The answer may surprise you



Might be the same people that had the Grand Canyon ant heap. Very informative and fun....and a bit eye opening.

Cool vid! Thanks for sharing, macdoc.

No way am I living standing inside a "one point sixty-three metre" high room, though.

When I looked at the opening frame of the video, I thought I could see the answer already:


However, the actual answer appears to be this:


So, yes, "the answer may surprise you" and it did! You won't believe what happened next...

I made myself a cup of coffee.

My rough estimate took much less time to calculate and does not include mention of "the Nazis". 8x10^9 people (roughly). Take the cube root to get 2x10^3. Give them each 1 m^2 of floor space and a 2m ceiling (very generous in comparison to the vid) to get a 2km x 2km x 4km building.

Yeah except that The Great Courses Plus would probably not sponsor your 3 sentences ;)

I actually enjoyed learning about the other buildings that actually exist...Mecca, Tesla and the Boeing factory ....

Good for you.
I wasn't surprised that I could estimate without a calculator to be within a factor of 2 or so in a time much shorter that the vid.

[Troll alert]You couldn't ask this question about Hilbert's hotel.[/Troll alert]

What would you do with the 5 million tons of poo produced every day?

Consumables in - waste out...

This could possibly be sci-fi. Just like the house in Alaska, a cube surrounded by production capacities and rest wilderness where access to such  would only be allowed for non-commercial purposes and/or under highly specific/selective conditions. The last stand of humanity against global warming in highly efficient ant-like nest. 

juju7 wrote:What would you do with the 5 million tons of poo produced every day?

Call it an 'Executive order'

I've done a bit of quick research and approximate calculations about populations before - primarily as a response to the xenophobes that insist Britain is full. Not with impractical "cram them tightly in" measurements like the video above, but real liveable scenarios.

In England only around 4% of the land actually has anything built on it, and NI, Wales and Scotland are closer to 1%.

Our most densely populated city is London, yet it's population density is around half that of New York despite both cities being around 8.5 million people.

The New York borough of Manhattan has a density more than five times that of London and around ten times that of many of our smaller cities – this is despite the fact that Manhattan includes an 800 acre park - half a mile wide and two and a half miles long, and lots of other smaller parks and green-space besides, - about 17% of its area in total.

So with sufficient redevelopment of our towns and cities the population of the UK could very comfortably double to 130 million without us building on any greenbelt land, and we still wouldn't have a city in the UK with a higher population density than that of New York.

But if we really wanted to cram people in, so all the land in the UK was as densely populated as Manhattan minus central park (still leaving other parks and green-space), we could actually fit the entire population of the world in the UK.

Yes and in similar fashion with other kinds of "overpopulation". Let's hope everyone's got it finally.

minininja wrote:I've done a bit of quick research and approximate calculations about populations before - primarily as a response to the xenophobes that insist Britain is full. Not with impractical "cram them tightly in" measurements like the video above, but real liveable scenarios.

In England only around 4% of the land actually has anything built on it, and NI, Wales and Scotland are closer to 1%.

Our most densely populated city is London, yet it's population density is around half that of New York despite both cities being around 8.5 million people.

The New York borough of Manhattan has a density more than five times that of London and around ten times that of many of our smaller cities – this is despite the fact that Manhattan includes an 800 acre park - half a mile wide and two and a half miles long, and lots of other smaller parks and green-space besides, - about 17% of its area in total.

So with sufficient redevelopment of our towns and cities the population of the UK could very comfortably double to 130 million without us building on any greenbelt land, and we still wouldn't have a city in the UK with a higher population density than that of New York.

But if we really wanted to cram people in, so all the land in the UK was as densely populated as Manhattan minus central park (still leaving other parks and green-space), we could actually fit the entire population of the world in the UK.

If you care nothing for quality of life, carrying capacity, global warming, transportation, economic, food production, biodiversity and other issues, this works (in the same way the video in the OP works).

Conversely if you take a conservative estimate of the long term sustainable human carrying capacity of Earth to be of the order of two or three billion, you might conclude that based on present world population densities the UK is overpopulated by a factor of five or six.

The question is whether either set of assumptions is justifiable.

Thommo wrote:Conversely if you take a conservative estimate of the long term sustainable human carrying capacity of Earth to be of the order of two or three billion, you might conclude that based on present world population densities the UK is overpopulated by a factor of five or six.

Certainly carrying capacity is an important issue globally, but when people are talking about migration to the UK increasing our local population by a few hundred thousand a year as being any kind of problem it's useful to be able to put it into perspective.

I don't think that does though, that's what I'm saying. If our population is (potentially) too big already and growing by 4 million a decade, and somehow you need to find a humane way from there to 30 or 40 million (or less) within a few generations or so, that's actually a huge problem, from within the same context.

I suspect most people who make the argument think about it from neither point of view and see problems instead with pressure on public services as well as ghettoisation/lack of assimilation, but truthfully I can't possibly presume to speak for the opinions of a fairly diverse group of tens of millions.

Thommo wrote:I don't think that does though, that's what I'm saying. If our population is (potentially) too big already and growing by 4 million a decade, and somehow you need to find a humane way from there to 30 or 40 million (or less) within a few generations or so, that's actually a huge problem, from within the same context.

Why on earth would we need to reduce population in the UK to 30 million? There's no reason why populations can't be concentrated in certain areas rather than spread out evenly across the globe, indeed it's more efficient and can be less damaging to the environment to do so.

minininja wrote:Why on earth would we need to reduce population in the UK to 30 million? There's no reason why populations can't be concentrated in certain areas rather than spread out evenly across the globe, indeed it's more efficient and can be less damaging to the environment to do so.

That's an illustration of the kind of population level at which traditional British animals, biodiversity and countryside might be sustainable alongside enough production of food and energy to sustain the population in the long term.

As soon as you admit the premise that some areas could be fuller than others, someone else could arbitrate the limit to be lower in just the same way you arbitrate it to be higher.

It might be worth pointing out that at that level of population and for a working hypothesis of a world carrying capacity of a few billion, Britain would be one of the more densely populated regions as well.

Would be interesting, to me to but rather pointless, to see what consumption of the whole population of Earth would be IF it was concentrated in such cube. Some nuke power plants, genetically engineered crops, factories underground etc. Build it somewhere warm so we can grow all year, bring in resources by pipeline, scrap airlines and cars.

Do you think I could get The Great Courses Plus to sponsor me on this?

minininja wrote:

Thommo wrote:Conversely if you take a conservative estimate of the long term sustainable human carrying capacity of Earth to be of the order of two or three billion, you might conclude that based on present world population densities the UK is overpopulated by a factor of five or six.

Certainly carrying capacity is an important issue globally, but when people are talking about migration to the UK increasing our local population by a few hundred thousand a year as being any kind of problem it's useful to be able to put it into perspective.

"Carrying capacity" is one that people frequently forget when talking about, say, immigration to Australia. Foolish people look at our vast country, and how astoundingly empty it is, and say "We should bring as many people here as possible...we should be aiming for a population of a hundred million or more!!! The USA has about the same land area and they have 300 million people!!" or even more ludicrously "Look how many people China manages to fit in!". The last campaign push started at a more modest "50 million". All seemingly forgetting one thing:

"Carrying capacity"...

Australia is mostly desert or semi-desert, and what isn't desert is dense bushland or rainforest or coastal swamps. The few arable areas we have are needed for food production. That's not even to touch on the important subject of water supply and severe droughts which are a natural part of the cycles here. There is literally a limit on how many people you can fit in a country and still have a good standard of living...and "more" isn't "better". Not to mention that massively increasing your population means you will magically all maintain the same standard of living you had before...in fact the opposite would seem to be true.

Or do people want spacious countries with lovely natural environments to be bulldozed flat and covered in housing "just because" to suit some stupid philosophical point...?