b) objections to nuclear power will vanish. In 50 years, we'll probably be using very cheap, environmentally safe nuclear power, and able to produce food in vertical greenhouses.

The world's population will likely peak around 9.5-10 billion and then begin declining because people are having fewer children.

So I don't think we're in danger of a Malthusian catastrophe, aside from the fact that the developing world is already in one. We're actually coming out of the Malthusian era. Malthus was wrong about the mathematics (economic growth is exponential; it was just so slow-- below 1%-- before the Industrial Revolution that it looked linear) but he was right about the population dynamics of pretty much every pre-industrial society.

alexchamberlain2• 14 years ago

Thanks for a good laugh. FYI fox hunting is banned and your horse is high enough to use for hunting.

> credible plant-based meats in 20 years

What is a plant-based meat? I don't know of any plants with muscles.

4ad3• 14 years ago

I downvoted you because you made zero effort in researching what the OP said before acting so dismissive. Depending on where you live, it's possible you never eaten nor seen meat substitutes made of soy, but before refuting a claim you should check some facts, not make a claim based on your own lack of knowledge about the subject. "I've never seen something therefore it must not exist".

wisty• 14 years ago

IIRC, you can grow fish-steaks in petrie dishes. The researchers who first did it claimed not to have eaten it (for legal reasons), but claim it smelt OK, when fried in butter.

Mince would be easy to make. A real cut of meat (like a rib-eye) would be much harder, but if it's $5/pound for mince "steaks" (patties) and $30/pound for real steaks (massive world-wide demand for tender cuts, but no demand for the tough bits which used to go in hamburgers) then ... well ... people will go for the mince.

And science will eventually give us 100% artificial steaks. Delicious, lab grown meat.

uptown• 14 years ago

Take a look at one of @biz's investments:

http://www.thekitchn.com/twitter-co-founders-betting-big-on-...

4ad3• 14 years ago

I'm hoping for cloned meat mass grown in some kind of installation, which is for all purposes real meat, rather than plant meat that supposedly tastes like real meat.

sneak• 14 years ago

There are fields, Neo, endless fields...

I, for one, welcome our vat-grown replicator meat overlords.

seanmcdirmid3• 14 years ago

I am now forced to quote Douglas Adam's "Restaurant at the End of the Universe:"

"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.

"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"

"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."

swah• 14 years ago

Right now, there aren't any barriers for regular people to raise their meat - if you have some space you can have some chickens there... I don't think changing to a centralized false-meat production and forbidding the free range chicken is the way forward...

malandrew5• 14 years ago

IMHO the way forward is to heavily regulate the treatment of animals on farm and largely do away with factory farming. The meat that gets to our table wouldn't even be that much more expensive. Most humanely raised and slaughtered me is only marginally more expensive and that is largely because people are will to pay a premium to know the animal has been treated well. If all animals had to be treated equally well, the prices would drop to near the current prices of factory farmed meats today.

Eliminating meat is a non-answer, but legally requiring the humane treatment of animals raised for slaughter is a platform that you wouldn't have any difficulty getting most Americans behind were it made a national issue.

justincormack• 14 years ago

Meat is less efficient but only by a factor of 10 or so. Unless food costs as a proportion of income go up a huge amount it is unlikely people will not be able to afford meat. It may well become less popular. Even well cared for animals are not that much more expensive.

njharman2• 14 years ago

No cite, but even if true. That is today. Things change. Increasing demand for land and water, increasing demand for meat by formally poor peoples in rapidly "industrializing" China/India will skyrocket cost.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Soy lowers your testerone level, so I hope not.

Anyway it is much likelier that we will have labgrown meat, although I guess you would prefer we all go with artificial meat (lab grown meat is real meat, just without the animal. Plant based substitutes are plants).

spacemanaki2• 14 years ago

> Soy lowers your testerone level, so I hope not.

From what I've read, this isn't cut and dried, so citations would be helpful. Wikipedia links to some meta-study that concluded there was no affect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Men

In any case, there are other plant-based proteins that are not based on soy.

ciupicri• 14 years ago

> Animal meat, which has an enormous ecological footprint, is on its way out. I'm not a vegetarian, so I'm not saying this on top of some moral high horse, but it's inefficient and the way animals are raised and slaughtered now is insanely cruel.

Actually there are places where plants are worse. How do you grow cereals in hot or cold areas or in the mountains? You'll need irrigation for the hot one and harvesting is going to suck in the mountains. There's also the issue of deforestation. Instead it's better to raise animals like chicken, sheep or goats and let them feed with the grass that's available.

Regarding efficiency of plants I've heard that hemp (which is much better than soy) is easy to grow, but I'm not sure about this. Maybe someone else has more information about it.

seanmcdirmid3• 14 years ago

This is a very good reason why Tibetan Buddhists aren't vegetarians; they couldn't survive on plant matter in the high Himalayas, where barely any plant growing agriculture is possible.

Animals are incredibly effective in converting widely dispersed plant matter into something we can actually use for energy. Pigs are even probably the world's best recyclers, able to eat anything (garbage, but hopefully just organic left overs), which we can then benefit from indirectly (there is a good reason why many cultures don't eat pork though, its kind of gross when you think too much about it).

cultureulterior• 14 years ago

The world is not a zero-sum game.

yen223• 14 years ago

We only have resources of one planet to share among the entire population, so I think it's safe to say that it is a zero-sum game.

Assuming of course, we don't end up going into space.

Evbn4• 14 years ago

The earth's not a closed system, it's powered by the Sun.

--MC Hawking.

antidoh• 14 years ago

When you look at the last few lived-like countries in the list, including the US, keep in mind that we use resources like drunken sailors because we can. We have much more land and resources than we need, so we trade long term waste for short term cost.

I think it's reasonable to assume that we could, if we decided, be much better at using, reusing and conserving our resources. And if we did that, it would be possible for the rest of the world to bring their standard of living up to the US or better, and still not use multiples of the world's available resources.

If that's what we decided.

mchahn• 14 years ago

Conterminous? I learn something new on HN every day, but new words are unusual.

If the world’s population lived like... (infographic)

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