In other words, the planet is huge, seventy percent of it is uninhabitable, and of the remaining 30 percent that is land area the vast majority of it is uninhabited by humans. Go drive through South Dakota some time. Or Nevada. Or the steppes of Mongolia. When you get back, then tell me the planet is overcrowded.macdoc wrote:
If you took every human being on Earth and put them in the Grand Canyon, they wouldn't even begin to fill it up. The seven billion-strong lot of us would make a pretty formidable pile, sure, but we'd get nowhere close to an overflow. At least, not according to this 'species portrait' put together by VSauce and recently shared far and wide across the blogland.
The visualization proved so popular because it turns our working conception of the size and scope of humanity on its head—we are a vast and multiplying species; we blanket the entire planet with our cities and settlements. Jesus Diaz notes that "Even if you took all of humanity across all the ages—an estimated 106 billion—the piles—about 15 of these—wouldn't cover the Grand Canyon. Not even a significant fraction."
It's not. Human occupation of any impact at all is severely limited and restricted to relatively small areas planet-wide. A very small number of them relatively speaking. A small enough number that it would be very easy and quite effective to simply sterilize those few dozen major population centers by dusting them with properly targeted biological and chemical weapons and killing off 80 to 90 percent of the human population without really affecting outlying areas at all, much less the entirety of the ecosystem.
I say we start with England, which is infested and polluted beyond redemption and will make a great example of how easy it will be to wipe out Paris, Amsterdam, Moscow, New York, LA, Chicago, Hong Kong, Bejing, Sidney, Christchurch, Bombay, Saigon, Tokyo, etc.
Then you jackasses will quit bitching about global warming. I suspect that's the ONLY way we'll get you to stop bitching.
