The Earth is a Giant Clown Car

Science tells us that the land area on the earth is today 58 million square miles. Over 6.5 billion of us live there. If we have these numbers correct, on average a little over 100 humans live on a square mile of the earth's land.

Humans are almost everywhere. They are remarkably adaptable, living in a wide range of climates from freezing artic to tropics, from deserts to jungles, from lowlands to mountains, and from elegant to humble. This capability to make any place a home is contained in the verse from 150 years ago by John Howard Payne, "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home."

Humans now have a challenge that is an outgrowth of their success at abundantly increasing in numbers. They must cope with being constrained to the finite size of the planet earth. Seeing how many people can fit on the earth is the planet equivalent of seeing how many people can fit into a phone booth or into a car. A clown car in the circus surprises us to see how many people can be contained. Nevertheless there are limits.

References:

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/DanielChen.shtml

http://www.convertworld.com/en/area/

News Update: Our earth is really a giant fishbowl

In the long gone past, everyone who bothered to think about the shape of the earth would tell you it was flat. They would say that it you went far enough, you could fall off the edge. Anyone who spoke otherwise at the time was kooky, or worse, was a heretic.

Then some people, who thought they were smart, made the claim that the earth was a round globe. They argued their point until most people believed it, and they pointed to the images of the earth seen from space. The flat earth types thought the images were fake but were then labeled the kooky ones.

Now we are being told that the global earth view is wrong. Some people, who think they are smart, tell us that the earth is really a giant round fishbowl. In their view, the fish are being crowded out and humans are being crowded in so much as to threaten all life in the fishbowl. Who would have believed it!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/2222548359/sizes/s/