Re: RE: Jeep Liberty

From: jon@dakota-truck.net
Date: Sat Jan 20 2007 - 09:20:56 EST


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.

    I have heard this said before also; I don't know if I read it
somewhere or heard it from somebody or what, but whichever it was,
I remember it being that each person was given 1,000 square feet,
as opposed to an acre. If you run the numbers on that basis, there
is indeed enough room with extra to spare. (If the land in Texas
were divided equally between 6 billion people, each one would have
about 1200 square feet.)

  I don't think the illustration was intended to mean that you
could actually set up a functioning living area this way, since
you'd need roads and stuff too, its merely a way to try to illustrate
the amount of land mass available on the earth in comparison to the
number of people - to combat the idea that the earth is overcrowded
I suppose. I have a feeling that the people who think the earth
is overcrowded are those same people who tend to jam themselves all
together in those wretched things called "cities". :-) Flying out
to the national DML meet last summer, I was struck more than once by
the vast amount of land we have here in the US alone.

  Anyhoo, I don't know anything about P.J. O'Rourke; I haven't
read any of his books, and so I'm not even sure if he was the
one who first came up with the illustration, but since I had
heard it before myself, I figured I'd chime in. There was no
error in your calculations as the illustration was posed, but
I think Rascal accidentally substituted 1 acre for 1,000 square
feet. If you check the numbers at 1,000 square feet I think
you'll find that the illustration rings true.

-- 
                                          -Jon-

.- Jon Steiger -- jon@dakota-truck.net or jon@jonsteiger.com -. | '96 Kolb Firefly, '96 Suzuki Intruder, Miscellaneous Mopars | `-------------------------------- http://www.jonsteiger.com --'



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