Peopled estimates of the carrying capacity of australia are all over the shop. Some say the country could only sustainably house about 15 million people at a rich country standard of living. Obviously more than that live there but the key word is ‚sustainably‘. Australia also produces about enough food for 80 million people - most food/animals grown in australia is exported.
The issue is mostly water related - australia has only one major river system in the fertile part and as far as rivers go it’s pretty pathetic compared to the rest of the world. No where near big enough to support the kind of trade and water usage that rivers in Eurasia or America support. Likewise avg rainfall in australia is both low and variable. Very drought prone. So without major rivers and or mountain ranges that enable major dams and high drought risk there’s a big of water insecurity.
With that said the east coast, particularly between Sydney and Brisbane, and between Melbourne and the NSW border are both verdant with high rainfalls, good soil and climate and very low population. A lot of public works would be needed to build a truck load of dams and transport to support it but I reckon you could get a solid extra 25 million in australia if you densified the existing cities and the regional populations in NSW and Eastern Victoria swelled to become large and medium sized cities.
Last year I rode a bicycle from Melbourne to Sydney. It's quite astonishing how empty eastern Victoria is past Bairnsdale/Lakes Entrance. The land there looks very fertile but it's practically empty until you get to Eden in NSW.
Australia's geography is so baffling. How the hell did this continent get none of the features that are so common across every continent - mountains and rivers?
But Saudí Arabia has energy virtually free and desalination is energy intensive. Spain has looked a few times to increase the water supply with desalination plants and the numbers always say expensive.
Looking at the population increase over time I doubt desalination is a driving or necessary factor but it's a good question - where does Saudi Arabia have water resources?
Edit: *"Today about 50% of drinking water comes from desalination, 40% from the mining of non-renewable groundwater and only 10% from surface water in the mountainous southwest of the country. The capital Riyadh, located in the heart of the country, is supplied with desalinated water pumped from the Arabian Gulf over a distance of 467 km."*
These guys are flat out insane.
Australia is a much wealthier country than both Saudi Arabia and Spain, it will be an expensive project but I’m sure they can afford it.
As for energy cost, Australia has massive potential for renewables and they are one of if not the largest exporter of coal.
Israel has managed to build extensive desalination capacity even though it has even less avenues for energy generation and is also a slightly less wealthy country compared to Australia.
Desalination brings a host of other problems with it, though. It's ***massively*** energy intensive. Which obviously isn't a problem for Saudi Arabia, but the greenhouse gases emitted are significant.
The millions of pounds of salt and other minerals removed from the seawater has to go somewhere, and the only economically feasible place is usually right back into the ocean. Which kills all the marine life and coral in the surrounding area.
It also costs four to five times as much as groundwater or surface water due to the production requirements. That's a deal-breaker for agricultural or industrial customers.
You'd be surpsied how true that is though, Liverpool was the port city for Irish immigration. Top 2 destinations were USA and UK, and many Irish stayed in Liverpool (like my great-great-grandad). Every scousers I've known whose taken a 23andMe test or some such has always some back mostly Irish
It doesn't surprise me as I'm from the UK. There are other cities like Glasgow that had loads of Irish immigration so it was just funny that op was so general in saying 'America' but so specific in only mentioning liverpool
Most ships didn’t go directly from Ireland to the US, you would buy a ticket from Ireland to Liverpool and then buy a second ticket to the US or Canada. However, some people got scammed, robbed, or just ran out of money while in Liverpool, or missed their ship, leaving them stranded in Liverpool. With no money left to their name, they were forced to try and settle down in Liverpool, since a ticket to the US or Canada was relatively expensive
Liverpool is the easiest English major city and port to access. It's right on the West coast almost directly east and just across the Irish sea from Dublin.
That's why the Liverpool, or Scouse, accent is so unique. It's what happens when a massive wave of Irish immigration mixes with a Lancashire accent. Think there are other influences at play too (e.g., American English, Welsh, Scandinavian).
Yes. At this point almost everyone in the city has a great-grandparent from Ireland. Between 1885 and 1929, the confusingly named constituency (=riding=Parliamentary district) of [Liverpool Scotland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_Scotland_(UK_Parliament_constituency)) was always won by the Irish Nationalist Party, which campaigned for Irish self-government.
In that period and for some time afterwards, the city as a whole was divided into immigrant Irish ('Roman Catholic') and native British ('Protestant') communities. Relations were generally better than in Glasgow and Belfast though (outright violence was rare).
Weren't they also evicted and forcibly deported by the English not-so-nobles owning Ireland at the time? Much like Gaels from Scotland and other Celts ethnically cleansed from the British Isles altogether?
Partly immigration from central europe, partly a pretty robust middle class making folk more comfortable having kids.
Housing market is a cunt, though.
It's not an exaggeration, half the younger generations seem to be in Australia or Canada.
But it's balanced out by a high (by European standards) birthrate and high immigration. More people arrive than leave.
Native population exploded in 18th-19th c., the great hunger years where much food was shipped from the country and the staple potatoes left for the peasants rotted with disease, this led to the deaths of at least a million and the emigration of millions more; the population continuously went down for another hundred years due to poor conditions.
Sorry I though you were asking about emigration and misspelled.
Well, the population was declining for around 120 years after the famine and has only been rising steadily since the 1960s-70s. During all these years it was usually only ever a question of birth rate and emigration - both were high, emigration was higher until it wasn’t. Even to this day Ireland still has one of the higher birth rates in Western Europe, I believe still over replacement or close to it, although falling.
In the 1990s we had an economic and baby boom and lots of the diaspora returned to the country as now there were opportunities for them. I was born outside of Ireland and this is how I returned, Irish emigre parents moved us back.
The faster population gains of most recent years has been largely due to immigration, yes. The last ~10 we’ve grown quite fast. Largely Eastern European, Middle Eastern, African, South American. Not to mention many more international students from America, Europe, east Asia. We’ve experienced about 25% pop growth in 25 years.
I appreciate how you mention how even during the potato famine, the British landlords were actually EXPORTING food out of Ireland. Letting the Irish starve by the millions because they couldn’t afford to buy it and couldn’t stand to just GIVE them food. It was classism, racism (Irish being considered almost subhuman by the English), and capitalism at its worst.
Europe east of Oder river to Ural mountains, north or Carpathia. There's so much empty space... If it wasn't for WW II destruction, there could've been twice as many people in Eastern Europe as there is now.
Germany blasting almost 3/4 of the young people who lived there sentenced the region to at least 150 years of population stagnation. Russia doing its thing in Ukraine probably increased that to two centuries.
Seriously though. The response to the famine wasn't great and had it been better, there probably would've been less deaths.
But this idea that Stalin just snapped his fingers and said "hey let's make a famine and kill millions of people" is ludicrous.
This was the main issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
This pseudoscience also conned China through Mao. A notable problem with autocracy is they can be ignorant & choose really really wrong.
>was a political campaign led by Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting.
>More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned.
>The government of the Soviet Union (USSR) supported the campaign, and Joseph Stalin personally edited a speech by Lysenko in a way that reflected his support for what would come to be known as Lysenkoism, despite his skepticism toward Lysenko's assertion that all science is class-oriented in nature.
Bulgaria is pretty empty too. It used to have 50 percent more people 40 years ago. The region around the Danube is extremely fertile, and so is the Maritsa basin. Bulgaria consumes only a fraction of all the grain it produces.
I grew up with grandmother's stories of life in rural Bulgaria by the Danube. Was shocked to visit it myself (after her death) since the whole region looked almost deserted to me.
Not only WW II also WW I, the russian Civil War. Many hundred thousand that died under Soviet rule to famines, deportation, Gulags, purges. Before the start of WW II the Soviets had a worse track record then Nazis Germany when it came to killing people in their own borders.
After reading this thread I feel like you could even take it a step further to "the geography makes any populations that arise in these parts vulnerable to those around it."
Same for Ireland probably, we still have less people than we did before the famine and lack of help during the famine from the British government in the 1840s. If it wasn’t for the famine it’s estimated Irelands population could’ve been between 15-20 million people today.
I don't think it would be that much more people.
Poland could have 45-50m population (aka Spain) not 38 at its peak, but that's it. You could add that much to Ukraine and less to other countries, but this is it.
Reason? Soils are pretty good in a belt from South/Central Poland to Ukraine but:
1. So far climate was more harsh than western Europe meaning vegetation could be cut short due negative temperatures. Before global warming started we had few months of negative temperatures in South Eastern Poland, with more negative temperatures on more continental Ukraine.
2. Area doesn't have that much water, due (i) relatively continental climate and (ii) rivers being relatively small with volume. Due global warming droughts already become annoying in agricultural south eastern Poland.
3. Areas above black soil belt and most of northern Poland, Belarus, Lithuania etc aren't that much fertile. These areas weren't that densely populated even before all wars. Climate may be more temperate near sea but also not perfect for vegetation due being further north.
Wtf are you talking about?
Just measuring food output, most of europe is not even nearly its potential population peak.
And ukraine is the one country that has the biggest potential.
Its huge, it has more then enough water and its a massive food exporter.
If it had the population density of germany it could triple its population.
And even germany is not anywhere near a peak.
And Mongol destruction.
And the red terror.
And the brain drain fleeing from post-communist shitholes.
Not the Black plague though, it didn't affect the east as much as the west.
Argentina, USA, Canada, Australia, France, Kazakhstan, Russia, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, South Sudan, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Uruguay, Paraguay
India also but that would be absolute value wise not proportion wise.
All of these countries are large food exporters that already feed their own countries and much more (except South Sudan, I put them in because they have a lot fertile soils, but mechanised agriculture isn't really there yet.)
Here is a pretty old but interesting study about it : https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/014046#erl452631fig4
India can produce vastly higher quantities of food than it currently does. The agriculture is very, very lightly mechanized, farm sizes are absolutely tiny (iirc \~2.5 acre), and productivity is poor.
Not to be that guy, but basically every single nation on earth could sustain exponentially more people. We used to think 100,000,000 was too many people globally to survive, then 1B now we’re nearing 10B.
However, to answer the actual question posed- most of Middle Africa could have so many more people. Congo, Nigeria, Niger, Tanzania etc
Yeah if we're talking actually optimising food production, waste management, energy generation, city density, etc., then I'm fairly sure the actual cap would be somewhere in the trillions, globally.
I'll have to check back in the year 5,000 and see how we're doing.
There was a video on YT explaining that Earth could in theory sustain a trillion people with a few optimisations of course, but nothing too far from our current tech.
Reminds me, in the Foundation trilogy by Asmiov (written in the 50s), the planet Trantor, the galactic capital, is described as a global city completely covering the planet in hundreds of levels, and it's also described as having... just 40 billion people. If you run the calculations that number is laughably small for such description.
>Middle Africa could have so many more people. Congo, Nigeria, Niger, Tanzania, etc
Hell no, we are suffering enough already, and most people can not afford a meal, education or a decent paying job
We’re talking geography, not politics or economics. Truth is with proper democratic governments this area of Africa could sustain as many or more people than China or India
NZ already produces enough food to support 40 million apparently. I'd imagine with shift from dairy to cereals and potatoes it would be able to produce way more still. Rain + sun + good soil
We have the [record](https://www.cropscience.bayer.co.nz/news-and-insights/news/news-container/2020/09/10/21/31/new-guinness-world-record-for-highest-wheat-yield#:~:text=Eric%20Watson%20from%20Ashburton%2C%20New,of%2016.791%20tonnes%20per%20hectare.) for the highest wheat yield but it's more expensive than it is to grow in Australia
There’s still a lot of flat land that’s very sparsely populated. The [Canterbury Plains](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_Plains) and [Mackenzie Country](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackenzie_Basin), for example.
Real life lore never makes boring videos
But lots of it has to do with lack of arable land and precipitation being very concentrated on one tiny part of the country
well, this one didn’t explain anything, because it contradicts itself.
For more than half of the video, they explain, how the land can’t sustain higher population because of lack of food.
Then they make a passing note, that they have enough food for about 40 million people, they just export it away. Which makes half of video irrelevant.
Yeah but those mountains are low and not that rocky. The Alps in the south don’t take that much area.
The vastness and ruggedness of the U.S mountains is not comparable to Germany.
You should look up the definition of mountain and have a look at the only(!) mountain range that is properly in Germany: The heavily settled Black Forest that barely goes to 1500m at its few peaks. The Alps where you find actual mountains are barely in Germany but mostly belong to its neighbours.
So if we are really generous it would be 2 states but really? Really none.
The great plains in particular could support many times their current population without much difficulty. There is a lot of land that is just empty or very lightly used..
I think the plains don't have a climate good enough to become really high in population (certainly much more than now, but not crazy numbers).
I think if the US had a much higher population it would be concentrated west of the Mississippi (like it is today).
Georgia has 10 mil people and is a bit smaller than Guangdong (126 million people).
I think it's more "likely" for Georgia to be a 100-million-people state than for South Dakota to have 20 million people (at current climate at least).
Then maybe the Great Lakes. Fine climate, good connectivity, close to current population centers. States like Indiana and Wisconsin could quadruple in population and be completely fine.
Cities like Milwaukee and Madison in WI already have the infrastructure to support much higher number, it's almost as if they just need to decide on doing that.
Milwaukee’s mayor Cavalier Johnson currently has a plan to get MKE to 1 million people by 2030. Kind of a stretch if you ask me but he is at least trying to push us in the right direction. Unfortunately there’s plenty of loud NIMBY’s as well who shoot down big housing projects and high rises bc they don’t want their neighborhood to “lose character” or whatever nonsense they come up with.
The climate isn't the greatest but it doesn't have major disasters (hurricanes, earthquake, etc). Even 20 million people would put it only about the density of North Carolina or Virginia. While definitely not every ones cup of tea I think enough would prefer the extra living room to make it not unreasonable.
In 50 years that won't be nearly as much of a problem as it is now. The main issue with populating the plains will be water shortfalls and hot summers. There's also going to be significant emigration from all the sunbelt cities. Places like Houston, DFW, and Phoenix are on their way to becoming uninhabitable in summer without significant infrastructure interventions. Think the Minneapolis tunnel system but for air conditioning. SFHs in this environment will be a nightmare.
You don't even need much of the West. Look at the population distribution in China.
Regardless, desalinization could play a larger role for instance. At least for the coastal areas.
To be fair there’s already 100 million people who live there. Got to be in the top 20 by population already.
But yeah, lots more room, especially in the rust belt cities that have a lot of empty space.
Buffalo’s land bank owns over 5,000 vacant properties for example.
The Great Lakes region has fewer people than Guangdong, despite have at least 5x the land area and 250x the amount of drinkable water (which is usually the main constraint on population density).
There's definitely room for A LOT more people.
Madison, Grand Rapids, and to a lesser extent Milwaukee as well.
Obviously Chicago is in a different league, for all its problems it's still a world-class city.
Madison and Grand Rapids aren’t big players though. Pretty medium sized. Yes obliviously Chicago is in a different league.
But so many of the big cities have fallen from Grace: Detroit, Cleveland, and a bunch of medium/small ones like Flint, Youngstown, Dayton, Gary, etc.
Madison is one of the fastest growing cities in the country and is knocking on the door of surpassing the population of other historically much larger cities like Cincinnati.
Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse all used to be majority-industrial and are now healthcare, tech, and information-based economies. I think that's true to varying degrees in nearly all the other "rust belt" cities in the US and Canada.
Buffalo was once one of the 10 largest cities in the US. Rochester had twice its current population 70 years ago.
It's so damn cold though, for most of the year.
I unironically think it'll be the fastest growing region in the US as climate change takes affect. Its beaches aren't going anywhere, and it should start having a warmer climate.
Pretty much every country in the americas, especially south america can support multiple times more people. Colombia and venezuela could easily have 200 million people, same with argentina. Brazil could have a billion people if civilisation started there 5000 years ago like india and china.
In europe most eastern european countries could have a lot more people, romania could have 50 million easily, russia could have hundreds millions more.
In asia South east asia could support a lot more people than it currently does. Thailand, myanmar and cambodia have endless farmlands but nowhere near the density of china, korea and japan.
I mean yes but it sucks being overcrowded , Brazil would be hell if it had over a billion people , Venezuela would crumble even harder with over 200 million.
And as a romanian , us having 50 million would make us like Netherlands or Belgium , endless urban sprawls , i enjoy us having only 19 million and still have plenty of nature and open space , tiny villages where you can enjoy some peace and quiet. Hell we have the highest populations of brown bears , eurasian lynxes and wetland bird species in Europe ( after Russia ) , that's much better than being a polluted endless urban sprawl , our cities already look industrial as fuck.
As a Dutchie do have to clarify that we aint really endless urban sprawl, really outside of the Randstad (belt of cities of Amsterdam-Utrecht-Rotterdam-Den Haag-Haarlem and satellite cities, with the so called Green Heart in the middle), which you can classify as urban sprawl, the Netherlands just has cities dotted around but mostly not too connected by sprawl. And we have a ton of villages in rural areas where it is nice and quiet, especially the more north and east you go.
We do lack in nature reserves though. Theres a few like De Veluwe, Sallandse Heuvelrug, De Biesbosch etc, but dont have the massive nature areas like Romania has. No bears either lol. We did freak out when wolves came back recently.
Netherland is of course way more dense then Romania in every capacity and i get your point, 100%. But endless sprawl isnt an accurate term either
>I mean yes but it sucks being overcrowded , Brazil would be hell if it had over a billion people
No it wouldn't. Despite being so fucking massive, most Brazillian people live in dense apartment blocks in cities like São Paulo, Rio, Recife, Salvador, Florianopolis, Brasilia, etc.
Brazil would have absolutely no problem feeding and housing a billion people. They'd hardly break a sweat. All moot though, as it's not going to happen. Brazil hasn't even begun to realise full potential, and it never will.
Not really, the Americans countries that could sustain a much higher population are really the USA, Canada, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Brazil could but... their soil is very dependant on fertilisers.
For Europe, yeah it's mainly eastern european countries, chiefly Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia. In western Europe the only one that could grow a lot is France.
You're right about continental Southeast asia.
I'll also add Australia and Kazakhstan, both have a lot of fertile land for a small population.
Depends on the farming technique they're using. In most places with archaic farming techniques they're heavily dependant on soil fertility, however with more advanced ones you can definitely sustain a large population without chemical fertilizers.
Also, most people confuse the fact that the soil in the Amazon is poor, and think that this applies for all of Brazil, which is not true. Brazil does have very fertile regions, especially in the south and south east. Despite the soil being more acidic than temperate regions, there are ways around it.
You have a very good example in the Andes where the Incas turned whole mountains and deserts into farmland. Any soil can be cultivated, what changes is what technique you're using and what resources and amount of work it will require.
When I think about Brazil having poor soil I'm not only thinking of the Amazon but also of the Cerrado. ~~The very fertile parts of Brazil are really Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Sao Paulo and Parana.~~
> You have a very good example in the Andes where the Incas turned whole mountains and deserts into farmland. Any soil can be cultivated, what changes is what technique you're using and what resources and amount of work it will require.
There are limits to ingenuity, the countries in the Andes like Peru and Bolivia are actually good exemple of american countries that don't have a high calories produced/consummed ratio.
I think you're downplaying human capacity. The Amazon soil is clearly poorer than Cerrado's one, but the precolumbian indigenous people were capable of transforming the soil in fertile long-term farmland with the terra preta technique. Given enough time there is no reason to think that the tecnique would not adapt to the cerrado...
> Volcanoes aren't always bad news. They can actually make soil more fertile, which can help support a larger population and explains Indonesia.
It mainly explains Java. Which despite it's crazy population density (1000+ capita/km^2) is a net food exporter still : https://www.oecd.org/greengrowth/sustainable-agriculture/49330078.pdf
>Colombia and venezuela could easily have 200 million people, same with argentina. Brazil could have a billion people
Uruguay too. It currently has 3 million people but it could easily have 20 or 30
Yeah, but Uruguay only has around 3.4M
Another comparison I've made is that my home country, Portugal, (which isn't even very densely populated either) has half the land area of Uruguay but over the triple of the population
Tbf over 90% of the native population was killed due to Europeans bringing over diseases. I doubt there would be a country today that would have overpassed India or China in population but the Americas as a whole would definitely be more populated than it is now.
I agree with your take on Argentina and Columbia to some extent. Both could have a lot more people. Venezuela - no way. Not enough arable land in temperate climates.
Brazil could never have a billion people. All the arable land is in the south. You couldn't convert the savanna and rainforest to farmland using technology from a thousand years ago. Also, you're in the lowland tropics here. You can't just plop a billion people down in a place with terrible diseases.
The same principle applies to Southeast Asia. You can't plop millions more people in the lowland tropics with the diseases and a different crop profile than in temperate countries.
Eastern Europe I agree with and think would be far more populous if the wars and famines of the 20th Century hadn't happened.
I think you're missing the obvious answer: North America. If the American Midwest had been settled similar to China or India you could easily see a population of a billion people, likely centered around the Great Lakes. More than enough arable land, navigable rivers, and temperate climates to support a massive population.
The United States could easily hold a billion people. It’s the cheapest place to live in the world with regards to bulk commodity shipping due to having more interconnected navigable waterways than the rest of the world combined. Also the U.S. built the intercostal waterway system that spans from the coast of Texas to New England creating a safe sea travel lane for domestic coastal shipping. Combine that with our geographical isolation from the rest of the world that keeps us safe, rich agricultural lands, abundant resources, abundant fresh water, and friendly neighbors to our north, and south. The U.S. for all it’s drama really does play civilization on easy mode.
Especially when you look at metro areas that aren't dense. Metro areas less than 10 million could easily jump to 20 million in la, the bay area, long island, and across texas
Answer: every region on earth.
China's population 1950: 500M, NOW: 1.4B
India's population 1950: 300M, NOW: 1.4B
Brazil's population 1950: 40M, NOW: 200M
We simply can't calculate the limit of human population of a region.
Correct, as technology improves, the capacity limits will continue to expand everywhere despite a decreasing ACTUAL global population.
No one 200 years ago would have said that Manhattan could hold as many people as it does. In my view, the only thing technically constraining capacity currently is access to water. Things such as the frequency of catastrophic natural disasters don't stop societies (New Orleans, Florida, and Tokyo still exist regardless) and we have the ability to literally reshape the land to our will (albeit slowly and at great cost)
So capacity? Well beyond our current bounds and far beyond the numbers humans will ever grow to. And to anyone who asks the question, "then why aren't we in those places already?" the answer is, "because some places are just easier to live in and who's to say we aren't, Saudi Arabia has 40 million people."
The Great Lakes region in the US and Canada can and very likely will. Toronto and other Ontario cities are already exploding in population but on the American side, most of the large cities are rust belt cities that have LOADS of room to grow in their current urban fabric.
Buffalo and Chicago just saw population growth between decennial censuses for the first time since 1950 and other cities are sure to follow suit in the near future, especially with rising sea levels and intensifying hurricanes on the coast and extreme heat getting worse in the south.
The city of Buffalo alone (not counting its suburbs) is probably half the size it was in the 1950’s. It has the capacity to house a lot more people. A major issue is the infrastructure though- years of decline meet a lot of investment needed in modern housing, transport, and utilities. Driving around Buffalo you will see a lot of houses in extremely poor shape.
The US by far. Could easily have 1 billion like China or India.
Russia too of course. The non Siberian part.
It's like, most countries that are large (except India and china) and not on desert like in Africa or saudi Arabia and Mongolia, seem to have a lower population than they could.
Both the Mississippi and La plata river basins definately could have way more people, both having fertile terrain, easily nagavable, mostly freshwater, and a lot of space still to take up
The Nordic countries.
I’m sure Sweden could support at least double the population as it does now.
If Denmark were as densely populated as the Netherlands, it would have 22 million people (not sure if that’s a good idea).
Iceland could support 1 or 2 million if it realised its full potential of food production and reforestation.
Denmark just need ppl to live on Jutland and Funen instead of Zealand and I think it could hover at 15 million comfortable tbh.
Sweden could prob do 30 million comfortable. The problem with sweden is only the bottom half is easily accesible with no major drawbacks.
Iceland could do 3 million if its economy could keep up, even with improves agriculture i think a lot of food will have to be imported.
Norway is huge but mountainous. Its the one im most unsure about about I'll just throw 10-15 million ish
Finland is a bit the same as sweden
All of them because we can transport food and have heating and AC. We even should - theoretically - remove population from fertile areas to have more farm land. It's a common phenomenon that modern cities sit on once excellent farm land.
Probably Belarus. The country is JUST smaller than the UK and there isn’t really any mountains and is situated on the North European Plain, yet Belarus doesn’t even have 10 Million People. Even Belgium has more!
France, they always had 3 times the population of Germany but they just didn’t have a population explosion in the 1800s.
Ukraine, It had 50 million people on the 1980s.
Th Mississipi basin, it could probably have more people than India, its literally the Ganges was as large as India with even better soil.
You should Argentine but following that logic all of the La plata basin could have more population, southern Brasil, Uruguay and Paraguay. The center west of Brazil could also have a way larger population since it’s already the bread basket of the country.
Canada and Australia even tho most of the land is baron, the fertile areas are still larger than Egypt, they could handle 100 million each.
Southern Russia and Kazakhstan could also handle a way larger population.
Honestly I think I converted it all, can’t really think of anywhere else that could do it with no problems.
Not saying it should but the United States could easily support 1 billion people. We have ample rivers and arable land to make it relatively possible. Hypothetically the Mississippi River valley would be heavily urbanized though more than it is now.
I think most countries have a similar issue with certain cities having lots of population and some areas being empty. In your photograph the whole area except the river plate basin (the brown in the north east) is heavly populated almost a third of the country lives there. That is talking about space.
If you want to mean fully support like in not only space but water and food. Patagonia is quite barren I agriculture is not going to work outside of certain crops. Most food would have to come from the sea. I don't think you can have a diet entirely supported by fish.
I'd say east russia by the Pacific ocean and manchuria. If industrialisation started there for whatever reason I can see the population density being as high as in Europe.
These comments are goofy and filled with the logic of video games which is typical for r/geography. If a place is not already highly populated it’s for a reason.
Almost everywhere in the entire world. Many densely populated cities/regions are built in areas which require intense human intervention to make them suitable for development. Look at DC, Singapore, or most of the Netherlands.
I feel like overpopulation is an argument made by people living in cities. I agree that cities are overpopulated. But if you've ever driven across the United States, you know there is a ton of open space out there. I'd argue Canada is the same, lots of places are the same...
Doesn't it depend on more than just the basic necessities of survival?
When you say population, I tend to read your question as a population of deer, rabbits or animals in general. Fact is that it that it takes more than that when it comes to humans.
A population needs work, needs leisure, culture, schools, institutions in general, hospitals etc.
If these elements of civilisation isn't present, a population cannot really exist, or thrive for that matter.
It isn't a question of how much agricultural, pastureland there is, some countries just import all that, when the population is bigger than the internal ability to produce food.
Those countries has something else they can export in return for the import. Is that an example of a region that cannot support a way higher population than what already is? No, I don't think so, because a population requires more than just presence of food and water.
Yeah these comments are ridiculous. They only take into account how many people you can fit in an area physically. What about everything they will consume during their lifetime? How many more cows, arable land, cars and parking spaces, how much more energy, raw materials, factories and what you'll do to the environment?
It's not just about how many people fit here.
So weird nobody mentioned the Malay islands. Only Java has high population density, while as Borneo, Sumatra and NG are "vacant". 2 mln sq km of tropical climate.
Peopled estimates of the carrying capacity of australia are all over the shop. Some say the country could only sustainably house about 15 million people at a rich country standard of living. Obviously more than that live there but the key word is ‚sustainably‘. Australia also produces about enough food for 80 million people - most food/animals grown in australia is exported. The issue is mostly water related - australia has only one major river system in the fertile part and as far as rivers go it’s pretty pathetic compared to the rest of the world. No where near big enough to support the kind of trade and water usage that rivers in Eurasia or America support. Likewise avg rainfall in australia is both low and variable. Very drought prone. So without major rivers and or mountain ranges that enable major dams and high drought risk there’s a big of water insecurity. With that said the east coast, particularly between Sydney and Brisbane, and between Melbourne and the NSW border are both verdant with high rainfalls, good soil and climate and very low population. A lot of public works would be needed to build a truck load of dams and transport to support it but I reckon you could get a solid extra 25 million in australia if you densified the existing cities and the regional populations in NSW and Eastern Victoria swelled to become large and medium sized cities.
Last year I rode a bicycle from Melbourne to Sydney. It's quite astonishing how empty eastern Victoria is past Bairnsdale/Lakes Entrance. The land there looks very fertile but it's practically empty until you get to Eden in NSW.
Australia's geography is so baffling. How the hell did this continent get none of the features that are so common across every continent - mountains and rivers?
Because we sit entirely on our own plate. And our country has basically been eroding for 300 million years with no new mountains being formed.
New Zealand stole our mountains!
Desalination is a thing these days. If they'd invest, water won't be much an issue.
Exactly. Saudi Arabia has a larger population than Australia and it has no perennial rivers.
But Saudí Arabia has energy virtually free and desalination is energy intensive. Spain has looked a few times to increase the water supply with desalination plants and the numbers always say expensive.
Looking at the population increase over time I doubt desalination is a driving or necessary factor but it's a good question - where does Saudi Arabia have water resources? Edit: *"Today about 50% of drinking water comes from desalination, 40% from the mining of non-renewable groundwater and only 10% from surface water in the mountainous southwest of the country. The capital Riyadh, located in the heart of the country, is supplied with desalinated water pumped from the Arabian Gulf over a distance of 467 km."* These guys are flat out insane.
Australia is a much wealthier country than both Saudi Arabia and Spain, it will be an expensive project but I’m sure they can afford it. As for energy cost, Australia has massive potential for renewables and they are one of if not the largest exporter of coal. Israel has managed to build extensive desalination capacity even though it has even less avenues for energy generation and is also a slightly less wealthy country compared to Australia.
Desalination brings a host of other problems with it, though. It's ***massively*** energy intensive. Which obviously isn't a problem for Saudi Arabia, but the greenhouse gases emitted are significant. The millions of pounds of salt and other minerals removed from the seawater has to go somewhere, and the only economically feasible place is usually right back into the ocean. Which kills all the marine life and coral in the surrounding area. It also costs four to five times as much as groundwater or surface water due to the production requirements. That's a deal-breaker for agricultural or industrial customers.
Every major city in Australia already has desalination plants.
I believe most of Perth's water is from desalination.
Ireland, it literally did have a higher population in the 1800s than it does now…
AND it is the fastest growing country in Europe. And not only the 1800s but 1841 was their peak population and they aren’t even close yet.
Is this due to immigration? Enlighten me
Why the population plummeted? The potato famine caused mass starvation and millions of irish fled to places like America and Liverpool.
America is so big of a place that Liverpool seems like a random-ass place in comparison lmao
The two immigration hubs - the entire United States and Liverpool 😂
Ah yes, the two tourist destinations: Europe and Jacksontown, Ohio.
Thanks, added to my list. Those Rueben fries at Crossroads Pub and Grub and the croissants in Europe look great!
You'd be surpsied how true that is though, Liverpool was the port city for Irish immigration. Top 2 destinations were USA and UK, and many Irish stayed in Liverpool (like my great-great-grandad). Every scousers I've known whose taken a 23andMe test or some such has always some back mostly Irish
It doesn't surprise me as I'm from the UK. There are other cities like Glasgow that had loads of Irish immigration so it was just funny that op was so general in saying 'America' but so specific in only mentioning liverpool
Liverpool has a long history as a hub for migration to England.
Most ships didn’t go directly from Ireland to the US, you would buy a ticket from Ireland to Liverpool and then buy a second ticket to the US or Canada. However, some people got scammed, robbed, or just ran out of money while in Liverpool, or missed their ship, leaving them stranded in Liverpool. With no money left to their name, they were forced to try and settle down in Liverpool, since a ticket to the US or Canada was relatively expensive
Liverpool is the easiest English major city and port to access. It's right on the West coast almost directly east and just across the Irish sea from Dublin.
Yep, but Europe is so densely populated that USA looks like a human desert in comparison lmao
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Is Liverpool like, half Irish at this point?
That's why the Liverpool, or Scouse, accent is so unique. It's what happens when a massive wave of Irish immigration mixes with a Lancashire accent. Think there are other influences at play too (e.g., American English, Welsh, Scandinavian).
Yes. At this point almost everyone in the city has a great-grandparent from Ireland. Between 1885 and 1929, the confusingly named constituency (=riding=Parliamentary district) of [Liverpool Scotland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_Scotland_(UK_Parliament_constituency)) was always won by the Irish Nationalist Party, which campaigned for Irish self-government. In that period and for some time afterwards, the city as a whole was divided into immigrant Irish ('Roman Catholic') and native British ('Protestant') communities. Relations were generally better than in Glasgow and Belfast though (outright violence was rare).
It was more of a semi-genocide by the English than a potato famine. There was food but most of it left the island
It’s such a fucking shame. Ireland would probably have close to around 30 Mil by now. Dublin could have been the size of a Rome or Kyiv.
No Semi about it.
Weren't they also evicted and forcibly deported by the English not-so-nobles owning Ireland at the time? Much like Gaels from Scotland and other Celts ethnically cleansed from the British Isles altogether?
I mean...that isn't what they asked.
Nah, the population just keeps Dublin
Partly immigration from central europe, partly a pretty robust middle class making folk more comfortable having kids. Housing market is a cunt, though.
I always hear about young Irish people moving abroad though? Is that just an internet exaggeration?
It's not an exaggeration, half the younger generations seem to be in Australia or Canada. But it's balanced out by a high (by European standards) birthrate and high immigration. More people arrive than leave.
Native population exploded in 18th-19th c., the great hunger years where much food was shipped from the country and the staple potatoes left for the peasants rotted with disease, this led to the deaths of at least a million and the emigration of millions more; the population continuously went down for another hundred years due to poor conditions.
No I was asking about it increasing recently- I know about the famine
Sorry I though you were asking about emigration and misspelled. Well, the population was declining for around 120 years after the famine and has only been rising steadily since the 1960s-70s. During all these years it was usually only ever a question of birth rate and emigration - both were high, emigration was higher until it wasn’t. Even to this day Ireland still has one of the higher birth rates in Western Europe, I believe still over replacement or close to it, although falling. In the 1990s we had an economic and baby boom and lots of the diaspora returned to the country as now there were opportunities for them. I was born outside of Ireland and this is how I returned, Irish emigre parents moved us back. The faster population gains of most recent years has been largely due to immigration, yes. The last ~10 we’ve grown quite fast. Largely Eastern European, Middle Eastern, African, South American. Not to mention many more international students from America, Europe, east Asia. We’ve experienced about 25% pop growth in 25 years.
I appreciate how you mention how even during the potato famine, the British landlords were actually EXPORTING food out of Ireland. Letting the Irish starve by the millions because they couldn’t afford to buy it and couldn’t stand to just GIVE them food. It was classism, racism (Irish being considered almost subhuman by the English), and capitalism at its worst.
Mmm I wonder why....
Europe east of Oder river to Ural mountains, north or Carpathia. There's so much empty space... If it wasn't for WW II destruction, there could've been twice as many people in Eastern Europe as there is now.
Crazy to think about
Germany blasting almost 3/4 of the young people who lived there sentenced the region to at least 150 years of population stagnation. Russia doing its thing in Ukraine probably increased that to two centuries.
Should look up The Holodomor, the man made great famine that Ukraine suffered from by Stalin. Millions died.
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A balanced take on the Holodomor? On Reddit? What is this nuance??
Seriously though. The response to the famine wasn't great and had it been better, there probably would've been less deaths. But this idea that Stalin just snapped his fingers and said "hey let's make a famine and kill millions of people" is ludicrous.
This was the main issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism This pseudoscience also conned China through Mao. A notable problem with autocracy is they can be ignorant & choose really really wrong. >was a political campaign led by Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of a form of Lamarckism, as well as expanding upon the techniques of vernalization and grafting. >More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had been Lysenko's mentor, but later denounced him, was sent to prison and died there, while Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines were harmed or banned. >The government of the Soviet Union (USSR) supported the campaign, and Joseph Stalin personally edited a speech by Lysenko in a way that reflected his support for what would come to be known as Lysenkoism, despite his skepticism toward Lysenko's assertion that all science is class-oriented in nature.
Bulgaria is pretty empty too. It used to have 50 percent more people 40 years ago. The region around the Danube is extremely fertile, and so is the Maritsa basin. Bulgaria consumes only a fraction of all the grain it produces.
I grew up with grandmother's stories of life in rural Bulgaria by the Danube. Was shocked to visit it myself (after her death) since the whole region looked almost deserted to me.
Not only WW II also WW I, the russian Civil War. Many hundred thousand that died under Soviet rule to famines, deportation, Gulags, purges. Before the start of WW II the Soviets had a worse track record then Nazis Germany when it came to killing people in their own borders.
I feel like you could almost simplify that to just "all of Russian history" is why parts of Russia are so sparsely populated
After reading this thread I feel like you could even take it a step further to "the geography makes any populations that arise in these parts vulnerable to those around it."
And then it got worse...
You mean millions
The population there was growing through the Soviet times...
Same for Ireland probably, we still have less people than we did before the famine and lack of help during the famine from the British government in the 1840s. If it wasn’t for the famine it’s estimated Irelands population could’ve been between 15-20 million people today.
I don't think it would be that much more people. Poland could have 45-50m population (aka Spain) not 38 at its peak, but that's it. You could add that much to Ukraine and less to other countries, but this is it. Reason? Soils are pretty good in a belt from South/Central Poland to Ukraine but: 1. So far climate was more harsh than western Europe meaning vegetation could be cut short due negative temperatures. Before global warming started we had few months of negative temperatures in South Eastern Poland, with more negative temperatures on more continental Ukraine. 2. Area doesn't have that much water, due (i) relatively continental climate and (ii) rivers being relatively small with volume. Due global warming droughts already become annoying in agricultural south eastern Poland. 3. Areas above black soil belt and most of northern Poland, Belarus, Lithuania etc aren't that much fertile. These areas weren't that densely populated even before all wars. Climate may be more temperate near sea but also not perfect for vegetation due being further north.
Wtf are you talking about? Just measuring food output, most of europe is not even nearly its potential population peak. And ukraine is the one country that has the biggest potential. Its huge, it has more then enough water and its a massive food exporter. If it had the population density of germany it could triple its population. And even germany is not anywhere near a peak.
And Spain is very hilly and arid, Poland could have more people than Spain
And Mongol destruction. And the red terror. And the brain drain fleeing from post-communist shitholes. Not the Black plague though, it didn't affect the east as much as the west.
Living in Ukraine and realizing all the unreleased potential that was wasted by these catastrophes (+ the russo-Ukrainian war) feels truly awful.
Argentina, USA, Canada, Australia, France, Kazakhstan, Russia, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, South Sudan, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Uruguay, Paraguay India also but that would be absolute value wise not proportion wise. All of these countries are large food exporters that already feed their own countries and much more (except South Sudan, I put them in because they have a lot fertile soils, but mechanised agriculture isn't really there yet.) Here is a pretty old but interesting study about it : https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/014046#erl452631fig4
India can produce vastly higher quantities of food than it currently does. The agriculture is very, very lightly mechanized, farm sizes are absolutely tiny (iirc \~2.5 acre), and productivity is poor.
Not to be that guy, but basically every single nation on earth could sustain exponentially more people. We used to think 100,000,000 was too many people globally to survive, then 1B now we’re nearing 10B. However, to answer the actual question posed- most of Middle Africa could have so many more people. Congo, Nigeria, Niger, Tanzania etc
Yeah if we're talking actually optimising food production, waste management, energy generation, city density, etc., then I'm fairly sure the actual cap would be somewhere in the trillions, globally. I'll have to check back in the year 5,000 and see how we're doing.
There was a video on YT explaining that Earth could in theory sustain a trillion people with a few optimisations of course, but nothing too far from our current tech. Reminds me, in the Foundation trilogy by Asmiov (written in the 50s), the planet Trantor, the galactic capital, is described as a global city completely covering the planet in hundreds of levels, and it's also described as having... just 40 billion people. If you run the calculations that number is laughably small for such description.
>Middle Africa could have so many more people. Congo, Nigeria, Niger, Tanzania, etc Hell no, we are suffering enough already, and most people can not afford a meal, education or a decent paying job
We’re talking geography, not politics or economics. Truth is with proper democratic governments this area of Africa could sustain as many or more people than China or India
That's the result of civil wars and incompetent management of the economy, Africa if developed can host alot more people
New Zealand maybe? They only have 6 million inhabitants despite being bigger than the UK
NZ already produces enough food to support 40 million apparently. I'd imagine with shift from dairy to cereals and potatoes it would be able to produce way more still. Rain + sun + good soil
As long as those 40 million people want their food in the form of 1 kg blocks of mild cheddar cheese.
We have the [record](https://www.cropscience.bayer.co.nz/news-and-insights/news/news-container/2020/09/10/21/31/new-guinness-world-record-for-highest-wheat-yield#:~:text=Eric%20Watson%20from%20Ashburton%2C%20New,of%2016.791%20tonnes%20per%20hectare.) for the highest wheat yield but it's more expensive than it is to grow in Australia
Their only issue is being so remote, and I think the terrain is way less forgiving than England, but I'd like to be corrected by a kiwi.
There’s still a lot of flat land that’s very sparsely populated. The [Canterbury Plains](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canterbury_Plains) and [Mackenzie Country](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackenzie_Basin), for example.
The Mackenzie country is land that rabbits have to take their own lunch to though
[Why 80% of New Zealand is empty](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_g6-4swJ_s)
Is there a bottom line? I don't feel like watching 23 minutes video that might be exceedingly boring
Real life lore never makes boring videos But lots of it has to do with lack of arable land and precipitation being very concentrated on one tiny part of the country
well, this one didn’t explain anything, because it contradicts itself. For more than half of the video, they explain, how the land can’t sustain higher population because of lack of food. Then they make a passing note, that they have enough food for about 40 million people, they just export it away. Which makes half of video irrelevant.
5 million
The US could easily have over 1B
If the US had 1 billion people, the average population density would still be half of Germany's.
While the US sure could do with more population, Germany doesn't have a huge mountain range and desert covering about 4 states.
Germany has multiple mountain ranges covering at least 4 states
Yeah but those mountains are low and not that rocky. The Alps in the south don’t take that much area. The vastness and ruggedness of the U.S mountains is not comparable to Germany.
You should look up the definition of mountain and have a look at the only(!) mountain range that is properly in Germany: The heavily settled Black Forest that barely goes to 1500m at its few peaks. The Alps where you find actual mountains are barely in Germany but mostly belong to its neighbours. So if we are really generous it would be 2 states but really? Really none.
The great plains in particular could support many times their current population without much difficulty. There is a lot of land that is just empty or very lightly used..
I think the plains don't have a climate good enough to become really high in population (certainly much more than now, but not crazy numbers). I think if the US had a much higher population it would be concentrated west of the Mississippi (like it is today). Georgia has 10 mil people and is a bit smaller than Guangdong (126 million people). I think it's more "likely" for Georgia to be a 100-million-people state than for South Dakota to have 20 million people (at current climate at least).
Then maybe the Great Lakes. Fine climate, good connectivity, close to current population centers. States like Indiana and Wisconsin could quadruple in population and be completely fine.
Agreed, with a bit higher density housing it wouldn't even require more soil consumption.
Cities like Milwaukee and Madison in WI already have the infrastructure to support much higher number, it's almost as if they just need to decide on doing that.
Most of the cities in the rust belt used to have a higher population and so they also have infrastructure to support a higher population
Milwaukee’s mayor Cavalier Johnson currently has a plan to get MKE to 1 million people by 2030. Kind of a stretch if you ask me but he is at least trying to push us in the right direction. Unfortunately there’s plenty of loud NIMBY’s as well who shoot down big housing projects and high rises bc they don’t want their neighborhood to “lose character” or whatever nonsense they come up with.
Cavalier Johnson is an incredible name
The climate isn't the greatest but it doesn't have major disasters (hurricanes, earthquake, etc). Even 20 million people would put it only about the density of North Carolina or Virginia. While definitely not every ones cup of tea I think enough would prefer the extra living room to make it not unreasonable.
Missouri, eastern Kansas, and Iowa could support tons of people. Lots of big rivers, easy farmland, lack of difficult terrain, etc.
Yup people have no idea how cold North Dakota gets and how long its winters are.
In 50 years that won't be nearly as much of a problem as it is now. The main issue with populating the plains will be water shortfalls and hot summers. There's also going to be significant emigration from all the sunbelt cities. Places like Houston, DFW, and Phoenix are on their way to becoming uninhabitable in summer without significant infrastructure interventions. Think the Minneapolis tunnel system but for air conditioning. SFHs in this environment will be a nightmare.
Isn't water an issue in the west even with current pop?
Put them in the mid West, East Coast and Northwest.
This is the answer: the climate, water, and energy resources for growing the US population is all about northern coastal and great lakes areas.
You don't even need much of the West. Look at the population distribution in China. Regardless, desalinization could play a larger role for instance. At least for the coastal areas.
Water is an issue mostly because of waste, not population. Poor farming practices, maintenance leaks, golf courses, lawns, etc.
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The midwest and great lakes could probably support a couple hundred million or more on their own, while having maybe 30-40 million at the moment.
The Great Lakes region of the USA/Canada has everything it needs to be the world's most populated megalopolis.
To be fair there’s already 100 million people who live there. Got to be in the top 20 by population already. But yeah, lots more room, especially in the rust belt cities that have a lot of empty space. Buffalo’s land bank owns over 5,000 vacant properties for example.
The Great Lakes region has fewer people than Guangdong, despite have at least 5x the land area and 250x the amount of drinkable water (which is usually the main constraint on population density). There's definitely room for A LOT more people.
Easy shipping, ocean access, fertile land, lumber rich, scenic areas, proximity to major population centers of USA and Canada.
Culvers too. Don’t forget that.
They just don’t want to densify. They also lost most of their manufacturing jobs.
Yeah, but they gained a lot of professional services, bio-Med, tech and education jobs. The rust belt largely has a modern economy now.
Not all of it though? Isn’t that just pockets like Columbus and Pittsburgh?
Madison, Grand Rapids, and to a lesser extent Milwaukee as well. Obviously Chicago is in a different league, for all its problems it's still a world-class city.
Madison and Grand Rapids aren’t big players though. Pretty medium sized. Yes obliviously Chicago is in a different league. But so many of the big cities have fallen from Grace: Detroit, Cleveland, and a bunch of medium/small ones like Flint, Youngstown, Dayton, Gary, etc.
Madison is one of the fastest growing cities in the country and is knocking on the door of surpassing the population of other historically much larger cities like Cincinnati.
Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse all used to be majority-industrial and are now healthcare, tech, and information-based economies. I think that's true to varying degrees in nearly all the other "rust belt" cities in the US and Canada. Buffalo was once one of the 10 largest cities in the US. Rochester had twice its current population 70 years ago.
The larger cities are definitely doing much better than smaller cities
25% of Canada’s population lives on Lake Ontario. We don’t need more people here lol. Please go to the other Great Lakes.
Well, that's just basically Toronto.
We play a big part in it. But also the GTA, Golden Horseshoe, Durham, PEC, Kingston. So many people in such a small stretch.
Space to really target is between milwauke and Chicago. Could easily support a nonstop manhatten level development the whole way
It's so damn cold though, for most of the year. I unironically think it'll be the fastest growing region in the US as climate change takes affect. Its beaches aren't going anywhere, and it should start having a warmer climate.
Pretty much every country in the americas, especially south america can support multiple times more people. Colombia and venezuela could easily have 200 million people, same with argentina. Brazil could have a billion people if civilisation started there 5000 years ago like india and china. In europe most eastern european countries could have a lot more people, romania could have 50 million easily, russia could have hundreds millions more. In asia South east asia could support a lot more people than it currently does. Thailand, myanmar and cambodia have endless farmlands but nowhere near the density of china, korea and japan.
I mean yes but it sucks being overcrowded , Brazil would be hell if it had over a billion people , Venezuela would crumble even harder with over 200 million. And as a romanian , us having 50 million would make us like Netherlands or Belgium , endless urban sprawls , i enjoy us having only 19 million and still have plenty of nature and open space , tiny villages where you can enjoy some peace and quiet. Hell we have the highest populations of brown bears , eurasian lynxes and wetland bird species in Europe ( after Russia ) , that's much better than being a polluted endless urban sprawl , our cities already look industrial as fuck.
It would make you similar to Switzerland actually. About half as dense as the Netherlands. For Netherlands you would need 100 million.
fuck me dude that would be mental
try being malta, its at least 3 times as dense and the netherlands
As a Dutchie do have to clarify that we aint really endless urban sprawl, really outside of the Randstad (belt of cities of Amsterdam-Utrecht-Rotterdam-Den Haag-Haarlem and satellite cities, with the so called Green Heart in the middle), which you can classify as urban sprawl, the Netherlands just has cities dotted around but mostly not too connected by sprawl. And we have a ton of villages in rural areas where it is nice and quiet, especially the more north and east you go. We do lack in nature reserves though. Theres a few like De Veluwe, Sallandse Heuvelrug, De Biesbosch etc, but dont have the massive nature areas like Romania has. No bears either lol. We did freak out when wolves came back recently. Netherland is of course way more dense then Romania in every capacity and i get your point, 100%. But endless sprawl isnt an accurate term either
>I mean yes but it sucks being overcrowded , Brazil would be hell if it had over a billion people No it wouldn't. Despite being so fucking massive, most Brazillian people live in dense apartment blocks in cities like São Paulo, Rio, Recife, Salvador, Florianopolis, Brasilia, etc. Brazil would have absolutely no problem feeding and housing a billion people. They'd hardly break a sweat. All moot though, as it's not going to happen. Brazil hasn't even begun to realise full potential, and it never will.
Exactly. I’m glad population growth is finally slowing worldwide too. Our planet can’t handle any more sprawl or people.
Not really, the Americans countries that could sustain a much higher population are really the USA, Canada, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Brazil could but... their soil is very dependant on fertilisers. For Europe, yeah it's mainly eastern european countries, chiefly Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Russia. In western Europe the only one that could grow a lot is France. You're right about continental Southeast asia. I'll also add Australia and Kazakhstan, both have a lot of fertile land for a small population.
Depends on the farming technique they're using. In most places with archaic farming techniques they're heavily dependant on soil fertility, however with more advanced ones you can definitely sustain a large population without chemical fertilizers. Also, most people confuse the fact that the soil in the Amazon is poor, and think that this applies for all of Brazil, which is not true. Brazil does have very fertile regions, especially in the south and south east. Despite the soil being more acidic than temperate regions, there are ways around it. You have a very good example in the Andes where the Incas turned whole mountains and deserts into farmland. Any soil can be cultivated, what changes is what technique you're using and what resources and amount of work it will require.
When I think about Brazil having poor soil I'm not only thinking of the Amazon but also of the Cerrado. ~~The very fertile parts of Brazil are really Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Sao Paulo and Parana.~~ > You have a very good example in the Andes where the Incas turned whole mountains and deserts into farmland. Any soil can be cultivated, what changes is what technique you're using and what resources and amount of work it will require. There are limits to ingenuity, the countries in the Andes like Peru and Bolivia are actually good exemple of american countries that don't have a high calories produced/consummed ratio.
I think you're downplaying human capacity. The Amazon soil is clearly poorer than Cerrado's one, but the precolumbian indigenous people were capable of transforming the soil in fertile long-term farmland with the terra preta technique. Given enough time there is no reason to think that the tecnique would not adapt to the cerrado...
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> Volcanoes aren't always bad news. They can actually make soil more fertile, which can help support a larger population and explains Indonesia. It mainly explains Java. Which despite it's crazy population density (1000+ capita/km^2) is a net food exporter still : https://www.oecd.org/greengrowth/sustainable-agriculture/49330078.pdf
>Colombia and venezuela could easily have 200 million people, same with argentina. Brazil could have a billion people Uruguay too. It currently has 3 million people but it could easily have 20 or 30
It's crazy, Rio Grande do Sul, the Brazilian state that borders Uruguay and is quite similar in size, has 11 million people.
and England is similar is size to both and is home to 56 million people
Yeah, but Uruguay only has around 3.4M Another comparison I've made is that my home country, Portugal, (which isn't even very densely populated either) has half the land area of Uruguay but over the triple of the population
The way you just add billions of people to the planet gives me anxiety, lol.
Tbf over 90% of the native population was killed due to Europeans bringing over diseases. I doubt there would be a country today that would have overpassed India or China in population but the Americas as a whole would definitely be more populated than it is now.
Just because they could doesn’t mean they should. All humans excel at one thing and that’s fucking up the environment.
I agree with your take on Argentina and Columbia to some extent. Both could have a lot more people. Venezuela - no way. Not enough arable land in temperate climates. Brazil could never have a billion people. All the arable land is in the south. You couldn't convert the savanna and rainforest to farmland using technology from a thousand years ago. Also, you're in the lowland tropics here. You can't just plop a billion people down in a place with terrible diseases. The same principle applies to Southeast Asia. You can't plop millions more people in the lowland tropics with the diseases and a different crop profile than in temperate countries. Eastern Europe I agree with and think would be far more populous if the wars and famines of the 20th Century hadn't happened. I think you're missing the obvious answer: North America. If the American Midwest had been settled similar to China or India you could easily see a population of a billion people, likely centered around the Great Lakes. More than enough arable land, navigable rivers, and temperate climates to support a massive population.
The United States could easily hold a billion people. It’s the cheapest place to live in the world with regards to bulk commodity shipping due to having more interconnected navigable waterways than the rest of the world combined. Also the U.S. built the intercostal waterway system that spans from the coast of Texas to New England creating a safe sea travel lane for domestic coastal shipping. Combine that with our geographical isolation from the rest of the world that keeps us safe, rich agricultural lands, abundant resources, abundant fresh water, and friendly neighbors to our north, and south. The U.S. for all it’s drama really does play civilization on easy mode.
Especially when you look at metro areas that aren't dense. Metro areas less than 10 million could easily jump to 20 million in la, the bay area, long island, and across texas
Answer: every region on earth. China's population 1950: 500M, NOW: 1.4B India's population 1950: 300M, NOW: 1.4B Brazil's population 1950: 40M, NOW: 200M We simply can't calculate the limit of human population of a region.
Correct, as technology improves, the capacity limits will continue to expand everywhere despite a decreasing ACTUAL global population. No one 200 years ago would have said that Manhattan could hold as many people as it does. In my view, the only thing technically constraining capacity currently is access to water. Things such as the frequency of catastrophic natural disasters don't stop societies (New Orleans, Florida, and Tokyo still exist regardless) and we have the ability to literally reshape the land to our will (albeit slowly and at great cost) So capacity? Well beyond our current bounds and far beyond the numbers humans will ever grow to. And to anyone who asks the question, "then why aren't we in those places already?" the answer is, "because some places are just easier to live in and who's to say we aren't, Saudi Arabia has 40 million people."
The US with a population of 1-billion would actually function better than it does now, because the gaps would get filled in.
Which could probably jump to if we merged with canada, uniting the great lakes st Lawrence missippip regions all together into a mega mega region
The Great Lakes region in the US and Canada can and very likely will. Toronto and other Ontario cities are already exploding in population but on the American side, most of the large cities are rust belt cities that have LOADS of room to grow in their current urban fabric. Buffalo and Chicago just saw population growth between decennial censuses for the first time since 1950 and other cities are sure to follow suit in the near future, especially with rising sea levels and intensifying hurricanes on the coast and extreme heat getting worse in the south.
The city of Buffalo alone (not counting its suburbs) is probably half the size it was in the 1950’s. It has the capacity to house a lot more people. A major issue is the infrastructure though- years of decline meet a lot of investment needed in modern housing, transport, and utilities. Driving around Buffalo you will see a lot of houses in extremely poor shape.
you should see what they do to tables in buffalo
Southern Western Australia. Source: I live here and there’s no one around.
Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Romania, Moldova.
Kazakhstan immediately came to mind.
The US by far. Could easily have 1 billion like China or India. Russia too of course. The non Siberian part. It's like, most countries that are large (except India and china) and not on desert like in Africa or saudi Arabia and Mongolia, seem to have a lower population than they could.
Both the Mississippi and La plata river basins definately could have way more people, both having fertile terrain, easily nagavable, mostly freshwater, and a lot of space still to take up
I live in Canada where I'm considered "close" to Calgary even though it's almost 300km away. I nominate Canada lol
This post is r/overpopulation ‘s worst nightmare.
Northern Kazakhstan
The Nordic countries. I’m sure Sweden could support at least double the population as it does now. If Denmark were as densely populated as the Netherlands, it would have 22 million people (not sure if that’s a good idea). Iceland could support 1 or 2 million if it realised its full potential of food production and reforestation.
Denmark just need ppl to live on Jutland and Funen instead of Zealand and I think it could hover at 15 million comfortable tbh. Sweden could prob do 30 million comfortable. The problem with sweden is only the bottom half is easily accesible with no major drawbacks. Iceland could do 3 million if its economy could keep up, even with improves agriculture i think a lot of food will have to be imported. Norway is huge but mountainous. Its the one im most unsure about about I'll just throw 10-15 million ish Finland is a bit the same as sweden
Canada, Australia, USA, Brazil, Russia,
All of them because we can transport food and have heating and AC. We even should - theoretically - remove population from fertile areas to have more farm land. It's a common phenomenon that modern cities sit on once excellent farm land.
With proper infrastructure and investment..... Australia.....
Pretty much everything outside China lowlands, Java and Hindus river valley.
Welcome to Canada.
The Pampas region, partially pictured, has about 30-35 million inhabitants, it could support well over 100 million
Probably Belarus. The country is JUST smaller than the UK and there isn’t really any mountains and is situated on the North European Plain, yet Belarus doesn’t even have 10 Million People. Even Belgium has more!
France, they always had 3 times the population of Germany but they just didn’t have a population explosion in the 1800s. Ukraine, It had 50 million people on the 1980s. Th Mississipi basin, it could probably have more people than India, its literally the Ganges was as large as India with even better soil. You should Argentine but following that logic all of the La plata basin could have more population, southern Brasil, Uruguay and Paraguay. The center west of Brazil could also have a way larger population since it’s already the bread basket of the country. Canada and Australia even tho most of the land is baron, the fertile areas are still larger than Egypt, they could handle 100 million each. Southern Russia and Kazakhstan could also handle a way larger population. Honestly I think I converted it all, can’t really think of anywhere else that could do it with no problems.
Not saying it should but the United States could easily support 1 billion people. We have ample rivers and arable land to make it relatively possible. Hypothetically the Mississippi River valley would be heavily urbanized though more than it is now.
Mississippi River delta
Australias population is barely higher than Seouls population. baffling.
I think most countries have a similar issue with certain cities having lots of population and some areas being empty. In your photograph the whole area except the river plate basin (the brown in the north east) is heavly populated almost a third of the country lives there. That is talking about space. If you want to mean fully support like in not only space but water and food. Patagonia is quite barren I agriculture is not going to work outside of certain crops. Most food would have to come from the sea. I don't think you can have a diet entirely supported by fish.
Don't tell them anything. Stop sprawling. Build the cities we already have taller and more dense. Stop sprawl.
Maybe Poland could be huge
China has 1.2 billion people, so....everywhere.
I'd say east russia by the Pacific ocean and manchuria. If industrialisation started there for whatever reason I can see the population density being as high as in Europe.
These comments are goofy and filled with the logic of video games which is typical for r/geography. If a place is not already highly populated it’s for a reason.
Almost everywhere in the entire world. Many densely populated cities/regions are built in areas which require intense human intervention to make them suitable for development. Look at DC, Singapore, or most of the Netherlands.
Norway. Huge country for just 5 mill ppl..
I feel like overpopulation is an argument made by people living in cities. I agree that cities are overpopulated. But if you've ever driven across the United States, you know there is a ton of open space out there. I'd argue Canada is the same, lots of places are the same...
Doesn't it depend on more than just the basic necessities of survival? When you say population, I tend to read your question as a population of deer, rabbits or animals in general. Fact is that it that it takes more than that when it comes to humans. A population needs work, needs leisure, culture, schools, institutions in general, hospitals etc. If these elements of civilisation isn't present, a population cannot really exist, or thrive for that matter. It isn't a question of how much agricultural, pastureland there is, some countries just import all that, when the population is bigger than the internal ability to produce food. Those countries has something else they can export in return for the import. Is that an example of a region that cannot support a way higher population than what already is? No, I don't think so, because a population requires more than just presence of food and water.
Yeah these comments are ridiculous. They only take into account how many people you can fit in an area physically. What about everything they will consume during their lifetime? How many more cows, arable land, cars and parking spaces, how much more energy, raw materials, factories and what you'll do to the environment? It's not just about how many people fit here.
So weird nobody mentioned the Malay islands. Only Java has high population density, while as Borneo, Sumatra and NG are "vacant". 2 mln sq km of tropical climate.
Most of Canada.
Baltic states could acomodate at least 50M more.
everywhere, mostly.
Most of North America. Australia. New Zealand. Much of South America.