How crowded are we?

I was thinking about overcrowded cities, and how a friend of mine, Ian Mackenzie, once commented that the only people who complain about the world being too crowded are people who live in crowded cities.

So I finally went and did the math.

Figure six billion people on Earth, and imagine them standing in a space three feet on a side. They aren’t bumping one another, but it’s close.

6 billion * 9 square feet = 54 billion square feet

Sounds like a lot, for sure.

54 billion square feet = 1937 square miles

Hmm. Let’s translate that into something more tangible.

The state of Delaware (second smallest in the US) covers 1954 square miles. So every human on Earth standing shoulder to shoulder, front to back, wouldn’t fill the state of Delaware.

In fact, 1937 square miles is essentially a box about 44 miles on a side.

If you put every human on Earth together, you could drive your car (at 60 mph) around the horde of humanity in less than three hours.

Let’s see… the Earth has almost 200 million square miles of surface. Take the water and non-arable land out of the equation and you’re left with only 7.7 million square miles of arable land.

Know what? That’s 35,777 square feet per person on the planet.

For some reason, that doesn’t seem nearly so crowded.