Felt like having a little math fun today.

One of the other 'scares' that I have heard along with the climate change scare is the one that says humans will either overpopulate the earth or have already done so.

It's often interesting to question by what metric the people making these claims are using to judge overpopulation. I am going to debunk one possible metric right now: land area.

This is actually really simple to do. First we need the approximate population of the earth. A quick google search tells me that the estimated population of the earth in 2020 was 7.8 billion. For the purposes of my math lets just round that up to 8 billion even.

Now, let's decide how much land area we will allot per person. Lets go with 900 sq ft per person. And yes, I chose this number for a reason that will become clear by the end of this.

So, to determine the total land area required for 8 billion people to have 900 sq ft each, we simple multiply 900 sq ft by 8 billion. The result of this is a LARGE number: 7,200,000,000,000 sq ft. (7.2 trillion sq ft)

So, what can we compare this number to? Well, why don't we compare it to the land area of Texas?

According to Wikipedia, the total land area of Texas is 261,231.71 sq mi., which is 7,282,722,100,000 sq ft.

So, if every man, women and child was allotted 900 sq ft of land area, we could fit all 8 billion people into the land area of Texas with room to spare.

Yeah, humans are nowhere near close to running out of land area due to population growth.

More pressing is the matter of resources, mainly food and fresh water. While we hear a lot about people starving in various countries, I also know that many developed countries around the world throw out food that is 'past it's sell by date' at grocery stores. Food that could possibly be made available to those in need. Plus, as Mike has shown time and again, crop yields around the world have been booming in recent years.

That does leave the issue of access to fresh drinking water. To be honest I don't have any ideas for this. Desalination plants are an option but they are expensive to build and operate.

Anyway, just thought I would have a little fun with numbers today and debunk another 'scare argument'.