We are not running low on "open space" at all. The habitable area of the planet is vast.

Many of the emigrants of the 1800s ended up settling "new" land in the US. But there's vast territories around the world that are extremely inexpensive. Since the 1800s we have grown more dependent on the services provided by the state in urban areas.

In the 1800s you could go somewhere, kick out the natives and declare yourself the owner of the land. I don't think that's possible anymore. At least not in most habitable zones. Where in particular do you recommend people should go?

They left much of the areas they slaughtered the natives for, the midwest is still incredibly empty. Five states with eleven people per square mile or less, including Alaska. Plenty of space.

The "empty" midwest is all owned, though. $4000/acre, maybe? That's not much if you are trying to buy land to build a house. It's a lot if you're trying to acquire 1000 acres for a farm, though.

Alaska is largely government owned. It's empty, but that doesn't mean that you can take a chunk of land there.

Can you go the Midwest somewhere and live off the land? I doubt it.

You can, but you'll be dirt poor. Back when "dirt poor" was normal, and luxuries like "bathing every day" or "carpet" were uncommon, being dirt poor seemed acceptable. Now most people won't accept that as a lifestyle.

To all the empty land in central Iceland; Sweden is also not very dense.

Although those places are not very conductive to farming...

You are legally prohibited from building anything above 500m in Iceland, which is most of the central interior.

The problem isn't the abundance or lack of open space, it's the fact that the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive.

This. There's a reason that communist revolutions were fueled by a desire for bread, peace, and land. In the start of the 20th century, you could make a decent living if you owned nothing but the land you lived on.

Nowadays, you really can't.

I wonder what happens if we get robots that can provide a complete living off some plot of land. Like agriculture, energy and whatever you need. So in theory you could live autonomously then.

Somehow I think the owning class will come up with ways to make this illegal or impossible.

Why would robots make a difference? Currently, you can't really live off of a plot of land alone, but you'll be living quite well if you also own a bunch of high tech machinery to farm it efficiently. For a well-off Ferrari-owning farmer, the Ferrari is likely not among the most expensive vehicles he owns, the tractors/combines/whatever cost the big bucks.

That's what the poster above meant by "the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive", and owning these robots would be the massive amount of capital; you'd be able to sustain yourself because (and if) you'd have a lot of very expensive robots, not because you just had some land; and you'd also be able to sustain yourself by just investing the value of these robots.

I think that it was not so much about open space, as an opportunity to establish an economic independence. The likes of which the equivalents only exist in different forms today - much akin to dreams of startups today.

The idea that there was open space in the Americas before the Europeans came is a myth. It neglects the inconvenient fact that the native Americans were already here.

The indigenous population of the Americas was absolutely destroyed by Old World diseases. This happened mostly by accident (although sometimes done intentionally) but was probably near inevitable once first contact was made. (In many places it out-paced the actual extent of direct European contact as indigenous people traveled.)

So there WAS vast expanses available by that time, even without intentional genocide (which also happened).

Disease killed a lot of the native population, maybe even decimated, but it did not leave the USA a vast open space. Otherwise the US Army would not have had almost continuous warfare from the conclusion of the Revolution War to the surrender of Geronimo (minus the Civil War) to displace the natives to make room for American settlers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

A large percentage of the land battles of the War of 1812 were fought between the US and natives because the US wanted the land of the natives to become open space so the natives allied themselves with Britain.

Lewis and Clark would not have survived or even made it to the coast if they had not had help from most of the tribes they met along the way. Of course we displaced all of the natives they met eventually.

I just read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me so that may bias my opinion.

So why settlers spent so many bullets to kill people who were already dying by nobody else's fault? And if there was so much open space in America, why Europeans happened to locate exactly in the "very few" places where natives lived? Strange, indeed.

1. Because the vast majority of them already died from smallpox well before Manifest Destiny.

2. There is still a huge amount of open space in America. In 1800, there were only 5 million citizens, compared to 323 million today.

3. Natives lived all over the continent. Europeans landed where the ocean ended.

In the specific year you state was four years before Lewis and Clark started their expedition. They would not have survived if they did not have help from most of the natives they met along the way, one of the main objectives was to document all the natives that lived there. That would have been kind of weird goal if it was all open space.

Sorry, by open space, I meant sparsely populated, not pasture land.

re point one the __lowest__ plausible percentage of North America and South Americans that died of disease before ever hearing a rumor of it source is 90% and has a fair chance of being higher, the disease front traveled as quickly as the natives, refuges from one dying village to the next, or people coming to investigate why no body has visited from the next community over in a while. The deliberate atrocities later were just a mop up action in the larger picture.

I've read estimates of smallpox outbreak at 20-50% mortality across the continent. Some areas in New England are estimated to have a 96% mortality rate. Pretty crazy.