Also some of the best night sky in the country, and some areas are eerily still and quiet.
> In the stretch of highway between Fallon and Delta, Utah, a span of 409 miles (658 km), there are three small towns: Austin, Eureka, and Ely. This span is roughly the same distance as Boston, Massachusetts, to Baltimore, Maryland, or Paris, France, to Zürich, Switzerland.
Also known as the "Loneliest Road in America".
Eyre Highway runs east from Norseman in Western Australia for 1,200 kilometres (750 mi) across the Nullarbor Plain to Ceduna, South Australia.
It then crosses the top of the Eyre Peninsula as it continues eastwards for 470 kilometres (290 mi), before reaching Port Augusta.
The Kolyma Highway (aka Road of Bones) runs through over 2000 km of basically nothing, including the coldest place on Earth outside Antarctica.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway
And they're building another 2300 km:
A) East of the Appalachian Mtns
B) Appalachians to Mississippi River
C) Mississippi to Rockies
D) Rockies to Pacific
Of those, (C) is one or two orders of magnitude more remote than the others.
On the east coast, it's hard to be more than 30 minutes from a Starbucks. In South Dakota, it's easy to be 2.5 hours from the nearest one.
Broadly speaking, you have the Northeast Corridor, which is more or less a continuous conurbation from DC to Boston.
Outside of that, the Eastern US generally follows European models of density, with clear densely-populated urban regions (Chicago being the largest city, but more minor cities like Indianapolis or Dayton correspond well to minor urban centers in European countries, population wise), in a field of rural areas where there's basically a quantum of civilization anywhere the land is flat enough to actually support it. There's kind of omnipresent human presence in the rural areas of, say, Ohio (not unlike rural Netherlands, say), while the mountainous regions like West Virginia sees strips of small towns nestled in every river valley while the ridgelines are largely empty (like a lot of the Alps).
The boundary between rural-but-populated and rural-but-unpopulated in the US is not so much the Mississippi River, but the 100°W longitude line, the High Plains (or roughly a line running from Oklahoma City through Wichita and Omaha up to Winnipeg along I-29 and I-35). From here, there's basically nothing until you hit the Front Range and the beginning of the mountains.
Once you hit the Front Range and you look west, you're in a kind of combination of the previous two zones. There's again large urban centers. In some of the big valleys--Columbia, Snake, Central, and Willamette--you see basically a small slice of European-style omnipresent human presence in rural areas. But outside of these areas, the area is largely thoroughly unpopulated, more so than even the High Plains, due to either being a desert, mountainous, or both.
It really is a feat of engineering when you think about it that highways were built and maintained over such vast distances and through some really inhospitable terrain. When driving that road I sometimes ponder what it was like building it.
Highlights included going down the Tanami Track in a rental van during the wet season, taking nothing but a case of beer onto the 2000km 4wd-only Canning Stock Route[0] and getting bogged then rescued by a passing convoy, and walking down a seriously remote track for six hours with nothing but a day pack and a change of clothes then asking where "the next kiosk" was.
We were from a more built up area of Australia, so we had a good idea of what it was like in the really remote parts and prepared: two spare tires, spare bits and pieces like timing belts and radiator hoses, HF radio and an epirb, redundant water containers, checked in with the local police station to let them know our expected arrival dates, all the good stuff. It was still very strange being in a part of the world where people would stop if they saw you pulled over but not waving or signalling to them, because you might be in trouble and they knew there'd only be one or two cars a day. We were from an area of Australia where if you had a compass and followed any direction for a day or two on foot you'd eventually come to a road, but out there you could drive for a day and not see anything.
[0] The longest stock route in the world, and probably one of the worst roads in Australia, insofar as you can call it a road.
"Where are you from" I respond with something mid-western. "How far from New York or LA is that?" "I can drive a day in any direction and still be in the middle of nowhere".
It was cute to see the confused looks on everyones faces. I get it though, you drive a couple hours in any direction in Europe and you are likely to be in another country or a body of water.
Whenever people say "we're running out of room on this Earth" I encourage them to pick any of the less populated states in the US and just drive down a highway away from a city.
I'm sure you can have an even more surreal experience of the sort in any former USSR state or China, given their size.
I don't think many people think we're running out of physical space to house humans... but rather whether we're running out of productive land with ample resources.
It doesn’t even directly have anything to do with resources or productive land, as when you really look at it, those are not usually limited either in any real sense (though might be more expensive than preferred due to relative economic competitiveness!).
For what purpose?
Why is 8 billion 'better' than 2.5 billion, and how many people is too many (or not enough).
There is land left for us to cover over Trantor style, but there is little left in the way of prime habitat, the river mouths and edges have been largely urbanised at the expense of wet marsh filters that keep our petri dish of a planet clean.
Are you volunteering to help reduce the population? If so, how exactly?
Total fertility rate (TFR) is lower with longer average education for females, higher GDP per capita, higher contraceptive prevalence rate, and stronger family planning programs.
It’s very convenient!
Why is it that you lack a stance on whether this is a good thing | bad thing?
Serious question.
Mongolia is great for this, travelers can basically camp wherever they want and the nomadic locals are so friendly. They often invite travelers to stay in their yurts, be fed, and experience what their lives are like. It's an experience that transcends language barriers.
I sometimes hike out there and often don't see another person all day. Rarely do I see a drop of water, though, even though I'm only there in the "wetter" time.
I don't think people literally mean there isn't enough land for more humans to stand on. It's about the resources required by Homo Sapiens.
Or... don't? There's something sublime about being outside, away from civilization, truly on your own. It's part of what draws me to wild places.
There's still a lot of places where cell service doesn't reach and unless you have a specialized unit, they will be worthless in situations like this.
Satellite connection in the new iPhone should work anywhere in the US for emergencies IIRC.
Basically, it could be helpful in the event that you've got the maps available to you and you're already somewhat familiar with how to use a GPS and what their limitations are. Also, keep in mind how often your navigation app tells you to take an exit off the highway when you're actually on the frontage road. It's a tool, but it's not magic. Someone linked the Chretiens' story. They had a GPS unit, but not the understanding of its limitations. Relying on it was what went wrong in their situation.
I fall back to a road atlas when I need to navigate outside of town if I'm not on the interstate. It just works. Topo maps for hiking and a compass. If you know how to use them, it takes 99% of the guesswork out of the equation.
And, especially for driving purposes, knowing things like the number of satellites locked on and how many feet of precision you have isn't very relevant.
I agree that in general backup topo maps and a compass are useful in any case.
But even maps are not magic. The knowledge that a "road" on a map may not be something navigable by a normal vehicle and driver or that a military base won't have a perimeter regularly patrolled by soldiers requires knowledge that a map won't give you.
A proper GPS unit will give you a lat/long reading as well as additional information that can help you determine how accurate those numbers are. This can be referenced on a topo map and to help determine your location in addition to landscape features. The accuracy of the GPS location is quite important as the difference between thinking you should make a slight turn onto a road that turns into a minimum maintenance quagmire and knowing you should stay on the visually identical main road can easily be measured in meters.
As far as whether cell phone navigation features could help people in these situations, they would have to already be prepared and familiar with its use. In many or most cases like this, the affected individuals were unfamiliar enough with what they were getting into that they would not have had the maps downloaded before finding themselves out of reach of cell signal. Without the maps downloaded, they'd be pretty much out of luck.
Even if they had the maps downloaded, there will be no real-time updates on road conditions as there is no cell signal. Most of the maps I've downloaded in the past didn't come with information such as roads only being passable at certain times of year. I know there are maps out there with that level of detail, but you'd have to have planned properly and made sure the maps were up to date and had the relevant details. At which point you probably wouldn't find yourself in the situation in the first place.
I've left this point alone so far, but your battery will not last for long trying to use it while outside of cell range. You can turn off all your data, wifi, etc, if your phone can decouple that from GPS availability, but it's still a lot of screen time and battery use. At some point, you're out of juice. It's more of a time constraint than a functional constraint, but it's something to keep in mind should you find yourself in this situation.
Basically, if folks are prepared for the situation, the cell phone navigation would probably help. The majority of people who wind up lost down a back road were not prepared and the cell phone nav wouldn't help.
Yes, you need to know how to use your phone and download the appropriate app(s) and maps while connected to the Internet. And you should probably have an external battery pack.
And many people won't prepare before setting out. But I'm not sure how different that is from a dedicated GPS unit or even map/compass. The only thing I use my ancient dedicated waterproof Garmin GPS for is sea kayaking so I don't risk my phone.
No judgment of anyone else who wants to carry one, of course! - we all have to balance risks and rewards in whatever way makes sense for our own lives.
[1] Another haunting one is the Chretiens in 2011 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/seven-...