> I cannot imagine living in a population density of of 742 people per mi² (287 per Km²).

That's a significantly lower than here in Belgium (376/km², and 490/km² here in Flanders).

I'm not sure which country you live in, but although I would absolutely move back home (at about 100/km²) if I could, it's not the urban hell you seem to imagine.

Only part of Pakistan is habitable. Pakistan has large inhabitable areas. Including three huge mountain rages: Himalaya, the Karakoram and the Hindukush. In these areas people live only in narrow valleys next to river. (when the the river floods, they are screwed).

This is the way people have always lived (except for very modern times)

I think they mean to say that comparing the Pakistani figures (which include low population mountains and deserts) to Belgium (which is pretty much entirely arable and flat as a pancake) is a bit silly.

Human societies have always crowded riverbanks. Until very recent times.

Both statements can be true at the same time

* this is a common pattern of settlement

* the different geographies of two countries make a very simple (population / land area) density figure misleading, because Belgium is nearly 100% riverbank or floodplain and Pakistan is not

This is such a known problem that the US Census already has a different density measurement method, population-weighted density: https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

Although Belgium certainly isn't as rugged as Pakistan, it's far from flat and especially in Wallonia population is very concentrated along one valley (the sillon Sambre et Meuse):

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kobe-Boussauw/publicati...

As a result, the region has a population density of 240/km² (only slightly less than Pakistan) but about 2/3rds of the population is in this valley representing 1/16th of the area of Wallonia. Flanders is mostly flat and more evenly settled.

This is actually more similar than I expected to the population distribution in Pakistan, with Punjab being a flat plain with an evenly distributed population, and the rest of the country being mostly settled along one river. By the way, Belgium also suffered a large flooding event last year in this valley, although nowhere near as deadly as what is happening in Pakistan.

*uninhabitable

I suppose the size of the territory and landscape is what makes all the difference.

Macau is amazingly densely populated, but at the same time the same density as Paris, but 1/3 of the size. It's an hour walk from one end to the other according to Google Maps.

India on the other hand is just 10% denser than Belgium, but doesn't feel like that when you look at photos of its cities and trains loaded with people.

It's more about designing good systems. Belgium is a developed country with excellent infrastructure whereas India is a developing country with poor infrastructure

322/km² in the UK

[0] Ourworldindata.org

Within the UK the distribution is far from uniform as well:

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/land-cover-atlas-uk-1.74...

e.g. More land is peat bogs than is built up.

521/km^2 here to your north in Holland...

>>I cannot imagine living in a population density of of 742 people per mi² (287 per Km²).

Can't tell from your comment - do you think that is higher-density or lower-density compared to where you are now?

That is high compared to the USA as a whole, but 742/sq mile is low compared to ~50 other countries, and is lower than many states in the USA - i.e. DC, MA, NJ and CT.

For context, Montreal is about 4,517 people per km², and New York is about 11,000.

I would guess that your number for Pakistan isn't really representative though: it's got dense cities and vast open spaces too.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I live out in the country and enjoy the quiet of nature. Seems like it would be hard to have a lot of wildlife, trees, and space in an area where it's 287 per Km^2. I'm not judging btw. It's just not my cup of tea. I live on 5000 M^2 and prefer to have my space.

I'm sure that will need to go sometime in the future but we still have plenty of space in the US to fill so I'm hoping it takes some time. lol

same here - where I live (my town) density is 53 ppl/sq mi - thats what I like - but I also happen to live in a state that has a much more dense population in other areas (one of the top 5 most dense states) - so I live in a dense state, but you wouldn't know it if you looked around the town I actually live.

> Can't tell from your comment - do you think that is higher-density or lower-density compared to where you are now?

Ah. I live in California, population density 254 per mi², so about a third. California is also 2 times smaller than Pakistan - since a lot of California is inhabitable (contrast with Pakistan) and the surrounding areas easily accessible, it translates to a lot of "breathing room", even if you live in a densely populated county like San Francisco or Los Angeles.

> That is high compared to the USA as a whole, but 742/sq mile is low compared to ~50 other countries.

Made me look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

It's really easy to forget how incredibly large a mile is. A single square mile is just under 28 million square feet. A population density of 742/sq mile means each person would have about 37,000 square feet to themselves. Not exactly a struggle for leg room.

Large scale population densities don't tell you anything, due to the fact that we have this habit of trying to fit as many of ourselves into the smallest places possible. San Francisco city, for instance, has a population density of 18,634/square mile. And while that's relatively dense it's dwarfed by places like Manila (Philippines) with a density > 111,000 per square mile. And if you want to go full on crazy there was Kowloon Walled City [1] in Hong Kong which had a population density in excess of 5,000,000 per square mile! That number's a bit misleading due to verticality, but not by much! That's probably the most densely packed area of a sizable population that there has ever been, and by a pretty wide margin.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

Amusingly, Trantor -- the Galactic Capital World in Asimov's Foundation series, a world covered by one giant city, so populous it was -- only works out to around 534/sq mile.

California is kind of unusual in that it consists almost exclusively of places that are either extremely dense or extremely empty [1]. Compare that e.g. to Germany [2], with 2.4 times the average population density but much more evenly spread out.

Pakistan is a bit of a mix of both: three quarters are pretty empty, but the population is spread somewhat evenly over the rest [3]

1: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/California-population-de...

2: https://i.redd.it/oz7m4lfy37b51.png

3: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8e/fb/11/8efb11c1d9cc698ddca2...

This is very important - local population density matters much more than some sort of "average" - if California ordered their army into Nevada and added it to their territory, the population density would drop from about 253 to about 154.

But nothing at all has changed!

Population density is only one aspect of "what it feels like to live somewhere" - local density, land usage, etc all play into it.

In Mountain View, California (~Silicon Valley) the density is 6,700/sq mi.

what's your county population density? http://www.usa.com/rank/california-state--population-density...

watching some extremely poor guy's mud hut get washed away in a flood made more likely by all my carbon emissions over my whole life: Wow. According to wikipedia the country this guy lives in is more densely populated than I'd want to live in.

It's boringly dystopian reading the comments in these threads. Just the most banal commentary on something so severe and something involving so much collective responsibility.

I think we are too many people on earth, with each of us with an expanding carbon footprint. Including me. With a third of Pakistan now flooded and an expanding population all wanting a better life, it is pretty sad and I have tons of empathy.

I have worked in the environmental advocacy community for a long time. There is a reason this talking point is radioactive and never talked about. You have the environmental footprint of many, many Pakistanis. The moment you start talking in the terms of the population being already too high or the increasing footprint of people from poor nations being a problem, the obvious solutions become terrifying. And if you read through your first comment, I think you will see why. It’s always “too many of them,” not “too many of us.”

And I’m not even saying that’s incorrect, just that there is a reason it’s not talked about.

But the majority of the world population would choose to have the lifestyle and environmental footprint of middle-class Americans if they had that option.

If we want to allow continued population growth, we are saying that 'developing countries' must stop developing, and the wealthy countries need to vastly reduce the quality of not just their middle-classes, but their working class too.

We simply don't have the option of a low-footprint high standard of living right for the masses.

Concur.

> The moment you start talking in the terms of the population being already too high, the obvious solutions become terrifying

Perhaps there are good solutions worth talking about, such as what kinds of crops and foods we incentivize and disincentivize, with concomitant impact on the environment and, ultimately, the space we need to thrive. Or another is giving women access to birth control so that they can make decisions about what they perceive to be an improvement to their own lives and that of their families.

Yes, that’s absolutely where the focus goes, and is talked about very carefully to not run afoul of the cancellers.

The Gates Foundation’s work with vaccination will have a huge impact as longevity increases and child mortality drops, people tend to respond to the lower risk by having smaller families. Plus the general education and empowerment of women is a big strategy to control birthrates as well since it gives women more life options beyond motherhood. You will notice that the overall western narrative is that we have a low birthrate crisis and need to support family life better, but in Africa the effort is to bring that birthrate down. Touchy, touchy subject, especially since a massive population increase in the global south is already baked into the math and is as close to inevitable as it gets.

Zero-sum thinking can get you into a whole lot of trouble here, which is why I am basically a solar punk. If that’s not realistic we are screwed anyway and will tear each other to pieces over the last scraps of the biosphere.

Of course it’s always going to be too many of ‘them’. Wars are always about limited resources. It’s crazy to think the planet can handle exponential population growth forever. At a certain point hard decision are going to have to be made, and I doubt anyone is going to volunteer to be culled.

At the rate the climate hysteria is growing, we are going to have wars specifically aimed at culling large populations. Maybe biological sneak attacks, I mean accidental releases.

Yup, that’s the stuff right there that makes this the radioactive topic. It’s just one teeny tiny step from it will happen to it should. A seemingly rational ideological conclusion. It has been tried before. A memorial stands on the spot in my Polish city and the ashes are still in the soil.

Wars have historically never been a particularly effective method of population reduction though - I gather during WWII the number of humans killed on the battle field was pretty small compared to those who died from disease or natural disasters.

Soviet Union lost 20 to 27 million people during WWII, which amounts to 10-15% of entire population at the moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the...

And terrifying graph for percentage losses by country:

https://topforeignstocks.com/2016/04/19/chart-world-war-ii-c...

Yep, that does stand out as a historical exception. But even a once off 15% reduction over a few years isn't necessarily going to matter much in the face of sustained exponential growth - if it happened in Ethiopia, the population would recover within 5 years.

Before people moved around a great deal, war was the most effective way to spread disease. USA's entry into WWI spread "Spanish" Flu from rural Kansas to the world, killing between 17 and 100 million.

Highly contagious diseases have inevitably spread worldwide for centuries now, ever since ships got fast enough. Wars only accelerate the process slightly, which hardly matters in the long run. There was another worldwide respiratory virus pandemic starting in 1889 which killed a lot of people despite the lack of large-scale wars.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104111

Assuming that the "Spanish Flu" originated in the USA (possible but unproven), it would have spread everywhere even if we never entered WWI.

That link appears to describe an earlier epidemic that did not coincide with a world war and killed far fewer people; what is the relevance of that?

It is well known that "Spanish" Flu originated in Kansas. It certainly would have spread beyond in the absence of USA military action, but it also certainly would not have killed 100 million people. Exposure rate drives incidence rate, which in turn drives mortality. If only ten people in a location have been exposed and only one of those has become infected, the resources of that location are better able to cope with the epidemic than would be the case if 1M were exposed and 100,000 were infected. Both treatment and isolation are more successful with more resources. This was why Americans were urged to isolate in the initial stages of covid, to prevent a shortage of hospital beds.

A very wrong way to handle an epidemic is to transfer tens of thousands of people to ground zero, expose them for weeks, and then transfer them to various other continents.

Our #1 export is death.

That’s why this line of thought is shunned. It’s because the best historical precedent for intentional population reduction is not war, it’s genocide.

This malthusian crap needs to end. The earth can happily support 8 billion people if we just use a better energy mix. We already (in the US) emit less CO2 than we did in the mid 2000s, and it's only going to keep going down. It's literally financially unreasonable to run coal plants, and the developed world should be doing everything in it's power to fill india and the middle east and africa with solar panels.

With a little help, most of these nations could jump straight past the pollution of a fossil fuel based economy and directly into a renewable/sustainable economy, while only improving their lives.

This is also completely orthogonal to the fact that if you want less people on the earth all you have to do is send women to school, allow them to start a career, and give them easy access to birth control. Population drops pretty reliably after that.

To make things worse, the population will double in the coming decades, it's one of the fastest growing country in population. The government is too scared to put in place efficient 'family planning', Pakistan being one of the most religious country in the world.

> The government is too scared to put in place efficient 'family planning', Pakistan being one of the most religious country in the world.

How do you know that Pakistan's 'family planning' is not focused on increasing instead of decreasing the population?

What about religion in Pakistan is incompatible with 'family planning?'

Family planning usually means birth control and or abortion access and religions usually oppose this as it leads to fewer followers.

Point being that there isn't evidence that Pakistan:

* doesn't see 'family planning' as increasing population

* has religious traditions incompatible with any interpretation of 'family planning'

If Pakistan has a strongly increasing population then it will be in good position to take advantage of depopulation in China and elsewhere.

It isn't quite "religion" as much as it is vast numbers of the poorly educated population using "religion" to support their highly conservative views. Religions, including the dominant one in Pakistan, have a component of social responsibility.

Pakistan too has a trend of decreasing birth rate with increasing economic power across the economic classes of people, even though all ascribe to the same religion.

> Religions, including the dominant one in Pakistan, have a component of social responsibility.

Is 'family planning' not socially responsible?

Such a weird and untrue statement. Birth control is allowed in Islam. Maybe they don't trust them because of cases like the one where the CIA ran a fake vaccine program in order to collect DNA to help catch Bin Laden[0]. Or maybe it's because there isn't widespread access to healthcare. Or one of the other factors you are totally ignorant to

0- https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277145-cias-hunt-for-o...

How come people from first world countries are more concerned about overpopulation in this world countries than your own coming underpopulation problems? What will happen is what has always happened-- people will go from crowded countries to countries where people are needed. Problem solved.

> The government is too scared to put in place efficient 'family planning',

Pakistan's fertility rate has been falling down from 6 kids couple of decades back to now around 3.

I grew up on a square mile where 4 people lived. Cities are weird.

That gets significantly less comfortable when a third of that area is under water.

It's actually both better and worse than you think.

Better in that many places which have comparable population densities on a national level like the UK or Italy are mixtures of villages, fields, and forests with substantial areas of wild space with a few very large cities set amongst them - though obviously not with the kind of wild space of, say, California.

Worse in that those countries have most of their land area flat, well watered, and temperate and Pakistanis are packed into a few river valleys.

1 square mile is 640 acres, so this is very close to an average 1 acre per person, or perhaps 4 acres for a 4-person household.

That's significantly less than Manhattan which is perfectly fine.