Population Density

The other night as I was driving home, I was listening to George Noory's Coast-to-Coast show on KVI.  It's an odd show that talks about aliens, conspiracy theories, ghosts, and all kinds of other stuff that I mostly think is ridiculous but I can't help but listen to when I happen to be in the car at that time.  He had on a guy that was talking about a bunch of things that would happen if the events described in the Biblical Revelations ever happened.  One of the things he said is, "God plans to dry up all the oceans, because that's the only way you could fit everyone that ever lived back on the planet."

 

That got me thinking, since I had once seen a documentary that mentioned roughly 1 in 10 humans that ever lived were still alive.  When Philip Jose Farmer wrote the Riverworld series, he'd apparently heard the same statistic, as Riverworld was populated with everyone who ever lived (plus a few aliens who were on the planet during a final nuclear holocaust) and that came to about 65 billion people.

 

When I think about how I spent about five hours hiking in a canyon alone without seeing anyone else except for in helicopters and on boats, the idea you'd have to dry up the oceans to fit every one seems like an overestimate of how many people there really are.  If you were walking at rush hour in New York, I could see how you might believe it, but the land area's just so little.

 

So, I did some research.

 

I found this article: http://www.prb.org/Content/ContentGroups/PTarticle/0ct-Dec02/How_Many_People_Have_Ever_Lived_on_Earth_.htm  Since I saw this referenced in a few other articles and the article seemed pretty sensible and cautious about how semi-scientific it is, it seems like a reasonable place to take as a baseline for total human population ever.  The author, Carl Haub, puts the total number at a little over 106 billion people, or some 17 times today's population.

 

This article at about.com: http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa012599.htm puts the world's population density, excluding Antarctica from consideration as land space because of it's zero population density, at about 114 people per square mile.

 

That means that putting everyone that ever lived back on earth at once would generate a population density of about 1938 people per square mile.  Turning to the Census Bureau's numbers here: http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027.html we find that this is roughly comparable to the population density in 1990 of Indianapolis, IN (2000 per square mile), more that twice that of Jacksonville, FL (800), but less than a tenth of New York, NY (23,700).

 

While that would mean Indianapolis' population density over the entire planet, including some pretty inhospitable areas, we're talking mostly previously deceased people who have been resurrected and should probably be able to take it, and that's really not that crowded.  Thank God, He won't have to dry up the oceans if He ends the world anytime soon!