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mouse
Joined: 10 Jul 2006
Posts: 15474
Location: under the bed
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 Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2012 10:27 pm Post subject: |
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ah. my mistake - we won't be standing shoulder to shoulder, we will be standing on each other's shoulders. about 20 deep.
that will be comfy.
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Thy Brilliance
Joined: 09 Jul 2006
Posts: 3213
Location: Relative
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| Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2012 11:31 pm Post subject: |
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| Dogen wrote: | I feel the need to work this out, just for the fun of it. Texas has an area of 696,241km^2. The World Bank puts the current population at 6,973,738,433. That gives us 0.00009983755581km^2 per person, or roughly 1 square centimeter.
Then we need to grow food for everyone with all of that arable land. |
The food growing aspect of this problem isn't as impossible as you make it out to be. |
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Snorri
Joined: 09 Jul 2006
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Location: hiding the decline.
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| Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2012 11:46 pm Post subject: |
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| Thy Brilliance wrote: | | Dogen wrote: | I feel the need to work this out, just for the fun of it. Texas has an area of 696,241km^2. The World Bank puts the current population at 6,973,738,433. That gives us 0.00009983755581km^2 per person, or roughly 1 square centimeter.
Then we need to grow food for everyone with all of that arable land. |
The food growing aspect of this problem isn't as impossible as you make it out to be. |
And having the entire world population in one location makes the logistics easier.
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Michael
Joined: 09 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:02 am Post subject: |
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| I dunno if you can get enough vitamin C from just eating vegans though. |
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mouse
Joined: 10 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:20 am Post subject: |
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we probably won't even need as much food as you think. since we will all be standing on one another's shoulders, you only have to feed the top layer - everyone else will survive on the trickle-down!
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Heretical Rants
Joined: 21 Jul 2009
Posts: 3050
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:28 am Post subject: |
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| Dogen wrote: | I feel the need to work this out, just for the fun of it. Texas has an area of 696,241km^2. The World Bank puts the current population at 6,973,738,433. That gives us 0.00009983755581km^2 per person, or roughly 1 square centimeter.
Then we need to grow food for everyone with all of that arable land. |
You did the conversions wrong.
(100000 cm/km)^2 * (696,241 km^2/6,973,738,433 people) = 998375.558087 cm^2/person
or ~ 100 square meters/person
A million square centimeters per person, not one.
It might be enough if you use basically the entire top layer for growing algae, and bring the resources to actually build it all in from somewhere else.
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Last edited by Heretical Rants on Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:43 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Dogen
Joined: 10 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:43 am Post subject: |
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Google says we're both wrong.
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"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman
Last edited by Dogen on Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:49 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Heretical Rants
Joined: 21 Jul 2009
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:44 am Post subject: |
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No, Google agrees with me. 100m^2/person.
You can't go directly between length and area, you have to square them.
For example, there are 144 square inches in a square foot, or 100^2 = 10,000 square centimeters in a square meter.
If you don't believe me, draw out a grid and count them.
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butts
Last edited by Heretical Rants on Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:50 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Dogen
Joined: 10 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:50 am Post subject: |
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Oh, that makes sense. I forgot to square! Bah. This is why I'm a social scientist... 
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Heretical Rants
Joined: 21 Jul 2009
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:51 am Post subject: |
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Why the hell are you using Gary's avatar, btw, it's confusing me.
Something to do with Halloween?
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Dogen
Joined: 10 Jul 2006
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:52 am Post subject: |
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I have no idea what you're talking about.
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"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman |
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Darqcyde
Joined: 11 Jul 2006
Posts: 9086
Location: A false vacuum abiding in ignorance.
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 12:58 am Post subject: |
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| Heretical Rants wrote: | | Dogen wrote: | I feel the need to work this out, just for the fun of it. Texas has an area of 696,241km^2. The World Bank puts the current population at 6,973,738,433. That gives us 0.00009983755581km^2 per person, or roughly 1 square centimeter.
Then we need to grow food for everyone with all of that arable land. |
You did the conversions wrong.
(100000 cm/km)^2 * (696,241 km^2/6,973,738,433 people) = 998375.558087 cm^2/person
or ~ 100 square meters/person
A million square centimeters per person, not one.
It might be enough if you use basically the entire top layer for growing algae, and bring the resources to actually build it all in from somewhere else. |
Easy answer: lots of people need to die.
Or rather, lots of people ARE going to die.
Populations going up and down is the natural order of things. Plants, animals, protists, bacteria, fungi -- it's how it goes. We humans are no exceptions. At some point, something, probably a disease, will kill off a HUGE chunk (or chunks) of us. Our efforts to prevent this are probably going to end up biting us in the ass. Hard. We're fighting a losing battle. Sustained growth is flawed from the get go.
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Heretical Rants
Joined: 21 Jul 2009
Posts: 3050
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 1:00 am Post subject: |
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http://www.iisc.ernet.in/currsci/feb25/articles16.htm
| Quote: | | The minimum amount of arable land required to sustainably support one person is 0.07 of a hectare. This assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no farmland degradation or water shortages, virtually no post- harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc. |
so 700 m^2/person would be necessary with traditional crops grown at maximum efficiency
but I think it might be workable if you feed everyone algae and have them live underneath the algae tanks
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Dogen
Joined: 10 Jul 2006
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Location: Bellingham, WA
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 1:06 am Post subject: |
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Hmm. So this might actually be feasible. As long as we lived underground. And, I guess, enough of the land in Texas was actually arable.
Mmm... algae.
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Heretical Rants
Joined: 21 Jul 2009
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| Posted: Thu Nov 01, 2012 1:12 am Post subject: |
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The barrier to it working isn't the land being arable so much as the immense difficulty of building it all
also it would be a pretty low standard of living
and if anything at all went wrong lots of people would starve
efficiency by area of growing the algae could be boosted somewhat with artificial lights (inside the tanks) powered by nuclear or maybe geothermal energy
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