Party in Jacksonville

I’d intended to attach this to the previous post, but forgot about it at the time, and it’s now grown well beyond the original scope, so it’s getting its own post.

The arguments about the amount of incident sunlight on the planet (grossly overexaggerating what’s actually recoverable) are suspiciously similar to the arguments you occasionally hear against overpopulation to the effect that the entire world population could fit within the city limits of Jacksonville, Florida.

Jacksonville, at 757.7 square miles, is the second largest city in the US by land area, which most people would never guess, so we start off with a misdirection.

At a world population of 6.7 billion people, that gives everyone just over 3 square feet of living space. Not even enough to sit comfortably, let alone lie down.

If we were to expand that out to the entire state of Florida (including the Everglades, which aren’t really viable living area, but for the sake of argument), that still would give people about 244 square feet each – not quite 16 feet square, and still not enough space for anyone to actually voluntarily occupy for any length of time, and probably on the same order as most jail cells.

And I do recognize that these estimates can be increased by vertical stacking – ie, apartments and such, but that still doesn’t solve the root problems (aside from a slight lessening of the claustrophobia).

The real problem with any of these estimates is that they don’t include food production, waste disposal, air recycling, or any of the other ancillary functions that are necessary to support life, let alone business, industry, power, transportation, and all of the other ancillary functions that are necessary to support civilization.

Cramming many people into a small space means that more resources have to be moved farther, which inherently increases the energy needed to transport them (until we develop some kind of clean, cheap, easy teleportation). That’s an inefficient use of resources; it’s much more efficient to have more people more dispersed, closer to their resource base, to decrease costs of transportation, of food in particular, since it’s so fundamental, and can’t just be piped through conduits like water and petroleum.

That means that to reduce the amount of energy (read: oil) required to move food, people need to decentralize, and ideally even grow their own, in small self-contained communities, if not isolated households. The less resources that need to be imported from any significant distance, the richer that community will be.

Which then begs the question of sneakers, coffee, chocolate, soda, hairspray, jewelry, pharmaceuticals, home exercise equipment, massage chairs, air purifiers, sandwich makers, video game systems, computers, waterproof digital camcorders, iPod earphone charms, banana protectors, and all the other silly crap that modern consumeristic society has convinced you that you need to have.

Huston Smith, professor of philosophy and religious studies, said, “You can never get enough of what you do not really want.” We keep blowing money on material crap because we think it’ll make us feel better, but it never does, so we keep buying, continuously chasing the high, and it never occurs to anyone that maybe they’re on the wrong track to begin with. What people are really looking for is a personal connection, a sense of belonging, a community, some true social security (as opposed to the bullshit that the government tries to feed you), to placate the rampant feelings of insecurity.

And now I’ve wandered kinda far afield, to something that really deserves its own post, and which I’ll come back to another time.