On Sat, 20 Jan 2007 07:23:58 -0500, Jason Bleazard <dml@bleazard.net>
wrote:
>
> Rick Barnes wrote:
>> Good points all...here is a trivia fact,...you could take every human on
>> earth and give them one acre of land and they could everyone live within
>> just the state of Texas, and Texas would still have room. Yeah, I
>> didn't
>> believe it either till I looked it up. That was in one of P.J.
>> O'Rourke's
>> books.
>
> Not to be a nit-picking jerk, but where did you look that up? I just
> checked Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas) and it says the
> land area of Texas is 268,581 square miles. I'll grant that Wikipedia
> is not the ultimate source for accurate facts, but they usually get the
> basic stuff right. However, the US Census Bureau says Texas only has
> 261,797 square miles
> (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48000.html). Either someone
> has inflated the numbers in Wikipedia, or the US Government is trying to
> grab some land back and hoping nobody will notice.
>
> We'll go with the larger number. There are 640 acres in one square
> mile, so Texas would have 268,581 * 640, or 171,891,840 acres (a bit
> under 172 million). You'd need 35 Texases to hold 6 billion people if
> each one had a full acre. Texas is big, but I don't think it's nearly
> as big as Texans think it is :-).
>
> If I've messed up the calculation somehow, kindly point out my error. I
> haven't had any caffeine yet, so all bets are off.
HAH!. I didn't even bother to check myself. But since you pointed that out
I went to find out the total area of the US. Turns out it's only 2.3
billion acres. So that would mean the US is short 2.7 billion acres to
hold the entore world population on 1 acre per person. Who is PJ O'rourke
and what is his book about anyway?
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