As of March 2016, the number of humans alive in the world is at $7.4 billion people.
But what if every single last one of us, everybody watching
this article, including
you, all lived together
in the same city?
How big or small would
this city look like?
And how close together
would we all have to live?
Let's pause and think for
a moment about where we all
currently live.
60% of us live in Asia,
while 16% live in Africa,
10% in Europe, 8% in North
America, 5.5% in South America,
just 0.5% in Australia and
Oceania, and too little people
to even register on the
scale in Antarctica.
So first off, we would have
to agree on which continent,
or island, we would migrate
everybody in the world to.
50.5% of everybody in the world
currently lives in a city,
so we would have to convince
the other 49.5% of people
to come and join us.
So now assuming that we have
gathered everybody together
in the same place
to create our city,
let's look at some
real life examples
to see what living
so close together
might actually look like.
Singapore is the most densely
populated country in the world
right now.
Five million 399,000 people
live in the small country
of just 710 square kilometers.
That means that, for every
square kilometer in size
within the country, there
are 7,605 people living out
their lives on average.
But Singapore is a country
the size of a city,
and there are much more densely
populated cities than that
already in the world.
For reference, downtown
Manhattan in New York City
has a population
density of 26,939 people
every square kilometer.
That's a lot of people
very close together,
but we're just
scratching the surface.
The densest city
in the world right
now is Manila, in
the Philippines,
where you will find 41,515
people every square kilometer.
But Manila's total
population is relatively low,
at just 1,780,000 people.
The density of people
is just so high
because they all live together
in such a small space.
The biggest
concentration of people
in one place
anywhere in the world
can be found here in Japan,
the Tokyo metro area, home
to 36,923,000 people.
To put into perspective
just how enormous Tokyo is,
I'm going to show
you two examples
to illustrate the point.
First, this is an image
of the United Kingdom
with the area of
the greater London
metro highlighted in red.
And if you think
that looks big, this
is the greater Tokyo metro
area highlighted in blue.
It's truly gargantuan.
But onto the second example.
This is an image taken
of downtown Tokyo.
But if we zoomed
out further to here,
then the exact
location of downtown
grows much harder to find.
Let's trade out this
photo for a new one,
which shows the true size of
Tokyo as seen from the sky.
In this one photo that
you're looking at,
lives nearly the same
population as all of Australia,
New Zealand, and Oceania
combined, or about 0.5%
of everybody in the
world, all in one city.
But we still have the other
95.5% of the human population
to think about.
And we can still fit people
into a much smaller space.
Right now, in 2016, the
highest concentration
of people living in a
smaller place than a city
is probably within the
city of Mumbai, India.
Located within the
city is a slum called
Dharavi, which is an area just
2.17 square kilometers in size.
If we think about that
size and compare it
to Central Park
in New York City,
the Dharavi slum would only
take up 64% of the same size,
or not even 2/3 of the area.
And living in that
cramped tiny space
or anywhere between 700,000
to 1 million people.
Averaging out those numbers,
we get 391,705 people
every square kilometer.
Now this number here
is the highest number
of people in the
world today that
live in a square kilometer.
As recently as the
1980s, however, there
was a place that was somehow
even more frighteningly
claustrophobic.
The most densely populated
place known in history
was the Kowloon
Walled City, which
was located here in Hong Kong.
To get some kind of
idea of what we're
going to be talking
about, this image
is an aerial view of
the city from 1987.
You can kind of get
some scale of it
by looking at the basketball
courts over here on the right,
or the trucks over
here on the left.
But the overall total
area of these buildings
is just 0.26 square kilometers.
Another way to possibly
imagine how tiny that really is
is this way.
Here are three American
football fields side by side.
The Kowloon Walled City
would be just a little
bigger than them put together.
And 33,000 people were
living in that tiny space.
Meaning that, if we
stretched that out
to a full square kilometer,
the population density
would be 1.2 million people.
Living that close together would
look something like this image,
and this number is
the absolute limit
that we've ever seen in the
real world of how many people
can live together in
such a small area.
So now let's visualize how big
our hypothetical global city
would have to be according
to the different population
densities that we
have been discussing.
First, let's imagine something
a little comfortable.
Let's take the city of
New Orleans in Louisiana,
whose population
density is about 784
people per square kilometer.
On that scale our
global city would
be about the same size as
roughly the continental United
States.
If we moved onto the density
of say, Austin, Texas,
we would be looking
at a city that
is about the size of Australia,
with room left to spare.
But we want to get
even smaller than that.
So we're going to try fitting
everybody into the same density
as Chicago next.
On that scale, our city would
be about the same size as Iran.
But let's get even smaller.
At the density of Singapore, we
could fit the entire human race
into just the states of Texas,
Oklahoma, and Louisiana--
already considerably smaller
than at the New Orleans
density.
But we're going to keep
on getting even smaller.
At the density of
Manhattan, we would
be looking at a city about
the size of Ecuador, here
in South America.
And if we had a city with the
same density we see in Manila,
then everybody in
the world would
fit inside the US
state of Missouri.
But to get even more
frightening and claustrophobic
our global city with the same
density seen within the Dharavi
slum in Mumbai would be about
the same size as New Jersey.
And finally, at about the
absolute real world limit,
if we built our global city
with the same population density
as Kowloon Walled City, we
would fit every single person
in the world into an area about
the same size as Palestine,
which itself is only about half
the size of the Tokyo metro
area.
Let's put all of
these different sizes
in a row to get possibly
the best visualization.
First, we have a city with the
same density of New Orleans,
followed by Austin, Chicago,
Singapore, Manhattan,
Manila, the Dharavi
slum, and finally
the Kowloon Walled City.
Whichever way you look
at it, living together
in the same city
would be both bizarre
and leave an enormous amount of empty space left in the world.
Tell us your opinions in the comments?
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