Usually, most of my flight travels are in the night, and I hardly get to see the "ground" below in broad daylight. I prefer aisle seats, and sleep for the most part of the journey. It so happened that my last travel was during the daytime, and I had to exchange seats with an elderly gentleman who had to frequently visit the loo! The flight happened to fly close to the Himalayas, and I was really awestruck at the sight outside. We are usually not very cognizant about the enormous size of the planet that we live on!
I decided to do some rough calculations to see if we can find out when this world will be filled by our fellow beings, and when will we be in a situation to decide that we do not have anymore space left than to sleep beside each other!
Calculation:
Surface area of land available on earth = 148,940,000 km2 (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth)
Human Population on earth = 7.4 billion (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)
Cool...so, if we were to divide this equally among all human beings, I'm entitled for about 4.9 Acres!
Now wait, our population keeps increasing at the rate of 1.1% a year on an average (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth).
At the above rate (assuming it is going to remain constant), what this means is that in 895 years, each human being will be entitled to have just 12 ft2 of land, just sufficient for all of us to lie down next to each other. This, by considering the fact that we've cut down all trees, all mountains have been flattened out by then, we no longer travel by road, and multi-storied apartments are no longer possible due to high air traffic!
Side note:
The above calculation is not at all an indication of when the world will end!
High density of population doesn't mean the end of this world, it just means that we lose a lot more privacy (for those who need it), and we can gain more insights into others' life (for the more voyueristic ones). We would be fighting among each other for resources, and shamelessly reproducing like animals.
On the other hand, we have the law of natural balance (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature), by which we hope that earth will bring back equilibrium whenever one race grows beyond control, in which case our calculation above will have to be revisited! No wonder, we'll see a lot of Asian folks migrating to the West, and a lot of folks in the West migrating to Mars!
Disclaimer: The author assumes that human beings would have destroyed all other living forms before he can embark on the mission of total control on the planet earth, and make it un-inhabitable for himself. The author also declares that he's not an expert at human demography, and that predictions made above are only indicative!
I decided to do some rough calculations to see if we can find out when this world will be filled by our fellow beings, and when will we be in a situation to decide that we do not have anymore space left than to sleep beside each other!
Calculation:
Surface area of land available on earth = 148,940,000 km2 (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth)
Human Population on earth = 7.4 billion (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population)
Cool...so, if we were to divide this equally among all human beings, I'm entitled for about 4.9 Acres!
Now wait, our population keeps increasing at the rate of 1.1% a year on an average (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth).
At the above rate (assuming it is going to remain constant), what this means is that in 895 years, each human being will be entitled to have just 12 ft2 of land, just sufficient for all of us to lie down next to each other. This, by considering the fact that we've cut down all trees, all mountains have been flattened out by then, we no longer travel by road, and multi-storied apartments are no longer possible due to high air traffic!
Side note:
The above calculation is not at all an indication of when the world will end!
High density of population doesn't mean the end of this world, it just means that we lose a lot more privacy (for those who need it), and we can gain more insights into others' life (for the more voyueristic ones). We would be fighting among each other for resources, and shamelessly reproducing like animals.
On the other hand, we have the law of natural balance (Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_nature), by which we hope that earth will bring back equilibrium whenever one race grows beyond control, in which case our calculation above will have to be revisited! No wonder, we'll see a lot of Asian folks migrating to the West, and a lot of folks in the West migrating to Mars!
Disclaimer: The author assumes that human beings would have destroyed all other living forms before he can embark on the mission of total control on the planet earth, and make it un-inhabitable for himself. The author also declares that he's not an expert at human demography, and that predictions made above are only indicative!
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