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You've probably heard that the earth cannot sustain many more people, that it's getting too crowded, blah blah blah. Well, let's see
if we can't just get that myth straightened around.
Understand this: All the people living on earth, and all those for many years to come could live 2 to a house (1500 square feet)
within the boundaries of the state of Texas. The rest of the world could be used for farming! The math is not difficult.
Currently (December 13, 2009) there are just a few million people short of 6.9 billion people living on earth. (6,803,196,814 Today)
For purposes of our calculations, let's be conservative and round some numbers down for ease of calculation (allowing unused space for
many small outdoor green areas).
Texas has an area of 261,797 square miles (USGS). We'll call that 261,000 (less than it actually has).
A Square mile has 27,878,400 square feet (5280 x 5280) We'll call that 27,000,000 (almost a million less than actual figure).
Multiplying those two figures 261 x 27 plus the 9 zeros gives Texas an area of 7,047,000,000,000 square feet.
Divide that number by 1500 square feet for each home needed and you get 4,698,000,000 homes needed for our project.
At 2 people to a 1500 square foot home (a very comfortable size for 2 persons) Texas could accommodate 9.396 billion people, a
number not to be reached for many years to come.
All that is with single story homes, but doesn't allow for roadways. Well, if you visit China, you'll see some beautiful tall housing
complexes. In the same manner many people could be housed in such structures in our Texan Utopia, opening space for above ground
high speed travelways. Let's think a little outside the box. Keeping in mind that high speed rail travel is currently available which
travel 200+ miles per hour, you can see that we could build a few areas reachable on a daily commute, say, every hundred miles or so
across the farm belt. Let's stay where the weather is fairly moderate...reducing the need for a lot of heating energy.
With some creative architecture and public works projects, utilities could all be underground, or perhaps even run overhead, as
could an extensive grid of public transportation.
Yeah, all this is a bit pie-in-the-sky, but the whole idea of this exercise is simply to prove that there really is plenty of space
on the water planet for many more people than we can yet imagine, and that it would take a total land area/square footage--less than
that of the size of Texas! Take a look at a world globe and see just how little of the world's land area that actually takes up!
Let's hope we use our world and its resources more wisely in the future than we have in the past.
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