The inspiration for this article came from a meme I saw online saying that Flat Earthers are worried that social distancing measures will push people over the edge!
Obviously they are referring to the huge psychological and economic hardship that billions of us are facing after enduring weeks of social distancing (I am currently on week 6 of working from home). But it got me thinking, how much room do we currently have to keep up social distancing guidelines, and what countries have the most room for social distancing?
First, to keep at least 2 metres away from the next nearest person, each person would need 4 m2.
Based on a rough calculation, that would mean you could get up to a population density of 250,000 people per km2. The most densely populated city in the world is Manila, at 46,178 people per km2. So there's no need for the Flat Earthers to worry.
In fact, if you gave the whole world just 4 m2 you could fit all 7.8 billion humans on Earth within 31,200 km2 - or a country roughly the size of Belgium. Obviously, the problem here is that people need food and an income source in order to survive. There reason the novel coronavirus has spread so quickly is because we are now a highly interconnected world, which often involves us getting well within 2 metres of other people (public transport, gigs, shopping, etc).
So what if we allowed each person to have their own piece of land big enough to support themselves so that they'd never have to come into contact with anyone else?
There's no real consensus on how much space it takes to support one person, and it depends hugely on their food source. But let's take a reasonable figure of 5 acres per person (~20,000 m2). That takes our maximum population density down to 50 people per km2.
I used the UN world population prospects data set to find out the population size, country area and population density for each country. You can see a live table of the world's population data here at worldpopulationreview.com.
As it turns out, a lot of countries would struggle to give each of their citizens 5 acres of land. Luckily, there are 74 countries to choose from if you do want to go and remove yourself from society completely. Here's the top 10 countries for lowest population density:
Of course, this doesn't take into account how much of the land area of each country can be used. But, as this is all hypothetical, I don't think we need to worry about everyone suddenly moving to Greenland and getting pissed that it's mostly glaciers.
I used the UN data to create a map of countries that would be able to support this extreme isolation below, countries in grey have a density above 50 people/>km2. As you'll see below, it's mostly European, Middle Eastern, Asian and Central American countries are more densely populated and, therefore, coloured grey.
The cool thing about this data set is that it also contains historical population data, as well as predicted populations for 2030 and 2050. So I applied the same process to population at 2050 to see whether any countries would no longer be able to support this 5 acres per person rule.
If you want to explore these data for yourself, you can see the full data set and workup of the visualisations on Tableau Public here.
I'd like to thank my sister in law, Ellen, and her boyfriend Matt for humouring my hypothetical questions and for helping with the mathematics on this post. You were very helpful on a sunny Saturday morning!
Obviously they are referring to the huge psychological and economic hardship that billions of us are facing after enduring weeks of social distancing (I am currently on week 6 of working from home). But it got me thinking, how much room do we currently have to keep up social distancing guidelines, and what countries have the most room for social distancing?
First, to keep at least 2 metres away from the next nearest person, each person would need 4 m2.
 |
| What would the world look like if you were to keep everyone exactly 2 metres apart? |
Based on a rough calculation, that would mean you could get up to a population density of 250,000 people per km2. The most densely populated city in the world is Manila, at 46,178 people per km2. So there's no need for the Flat Earthers to worry.
In fact, if you gave the whole world just 4 m2 you could fit all 7.8 billion humans on Earth within 31,200 km2 - or a country roughly the size of Belgium. Obviously, the problem here is that people need food and an income source in order to survive. There reason the novel coronavirus has spread so quickly is because we are now a highly interconnected world, which often involves us getting well within 2 metres of other people (public transport, gigs, shopping, etc).
So what if we allowed each person to have their own piece of land big enough to support themselves so that they'd never have to come into contact with anyone else?
There's no real consensus on how much space it takes to support one person, and it depends hugely on their food source. But let's take a reasonable figure of 5 acres per person (~20,000 m2). That takes our maximum population density down to 50 people per km2.
I used the UN world population prospects data set to find out the population size, country area and population density for each country. You can see a live table of the world's population data here at worldpopulationreview.com.
As it turns out, a lot of countries would struggle to give each of their citizens 5 acres of land. Luckily, there are 74 countries to choose from if you do want to go and remove yourself from society completely. Here's the top 10 countries for lowest population density:
 |
| Top 10 countries for lowest population density (people/km2) |
Of course, this doesn't take into account how much of the land area of each country can be used. But, as this is all hypothetical, I don't think we need to worry about everyone suddenly moving to Greenland and getting pissed that it's mostly glaciers.
I used the UN data to create a map of countries that would be able to support this extreme isolation below, countries in grey have a density above 50 people/>km2. As you'll see below, it's mostly European, Middle Eastern, Asian and Central American countries are more densely populated and, therefore, coloured grey.
 |
| World map coloured by population density. Paler colours indicate countries are close to 50 people/km2 while grey indicates density is >50 people/km2 |
The cool thing about this data set is that it also contains historical population data, as well as predicted populations for 2030 and 2050. So I applied the same process to population at 2050 to see whether any countries would no longer be able to support this 5 acres per person rule.
In total, 12 countries are predicted to hit a population density above 50 people/km2, and 9 of them are in Africa, which as a region is predicted to contribute the majority of population growth over the next few decades.
If you compare the maps of 2019 and 2050 population density, you get a clear impression of what is predicted to happen. The most noteworthy country, that goes from below 50 people/km2 to well above it, is Niger. In 2050, the population of Niger is predicted to reach 65.6 million, an increase of 42.3 million in just 3 decades!
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| Focus on Europe and Africa: very few countries in Europe have a population density below 50 people/km2 Left: Actual population density of countries in 2019; green shading indicates countries with a population density below 50 people/km2 Right: Forecast projection of population density of countries in 2050; blue shading indicates countries with a population density below 50 people/km2 |
If you want to explore these data for yourself, you can see the full data set and workup of the visualisations on Tableau Public here.
I'd like to thank my sister in law, Ellen, and her boyfriend Matt for humouring my hypothetical questions and for helping with the mathematics on this post. You were very helpful on a sunny Saturday morning!
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