| But it's not like you get that automatically just by having a giant mass of people. There needs to be a certain life-style and culture to create those things. What density of humans is ideal for that? The calculation shouldn't just be, "what's the maximum # of people we can physically support on earth?" It should be, what's a nice number that makes life pleasant and fulfilling and leaves time for leisure? And while the earth is very large, the number of places that are truly special is much smaller. For example, if you look over the whole earth, what fraction of it is at the level of, say, the San Francisco Bay Area, for sheer natural beauty and enjoyability of surroundings? A small fraction indeed, I would say! (Of course there is some room for personal preference in here; maybe you're a desert person or whatever. But though squishly defined, the point still stands.) Today, it's expensive and stressful to live in the Bay Area, because of overcrowding. But look back at say the middle of the 20th century -- it was still an amazing, beautiful place, but it was much less crowded and much less expensive! This provided fertile ground for interesting artistic and cultural movements, like the beats & their poetry & the hippies & their music. Now it's much harder to have those kind of cultural and artistic movements in SF, because just basic physical survival is much more of a struggle. |