Celebrating Critical Thinking While Pondering Population

It’s that time of year again in Happy Valley: Penn State graduation! This upcoming weekend more than 14,000 diplomas will be awarded to students university-wide, adding to the more than 750,000 Penn Staters worldwide.

And then, they, and many of the other 48,700 or so students enrolled here at the University Park campus, will pack up and leave. For the next several months until the beginning of fall semester the population of State College Borough will drop precipitously — from around 39,500 people to maybe half that.

As locals we’ll be able – except on Arts Festival weekend – to visit our favorite restaurants and watering holes downtown without long lines. As we drive up College Ave., fewer people will walk aimlessly in front of our cars with their faces in their phones. Drivers won’t make left turns from the right lane. Cars won’t be stopped here, there and everywhere, with flashers on—or not – while people get in-and-out of those cars. And the number of cars inventing new methods of parallel parking will diminish greatly. 

Although State College Borough will still have a greater population density – close to 4,500 people per square mile if it loses half its population — than the generally rural demographic of Centre County with 143 people per square mile, it will seem a lot quieter. 

As a kid growing up in north-central Pennsylvania this is the sort of space I knew. I lived in a normal house on a normal street in a normal town surrounded by farms and valleys and rivers and mountains and forests. Sure, there were people, but it was a short bike ride from my house to many different places where there weren’t people. Places with populations in five digits were big, and anywhere that required six digits to express its population was huge. 

I attended the traditional public schools, as did just about every other peer of mine. Outside of the local Catholic schools, there weren’t any other schooling options. For our public school,s the grade-to-building splits back then were kindergarten-sixth grade in the elementary schools;seventh to ninth grades in the junior high schools; and 10 to 12 grades in the senior high school. 

At times during elementary and junior high school, we would be marched out of our classrooms and into the school auditorium for an “assembly” of some sort. Occasionally these assemblies would be for the purpose of informing us of some great social ill, such as tobacco use, safe driving and the coming ice-age. We would usually be shown a documentary film that more-often-than-not contained graphic images – what better way to get across a message to young minds. Then we might listen to a guest speaker, and maybe even get handouts.

As I look back and think about some of the topics that were presented to us open-minded school children as fact, I recall one of those assemblies was about overpopulation. As a country and planet we were creating new humans much faster than old humans were dying, which resulted in our population growing. 

The best-selling book “The Population Bomb” was first published in 1968 and by the early 1970s was a hit. It sold millions of copies and has been characterized as one of the most influential books of the 20th century. The gist of the book was that there was one simple reason for many of the world’s terrible problems: too many people. 

The point being that there were too many humans on the planet who were living closely together and taking too much from the earth. The belief was that unless we reduced the number of people on the planet, everyone would suffer and face “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.”

It’s hard to understate the importance this book had on society – specifically American society. It’s been credited in part with creating the environmental movement as we now know it. And to my empathetic young mind, and the minds of many of my schoolmates, the information we received about this coming worldwide tragedy was powerful stuff. 

So powerful that a half-century later the assembly where we were presented this end-of-the-world-or-else scenario still occasionally resonates in my mind. And it resonates even more so these days due to the popular cultural reference of the Marvel “Avengers” movies. In these Marvel movies the most evil, bloodthirsty and powerful villain in the universe, Thanos, has one mission: use the Infinity Stones to wipe out half the universe so that the other half will survive. Forced population control. It’s probably not a coincidence that Thanos first showed up in Marvel comic books in February 1973, right around the height of “The Population Bomb.”

In the five decades since I sat in that assembly, I’ve had the opportunity to travel to a lot of this country. I’ve spent time in 39 of the 50 states. And the one thing I’m always amazed at as I drive around is the absolutely large amount of uninhabited space. Two summers ago, my wife and I were driving through a stretch of Wyoming where for miles there was no sign of humanity, save the road.

Here in Pennsylvania, I always think of the section of I-80 between the Lewisburg and Lamar exits because there wasn’t, and still mostly isn’t, anything there. To this day Mile Run exit 199 still drops you off to nothing. At least they’ve paved the road at the bottom of the exit ramp. It used to be just gravel. 

Due to this ever-present Marvel cinematic reminder of population overload, my personal experience with vast rural areas, and the availability of information on the internet that decades ago would have taken days to track down, I recently decided to perform my own little semi-scientific project. How much space do all the humans on the planet actually take up? If we stood everyone in the world side-by-side in long lines, how much land would we need to hold them?

I was surprised by the answer.

The current population of the world is 8.01 billion people.

The average shoulder width of a person is 16.2 inches. The average chest depth is 10.2 inches. Meaning that when an average human stands they take up a footprint of 16.2 inches by 10.2 inches. Just for ease of calculations, let’s bump that up to round numbers for a little breathing space – 24 inches wide by 18 inches deep – which gives us exactly 3 square feet of space. Now, let’s just say we double that to 6 square feet of space to cover all shapes and sizes. 

So, we’re giving every human 6 square feet in which to stand. With 8.01 billion people we need 48.06 billion square feet of space. That sounds like a lot. 

Except, not quite as much as it might appear. There are 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile. If we divide that into the 48.06 billion square feet we need, it shows that equals 1,724 square miles of space. In short, if every human on the planet was lined up in rows, side-by-side, we would need 1,724 square miles of land to fit them all.

To use a local comparison, Centre County is 1,108 square miles and Clinton County is 887 square miles, for a total of 1,995 square miles. If every human on the planet was standing in a space 3 feet wide by 2 feet deep, they would not take up even two central Pennsylvania counties. 

To be fair, at its core “The Population Bomb” was more about inequitable distribution than the total number of people, but try explaining that nuance to a full assembly of junior high school students. The effects were the same as the proverbial “hot take” in today’s social-media and headline-influenced world. 

Over time though, as I grew and was inundated with all the other end-of-the-world level information we were bombarded with, I began to think more deeply about some of the information I was presented. I believe I’ve garnered some “critical-thinking” skills and revisited some of my earliest biases. Hopefully the 14,000 diplomas Penn State will award this weekend signify the potential critical thinking abilities of these graduates. Because as much as I appreciate the lower population of wonderful Happy Valley when they’re gone, not everything is always what it’s made out to be, and it’s nice to have them here too!