• Question: where is everyone going to live in the future?

    Asked by to Edward, Ian, Mathew, Naomi, sakshisharda on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Sakshi Sharda

      Sakshi Sharda answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Hi addelle
      Well the way it’s going on right now, there are more people in the cities than in the rural areas, thanks to migrations! This means that in a small areas of land there are more poople than those that can be sustained by the resources. This brings about a concept of ecological footprint, which means that people are eating up more resources in that area than that are present. Now some engineers have introduced an idea of having floating cities in the future that are big enough to sustain 30,000 people. China is making artificial cities with tall skyscrapers to accommodate people because they have no place to live! Then there are mission to Mars (called Mars one) planned in the near future to take people there to live. This would be a one way trip which would mean that a person once gone would never return!

      The current situation is not so good, in countries such as Japan that have some of the highest densities of people. People live in crammed homes that are only as big as a train berth, that is just 2 metres in height and just enough to be able to sleep with no windows or anything. Due to the massive waves of migration from rural areas there is huge pressure on resources such as water, housing and even transport, leading to pollution and diseases. We need to make more and more cities that are sustainable and eco-friendly.

    • Photo: Ian Stephenson

      Ian Stephenson answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Sakshi’s answer got me thinking and I did some maths…

      the area of the surface of the earth is 510million sqkm, but only 149million km^2 is land.

      There are 6billion people, so that’s only 0.025km^2 per person, which doesn’t sound like much but there are a million square meters in every square km (1000x1000m). Putting it that way, thats 25,000 m^2 per person.

      The average new build house in the UK is about 80 square metres. Lets call that 100, but that includes the upstairs too, so we have a land footprint of about 50M^2.

      putting that together, we’ve got enough land for EVERYONE to have 500 three bedroom houses EACH.

      Ok, if you owned 500 houses you’d probably want a bit of garden in some of them, maybe a swimming pool, and a garage for all your sports cars… There’s also the question of space for roads, schools, offices, factories, and probably most important farms to produce food. There are also large areas of land where living would be quite unpleasant (deserts, mountains, arctic), so we’re not all going to get 500 houses, but there’s clearly enough space.

      It’s not about being short of resources, but about how we choose to use them.

    • Photo: Naomi Osborne

      Naomi Osborne answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      With an ever increasing population (expected to grow to over 9 billion by 2050), asking where we live is a very good question!

      A lot of it will come down to clever architecture – we’ll have to start building on more rural areas, and like Sakshi mentioned, building up is a way to house more people. I can’t see our population ever being big enough that we have to cover all land with housing – if it ever did then this would be so far in the future that living on the moon may be a possibility!

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