…we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet.
There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.
What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.
–Martin Luther King, Jr., 1966
Just something to consider. If you took all the people on Earth,
and you spread every one of us — men, women, and children — out as sparsely as possible over the entire land area of Earth, including land like Antarctica, Greenland, and Siberia,
how much land would everyone get? How far away would your neighbors be? The answer may shock you. Let’s see what your best guess is, first.
Now, let’s do the math together. At the current moment (October, 2009), the world’s population is 6.79 billion people. That seems like a huge number, of course, and it continues to get bigger every day.
But the Earth’s land area doesn’t increase over time in the same way, of course. The Earth’s has a radius of about 6,370 km, and about 30% of the surface is land. While not all of the land is habitable, we can pretend that it is, and we find that the total land area of Earth is about 149 million square kilometers.
This means that each person gets about 22,000 square meters of land. That might be a lot if you live in a city, but it’s only about 5.4 acres per person. That’s about two soccer fields. If you were to divide all the Earth’s land into a grid,
your square would be 148 meters on a side, which is less than 500 feet. If everyone built their home in the middle of their land, you’d be able to hit your eight nearest neighbors with a golf ball (more if you’re John Daly).
So that’s it; that’s all the land you’d get. About 10% of you would live in Antarctica, and despite its status as the smallest country in the world, 20 of you would live inside Vatican City.
Just a smidge under 150 meters to your nearest neighbor. Looks like it is a small world after all.