I woke up at 1 a.m. wondering how many people you could fit on Martha’s Vineyard.
I woke up at 1 a.m. wondering how many people you could fit on Martha’s Vineyard.
So I calculated it at two people per square foot. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre — so multiply by two and you get 87,120.
Then there are 640 acres in a square mile, so that gives you 55,756,800 people you could squeeze into a square mile.
Now there are 87.48 square miles on Martha’s Vineyard, so if you squeezed people into every square inch, the number would be 4,877,604,864.
Or in other words — equivalent to the approximate total population of the world in 1987.
Mathematically, if you project current population growth rates to continue on the rate of projection that we have been following, and if there were no energy or food constraints, we would eventually cram people into every square foot on the planet. This is obviously not sustainable and the population will start to decrease as we reach our resource limits and as climate change begins to affect our low-lying planetary population centers, causing not only remediation, buttressing, and withdrawal, but an awareness that population must be controlled.
It seems pretty obvious that we should not be planning for increased tourism, but rather to decrease or at least keep it at the same levels. This is at odds with the Steamship Authority, business community, selectmen and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission — all of whom are planning for greater and greater tourism. If only because as we plan for an ever-increasing revenue base to support the expenditures we plan, there will at some point be a reversal in the rate of taxable revenue and passenger and vehicle revenues for the Steamship Authority and this will be financially unsustainable.
In addition, if we choose the alternative to ever-increasing tourism and decide to become a more exclusive tourist destination based on limitations of what we perceive, then would it be wise to start considering widening the roads, taking land by eminent domain, as any legal shared user path along our roadways would necessitate? A smart idea, or would we be left with yet another anachronism?
Frank Brunelle
Vineyard Haven
Comments
Two people per square foot?
Ken Esq Edgartown, MATwo people per square foot? Mighty tight. Wouldn't you really want to start with how many people you could fit per cubic foot and go from there?
The average person would probably take up two feet by two feet by six feet or 24 cubic feet.
The Vineyard is roughly 100 square miles and we're probably going to want to have buildings that are roughly 1,000 feet tall (why go small?). This would leave us with about 27,878,400,000 cubic miles of space. So, we'll have room for roughly 1.161.600.000 people. Sounds like we're gonna need a bigger boat.
Let's just hope no one has gas.
(Note, please don't depend on the absolute accuracy of these numbers as my rithmitic ain't as good as it used to be and I could have forgotten to carry the naught or made a mistake with my gozintas.
Shhhh..... Listen very
Donna Russell, Esq. Braddock Bay NY (formerly Edgartown)Shhhh..... Listen very closely. The Heath Hen speaks. You can't see him, but if you stand still on silent evenings you may still hear Booming Ben's message about population. The math is very simple. Boom.
Our egos.
Frank BrunelleOur egos.
Earlier this week I proposed that that mathematically it would be possible to fit the entire population of the planet on Martha's Vineyard. Not surprisingly, some may come to doubt that this would be possible. Oh my.
Mathematically, looking at pure physical shapes and geographical grid lines, it does seem to make sense – if for no other reason than the novelty of the idea. But when I started to wonder in actuality what amount of human mass, less the space between atomic particles would be, then I did not have far to look before finding the answer.
You could fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube
This is because matter is incredibly, mind-bogglingly empty. An atom is like a miniature Solar System, with a tight nucleus playing the role of a Sun orbited by electrons like planets. But the nucleus is incredibly tiny compared with the orbits of the electrons. Tom Stoppard, the playwright, had the best image. He said, if the nucleus is like the altar of St Paul's cathedral, an electron is like a moth in the cathedral, one moment by the altar, the next by the dome. Imagine squeezing all the space out of an atom. Well, if you did that to all the atoms in all the people in the world, you could indeed fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube.
And so, in reality, what we really need to calculate is how many sugar cubes could we fit on Martha's Vineyard. Now put that in your coffee and stir it!
Add new comment