> I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases.

It emphasizes neither!

What you've described is a mass grave.

Quite literally so. If you killed all living humans (8.3billion), the mass-grave you'd have to dig to put them all in one place isn't quite large indeed!

Plus, humans on earth are affected by gravity, so any arrangement of them cubic squares instead of square miles is highly unintuitive, unusual and unnatural to begin with.

This doesn't say anything about habitable or fertile farmable area (measured in km^2, not in km^3) of the planet, or the number of people (that you've conveniently reduced by taking a square root of - twice! by packing them into a tightly packed cube)

For example, if you took 8 billion people and made them hold hands with each other tightly packed (0.5m per person) it would wrap the circumference of earth 100 times.

Now this actually says something about size of the earth!

If you divy up the land surface of earth by population, you get a rather small parcel of land, something to tune of 140m x 140m (this includes deserts and other mostly uninhabitable lands!)

Arable land would be a much smaller parcel of land still!

If you measure human land use in terms of arable land and living space per person, instead of mass-grave metrics the planet Earth is pretty much squarely over-populated and is very much stretching of what is sustainable.

I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd. That's a land the length of about 1.5 football fields, in both directions, for each and every person. So for a small family of 4 people, that'd be nearly 3 football fields of space, in all directions, just for themselves. And there's enough space on Earth for literally everybody to have this, including newborn babies as they are part of the population we're counting.

Now factor in larger families and the fact that some people voluntarily will want to live in close quarters (even given a free choice of all options), and you get many football fields of space, again in all directions, for every single person. This is just absolutely massive. And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.

And, as mentioned already, arable lands have nothing to do with population distribution. As you pack people into smaller quarters, you use up just as much arable land, if not more (due to minimizing decentralization possibilities), than you do with wider distribution.

> I think your intuition of 140m x 140m being a small parcel of land is rather odd.

I actually went into google maps/satellite of some very familiar places to me, and drew out a 140m x 140m meter squares just to get a feel how much it is. It's very much a small plot of land.

I rounded up, the actual plot of land given 8.3bil pop is closer to 134m x 134m. Mind you, 134m x 134m per person IF you include all land area (so deserts, permafrost, high mountains and various unlivable areas), so in practice, it would be significantly less, so 95m squared give or take depending on what you consider "livable".

Of these 134m x 134m arable/fertile land would be only like 10% if I recall correctly. And arable/fertile land is - ultimately - the bottle neck.

This does not in any shape or form emphasize "how few of people there are on Earth". Quite the opposite actually. And every new person just makes that small parcel of land ever smaller.

> And I think calling deserts uninhabitable is quite odd given everything from Nevada to Saudi Arabia. Basically no lands are truly uninhabitable if we want to inhabit them, even including water as the gradually expanding territory of China is demonstrating.

And what happens to be the population density of Sahara Desert? Plus, do you live or want to live in a desert yourself? No? Well then...

Nobody wants to live in "close quarters" in insanely polluted, noisy overpopulated shitholes like Dhaka, Mumbai or Karachi or deserts. Just so you know... people there never had a choice and were just spawned there.

Planet is overpopulated, the overpopulation is simply not evenly distributed. Mind you, as recently as 1950s your plot of land would be 3x larger, when pop of planet was "mere" 2.5bil.

Saudi Arabia is wholly dependent of it's oil reserves to make miracles happen in the middle of the desert. At current oil consumption rates in the world, the total world oil reserves will last mere 47 years.

Then either some "magical transformation" will happen, or lots of people will end up poured in that square death cube of yours. And only the fraction of people left alive in Saudi Arabia will go back to riding cammels instead of their sports cars and jeeps.

Betting that a "magical transformation" will happen in 47years is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Unfortunately people aren't really wired for long term planning and reason backwards from the conclusions in their mind as starting point instead.

Rather than derive conclusions from the observable, quantifiable and measurable - even if those conclusions end up being less than pretty.

I don't think you're discussing this in good faith. 134m^2 is well over 4 acres of land for a single person! That's larger than a typical small suburban subdivision for a single person. A minimal immediate family size for a sustainable society is 4 people. That's 16+ acres for every single family, which is just massive. And the overwhelming majority of the Earth's land is perfectly acceptable for habitation. I suspect you think the opposite of arable is inhospitable. It is not. Arable is a very specific definition of land, which land can be turned into through irrigation and other basic technologies. It's not a sort of fixed quality metric.

I'm not really following what point you're trying to make with the example cities. People move to urban areas for economic opportunities. It's thanks to the internet that deurbanization is becoming a more viable reality for more people, vaguely analogous to how vehicles enabled it at a different time in the past. Saudi Arabia existed before oil, so to speak, and will exist afterwards. Part of the reason you find them invested in basically everything stateside, to the chagrin of many, is because they're working to create a more sustainable economy. The nice thing about countries under defacto dictatorship type rules is the ability to carry out longer-term plans, even if they may sometimes be misguided. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia

> I don't think you're discussing this in good faith. 134m^2 is well over 4 acres of land for a single person!

134m is a distance you can walk in a minute and a half. And you're already in somebody elses land. The only way you can present this as some sort of large plot of land is if you take some already overpopulated suburban area as a reference point where houses are lined up like boxes right next to another. And that's your only point of reference and you can't even fathom anything else.

Subtracting the uninhabitable land from it, you basically get less than a mere hectare.

Accusing others of acting in bad faith is game everyone can play.

And it's very easy to do so since you're arguing how easily deserts, oceans or permafrost are habitable "if you really want to" (its just basic technology!) - when in truth it's achieved by pissing away one-time generational oil money to make it rain in the middle of the desert - no less.

Party which will most likely wrap up with mass starvation (globally) when the pumps run dry (47 more years of this! give or take!)

No sane person arguing in good faith would make arguments like this:

"Well, planet isn't overpopulated, there's still a lot of room in the desert! oh, you can inhabit the oceans and permafrsot too! You could live on top of the Himalayas (you don't, but you could!) Oh, the sky is the limit! Oh, yes!"

You aren't actually interested in truth, you're simply really, really want to and are programmed to multiply, and are working backwards (rationalizing) how actually planet isn't at all overpopulated or resource constrained, etc. That's what's actually happening. It's textbook.

Your ever-widening definition of "uninhabitable" includes vast areas of the world that are already habitated by millions, if not billions, of people. That is arguing in bad faith. And you're trying to argue that having more than a football field squared, for every person to live in - all by their selves, is a 'small parcel.' That is arguing in bad faith. And now you're adding child-like strawmen on top, which is once again - arguing in bad faith.

And I still have no idea why you think oil running out has any role in your argument at all. I completely agree it'll run out eventually, possibly within our lifetimes. It's unlikely to lead to anything particularly catastrophic as once reserves do start declining (keep in mind proven reserves have been increasing faster than production for decades), the price of oil will steadily rise, and it'll create some solid economic incentives to comfortably transition to other energy sources.

Should Antarctica be counted as habitable then?

It constitutes something to the tune of 9% of Earths land mass.

And it's already inhabited by millions if not billions of people? Really? Is Sahara-Desert habitable also?

Not the tiny parcels next to an Oasis, not people that live next to Nile.

But actual-effin-desert habitable? And billions live there - right chock in the middle of desert?

Interesting, very interesting indeed!

> And I still have no idea why you think oil running out has any role in your argument at all.

Oddly enough, your argument that earth isn't overpopulated, because there's still "a lot of room left in the desert, look at Saudis, UAE, Quatar!" hinges on Oil!

Your proof that deserts are habitable is basically - taking Saudis, UAE, Qatar - as an example.

Which is true, if you have infinite-money-hack, you abso-effin-lutely can man make it rain in the middle of desert (or middle of the ocean on a megayacht), ACs, green-patios, lambos, pools, artificial islands, giga-turbo-mega-towers and the most opulent displays of wealth!

Except it's not infinite money hack at all. It's very much 47years of partying left type of finite.

> And now you're adding child-like strawmen on top, which is once again - arguing in bad faith.

Dude, your whole opening statement was how few people on earth there are or how large the earth is by comparing it to a mass grave.

Your whole argumentation is childish-wishfull thinking or an indoctrinated adult who just isn't very bright, saying you're arguing in bad faith would be putting it very kindly.

That being said, this conversation is obviously over.

"Yet more than one billion people, one-sixth of the Earth's population, live in desert regions." [1] Add in the extreme drylands and you're up to more than 2 billion. This was just as true prior to oil, and will be just as true afterwards.

You've yet to manage to compose anything like an argument and are left trying to reduce multiple football fields of space for every person on this planet down to something that might be considered small. But the reality is you can't, because it's fundamentally false. If we started this discussion without the context of what has already transpired and I asked you what you thought a 'small' lot of land would be for each person, it's obviously not going to be 4 acres, nor anywhere even remotely close to that size.

So all you're left with is bad faith arguments, child like ad hominem, strawmen, and essentially an ongoing displays of argumentative fallacies, which is what people resort to when they have an argument they want to make, but are unable to do so on a factual or logical basis.

[1] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/deser...