Rural regions account for 43 percent of the world’s population – estimated to be just over 8 billion, at the last count – and if the calculations in this new study are correct then the number of unaccounted-for people could potentially stretch into the billions.(…)
“We were surprised to find that the actual population living in rural areas is much higher than the global population data indicates – depending on the dataset, rural populations have been underestimated by between 53 percent to 84 percent over the period studied.”(…)
ad: “Not everyone is convinced. Scientists who weren’t involved in the study told Chris Stokel-Walker at New Scientist that improvements in satellite imagery and the quality of data collecting in some countries would make these discrepancies smaller.”(…)
Sorry, but I’ve seen some comically bad reporting coming from this site in the past. Pretty sure clickbait is a significant part of their business model.
This page is so bad it’s the only blocked website on my google news feed blacklist. I’d not take anything from that website seriously
every time someone, including myself quotes the population of China, (officially 1.4 billion), I think about the huge towns in the middle of nowhere that I’ve been to and think “or maybe 2 billion”
TBH China’s population is likely less than the official figure, but they could easily accommodate more. There are tons of empty apartment buildings everywhere, and most of the country is still empty. Most people don’t intuitively grasp population density at scale but it’s shocking how little space we all take up with good urbanism.
If people were to stand shoulder to shoulder, the entire population of the world could fit into half of Prince Edward Island. If the world’s population was in a single city with the density of Paris, it would be the size of Iraq. To put that in perspective, Paris is the 35th most dense city in the world. If you matched the density of the densest city in the world, it would be about the size of Uruguay.
Of course, each person needs much more land to survive, and more still if they’re to live the lifestyle we in the developed world enjoy.
I don’t like living in a dense urban area, but undoubtedly it is the way to keep the planet healthy and us alive.
Vertical farming and efficiencies of providing services to denser areas, along with re-wilding areas for carbon capture all seem like part of the puzzle.
In the real world though, how do you get the entire population of the US to move to a handful of cities?
How would we even pay for the infrastructure development with our current model of building it and then ignoring it until we have to put a bandaid on it
vertical farming is not efficient. it doesn’t scale well for most crops, and none of those are the calorie dense stuff we tend to eat lots of.
carbon capture is pointless until we stop making so fucking much of it.
you don’t but you don’t really need to. how they live is less important than where. modal shifts are probably more important than economies of scale, where they differ.
we would need to end capitalism. but that’s necessary for any way the species survives more than a few years from now.
Yeah, I don’t see us all moving into cities, although many people already have. I also don’t think we need to have one giant city - those numbers were given to show how little actual living space people need, keeping in mind that Paris doesn’t seem to be viewed as somewhere undesirable to live, and still has room for beauty and not just urban utilitarianism.
On the flip side, many people who move to the city do so for work. I hope we see less of that, where things can be more decentralized so people who like a less urban environment can still effectively contribute to society and the economy without having to stifle their personal living preferences. I’d also like to see less cost-efficient but more space-efficient growing conditions for agriculture so more land can be returned to a natural state while still supporting the populations we have. Both vertical farming and vertical living can contribute to that. And I absolutely realize that livestock tend to be both less cost- and space-efficient, especially if it’s humane.
Yeah, the only way I see reducing livestock is if the cost gets unacceptable for the working class. Nobody wants to hear “you need to eat plants”. Would require a culture shift in the US at least
Chickens are surprisingly effective as far as meat animals go.
I’m super interested in insects too. Im growing spirulina right now to experiment if it can be a protein source
and this here is the only advantage of single family zoning, preventing the scourge of urbanism from taking root by cutting it off at the housing.
Single family home zoning was designed for racism and really shouldn’t exist anymore
Exactly. Nobody has actually counted them all, so nobody knows for sure. Let alone in the more remote areas of the world.
I’ll tell you, I backpack between cities regular, and a lot of those agricultural towns don’t even have police stations.
I personally know of ~400 people who are absolutely not counted on any census and I’d be willing to bet not included in any population stats. Whole town up in the mountains. I’d imagine if that can happen in the us, it’s not unlikely to happen elsewhere, so sure… But when they do the whole earth population calculations, I always assumed they just checked in a few extra people to account for, like, uncounted towns and shit
I’d bet that in many countries, the “census” cares more about its status as a gov’t official, than it does about accurate-counting, too…
While I’d been unconsciously assuming that the world population-count was somehow accurate,
my KNOWING of how rural people work to evade being counted contradicts my own assumption,
& your identifying that entire villages that aren’t counted… damn, damn, damn, have I ever been being ignorant/naive…
Thank you for pointing this obvious-in-hindsight behavior out, for us!
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so malthusianism is even more bullshit than we thought.
Yeah, you nailed it. Obvious in hindsight, but until this I had just assumed it was accurate, like, even if everyone wasn’t counted, I guess had I been pressed, I would have assumed there was some formula or something to account for the uncounted or some shit. Kinda wild
Also, village isn’t a word we really use in the US, but now that you say it, I guess that’s kind or exactly what it is. A little village of insane, isolated, meth makin’ hillbillies up in the woods that aren’t accessible by road.
This smells like some kind of bias. Find a measuring error in one situation and then project the maximum error onto everything.
Any statisticians here, is there a name for this?
The title is, unsurprisingly, heavily exaggerated. The study does not claim there are “billions more people”. They studied 307 different dam construction projects around the word, and found the actual number of affected people in those rural areas was like 40-80% higher than estimated.
Their conclusion is that it’s likely the population of the world is quite underestimated, but they don’t want to guess by how much, that’s all cooked up by the “journalist”.
This smells like
Don’t get too scientific now.
It’s just a study. Like many others. All studies are biased in some way. A proper scientific study can question status quo and or provide alternate views or methods.
In the end most scientists find 8 B people a reasonable and probable amount. But they don’t know, as those are estimates. The guys from this new study just used a different approach and come up with maybe 1B more.
Even if we can have more people, we probably shouldn’t tbh
Arr you suggesting some action should be tsken? Or…?
The biggest scam we’ve been sold is that birth rates are down and we’ll be running low on people!
Yet zoomers is the largest population EVER.
You have UK “needing immigration to sustain population decline” while it wasn’t declining. They used them to drive the labour costs down and rents up.
It is though. UK birth rate is well below replacement level and immigration is not enough to make up for it.
The math may not be obvious because that is a decrease in births now, that will become apparent in about 30 years when they would have children and previous large generations pass. You can either try to compensate now when it’s easy or wait 30 years until it’s a crisis with no way out and even if there was, it would take 30+ years
Millennials are still the larger demographic (ever) by about 3.5 million people.
What about worldwide? In UK, Milenials are also leading. But allegedly, zoomers are leading elsewhere.
China has 400 million “Millennials” compared to 280 million “Gen Z”. I put quotation marks around those terms because they do not use those terms locally. Their “Millennial” is technically two categories combined (Post 80’s and Post 90’s). Their Post-90 gen would be equivalent to mid-late millennial and zillennial.
I’ve done a bit of research into how other countries categorize their generations. They don’t all perfectly overlap age-wise. But, if we’re looking at people born around the late 80’s to mid 90’s, they all follow similar trends and behaviors, including the decline in sexual activity and birth rates. In the East, you also have Vietnam’s “Millennial”, 9X, and Taiwan’s, the Strawberry Generation.
They talk about discovering more people when they have to move them to new homes because of dam construction. Are they entirely sure all the people in the new homes were originally in the area that will be affected by the dam? Seems like a ripe opportunity for fraud and/or bribery.
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That moment when you unlock a new reference and put it everywhere regardless of if it fits because it’s new and exciting to you
I don’t remember making this comment and that’s scary to me.
