The human species already has more than 7.4 billion representatives on this planet. Science fiction has explored concepts like overpopulation and Malthusianism in depth, but experts still wonder how much space each human being ideally needs to live well. That said, what kind of structure could house 7.4 billion people? Using minimum volume parameters... let’s just say it’s not as big as we imagine.
We all want to live comfortably, no doubt about that. But comfort doesn’t mean much without access to basic resources like food, water, medicine, shelter, and energy. These resources represent a point of conflict that keeps experts up at night. More efficiency. More with less. Sustainability. We’re making progress, but we need to go much further. Unfortunately, humans must fight against themselves, though we hold out hope that we’ll make the necessary adjustments to our lifestyle before it’s too late. Back to comfort, there’s a word associated with it: “space”. How much space does humanity occupy? Or better, what kind of structure could (in theory) contain every human being?.
The video provides a broad overview of the largest artificial structures ever built, and those that were planned in the past but never materialized. Its starting point is the “town” of Whittier, Alaska. Why “town” in quotes? Because almost all of its 214 inhabitants live in a single building, which has everything they need, from shops and a school to the police station and the mayor’s office. It then takes as reference some values that, in my opinion, are very low: it calculates a minimum of five people per square meter, with an average height of 1.63 meters. Plugging in these numbers, the result for an artificial structure that could house all of humanity is a cube with 1,346 meters on each side.
I must insist that this is only about space. There are no calculations related to food, water, or anything like that. Now... 1,346 meters sounds like a number within reach of the human species. The Burj Khalifa is 830 meters tall, and the Jeddah Tower will reach 1,008 meters when it’s completed in three years. Of course, a cube is not the same as a tower...
