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let's do it! let's all get our butts to SC and starve to death, run out of water, and strangle each other for a moment's peace.
I heard it was the island of Maui. Wouldn't you really rather stand around on Maui?
They would need to be packed like sardines to fit on Maui
Every now and then some little thing comes out that makes the human population look small despite being 7 billion people.
In the statement you just made, there would be a lot of room to spare. It does not take a lot of mathematical literacy, especially with the use of a calculator, to do the math.
Let's say we stick with Imperial measurements, since that is the way land area is usually expressed in USA locations. Then just do some educated guesswork and hit some calculator keys.
The maximum width of American Airlines' economy class seats is 18.3 inches. Let us be generous and allow a little more room than that, like 2 feet, and let that be the width allowed each person. Front to back is tricky, but for a little room to breathe let's allow 3 feet. It would still be quite croweded.
Now multiply 2x3 to get 6 square feet per person. Then see how many persons can fit in a square mile. 5280 x 5280 is the number of feet in a square mile, or 27,848,400. 27,848,400 / 6 = 4,646,400 persons could fit in a square mile, shoulder to shoulder, with a little room to wiggle and breathe.
The world's population has surpassed 7 billion. 7,000,000,000 / 4,646/400 = 1,507 square miles. That is what would be needed to fit all the world's people shoulder to shoulder. You can use other guesstimates for the various arguments and land somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 square miles, but 1,507 will do for now.
Google-search "land area south carolina". It is 32,020 square miles, so in actuality the shoulder-to-shoulder population of the world would fit in South Carolina nearly 20 times over. South Carolina is actually way oversized to hold the tightly packed population of the world.
Next, google some other various articles about where they would all fit if shoulder to shoulder. That is, go to Google, search "population of the world shoulder to shoulder". Los Angeles or Greater Los Angeles gets a few mentions. Los Angeles is just over 500 square miles, so the city would be too small unless you packed them suffocatingly. Greater Los Angeles is over 4000 square miles, so the world's people would pack in there a little more comfortably.
There are several things that these hypothetical things ignore. People need to eat. They need to lay down and sleep. They need water to drink. They need basic sanitation, or room for their excrement to rot while it stays out of the water supply.
Sustenance in the form of food alone, for an American-style diet (which, contrary to the most simpleminded application of "sustainability", actually feeds MORE people per acre than does a vegetarian one), is about 1 acre per person.
http://www.farmlandlp.com/2012/01/one-acre-feeds-a-person/
If you extend that to the whole world, that would be 7 billion acres or 11 million square miles of land that could be committed to crops or pasture. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says there is nearly 14 million square miles of arable land, or land that can be plowed, which represents crop-suitable land. Additional land, such as for pasture, can also be committed to the food supply. Consumption of bush meat in Africa, for all its health issues, exploits non-agricultural land for food. Therefore it makes sense that everyone is fed at the current population level.
From the time of Malthus, and possibly long before, simple-minded people have looked at the current food and land supply and sounded the alarm that near-term or long-term population trends will outstrip the food supply. What actually happens is that land use changes, often with more land brought into the food supply. Technology increases yields per acre. For example, the Green Revolution of the 1970s, along with some market-oriented agricultural policy reforms and crop diversification, brought southern Asia out of repeated famines. Sea-bound places such a Japan have long looked to the sea as a major source of food.
Using a principle of one square metre per person:
7.5 billion people = 7.5 billion square metres.
South Carolina has an area of around 83 billion square meters
Ranked shoulder to shoulder with ten metres between ranks for exercise and there you go, almost full!
