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Comment by antt | Hacker News Reader

For Americans that don't get what the big deal is: Australia has a livable area about the same size as does California. The rest of the continent is desert that gets so hot they had to invent new colors to describe it [0].

Even towns in the 'habitable' area get in the upper 40C [115F] regularly during summer. The last three years have been relatively cool, but in between 2008-2012 there were days where Melbourne and Sydney basically had to shut down because the heat made infrastructure unusable without damaging it.

There is hardly any water and the cities were designed around cars far more than any city outside Los Angeles. Add a population that's three times what the neighborhoods were planned for and you see why Mad Max was thought up here.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/01/it...

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I think the real problem is that the growth has improved the economy but reduced the quality of life. A few decades ago it was affordable for most families to buy a nice house close to the beach. Now the big cities have doubled in population and quadrupled in price, that is no longer achievable.

Yes Australia could easily have 100m people living there, but they wouldn't be as comfortable as when there were 15m.

Its a bit like California. LA & SF in the 60s and 70s sounds dreamy - and we'll never get back to there.

How do you define an ‘improved’ economy? I don’t know any long-term Sydney residents who think life has gotten better for them.

It’s full of homeless camps, traffic is a gridlock. Rents are insane. Salaries are low.

There is hardly any water and the cities were designed around cars far more than any city outside Los Angeles.

As a past/present resident of both LA and Melbourne, I would modify that to say that Syd/Mel are as dependent on cars as much as Los Angeles, but without the planning commitment to cars that LA has exhibited. Bring up maps of LA and Sydney/Melbourne on the same scale. LA has a grid of freeways with a cell-size of 10-15 km. Not so for Sydney and Melbourne, and their surface streets are much worse. Roads designed as two lanes each way made into 3 narrow lanes each way by turning the shoulder into a new lane. Nowhere to go when someone breaks down. Without a commitment to either a comprehensive transit system, or a decent freeway network, Syd/Mel have half-arsed implementations of both.

In LA I was comfortable cycling along PCH, Santa Monica Blvd, Sepulveda Bvd etc, but I would never consider cycling on their Melbourne equivalents.

> Without a commitment to either a comprehensive transit system, or a decent freeway network, Syd/Mel have half-arsed implementations of both.

Funny you say that - when I visited Sydney I thought the regional rail network was better than anywhere in the US outside the eastern seaboard.

This is true. Note that Sydney has fairly unique infrastructure. Sydney has extensive heavy rail that runs from a web of regional areas straight into the city via underground tunnels and this then becomes a circular underground subway system with numerous stops in the city itself. The Sydney system is great. I used to commute 90mins each way on Sydney trains but the fact that I didn't have to change trains to get to my inner city subway stop meant I took a seat, got my laptop out and it became no different to being at my desk at work. A few less distractions in fact. I might be gushing a bit because I now live in SF which has made me realise just how good Sydney was.

Melbourne is similar to SF. They love their above ground trams for inner city transport but those trams do nothing to get people into the city in the first place. The love is pure historical admiration and not rooted in reality. Being above ground is a flaw in terms of adding to congestion and different track gauges and thus train changes is a hassle we could all do without.

In a sane universe, both of these things would not be true.

Even towns in the 'habitable' area get in the upper 40C [115F] regularly during summer

I'm curious about how "uninhabitable" is defined in this context.

There are American cities of millions of people (Phoenix, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, etc...) where summer high temperatures never get below 100-110° for months on end.

They, too, are in the desert, but not classified as "uninhabitable." (OK, maybe Vegas is uninhabitable... ;) )

Down the road from Las Vegas is a town called Baker, California where the hottest temperature on earth was recorded. 134°, IIRC. Thousands of people still live there.

>There are American cities of millions of people (Phoenix, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, etc...) where summer high temperatures never get below 100-110° for months on end.

There are places in Australia that have set records - including this "160 consecutive days above 100F" - note that this isn't talking 'highs', it was above 100 the entire time.

That's great. But I'm still trying to grok how Australians are defining "uninhabitable" for this article.

simple answer: there's no water, so unlike your US examples you can't use massive public diversion projects to make these areas fit for habitation.

> simple answer: there's no water

even deep under the ground?

Nah, the Great Artesian Basin has been overexteacted for decades for agriculture. It can’t be relied upon long term if you start using it in areas with big population growth.

Not even within a few hundred miles? Los Angeles, New York and lots of other American cities bring water in from hundreds of miles away.

The outflow of the Mississippi River is literally like six or seven times larger than from all our river systems combined, to put it in perspective.

We’d probably have to build heaps of desalination plants around the coast and pipe it in to put more people further out.

The outflow of the Mississippi River is literally like six or seven times larger than from all our river systems combined

That's a fun bit of trivia. But I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion. The sources of New York and Los Angeles water are up to a thousand miles away from the Mississippi River watershed. Neither gets its water from there.

The point of my example is that just one river system out of several in the US is many times bigger than all the rivers in Australia.

What I mean is that the problem is not the distance, but that sufficient water just isn't available anywhere in the continent.

Something useful to keep in mind is that all the desert cities of the American Southwest can only exist because of the Colorado river.

I use to say this as a joke that if Australia sells itself to USA, they will have 10 more big cities.

Australians tend to overstate the nature of their desert. It is true that a large part is very hot but then they can have few more cities long the coastline with desalination plants.

But all those sort of things are possible only when you have adventurous people trying to implement radical ideas which the USA gets in disproportionate numbers thanks to its immigration programs.

Australian immigration is only about high skilled immigrants and they do not attract the likes of Steve Jobs to Elon Musk.

I think you are on to something there.

Los Angeles and some other American cities get water from hundreds of miles away, even crossing mountain ranges to do so.

These days that kind of ambitious engineering would be largely unthinkable. Some bean counter somewhere would say it’s not worth the expense and the politicians would go along with it.

Recently I learned that until 2005 Navajo Indians were transporting coal 300 miles via a slurry pipeline to Nevada power plants. Again, something that would be inconceivable in these small thinking days.

I’m glad that a few crazy adventurers like Musk and Bezos and a few others have popped up. It’s been a long time since America had that kind of pioneering spirit.

If people in the 1930’s had today’s mindset, Los Angeles would be just another desert gas stop on the coast road between San Diego and San Francisco.

Glad to see that comment non down-voted. California's paralysis is so bad that they have not built a single new major road in last 25 years and absolutely no new water-reservoirs though population has doubled. Hippie environmentalism and misplaced priorities of politicians are to be blamed here. During the draught their priority was saving some fish by airlifting them from drying ponds rather than figuring out new reservoir projects.

Every time I visit Las Vegas I am reminded that the American prosperity is built on the sweat and blood of those badass pioneers who crossed the desert in unbearable heat, overcame all odds and built a fabulous city.

Read this story for example of a Sicilian man turning hard pen land into an underground orange farm in the middle of Fresno.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpBL_at8FAY&t=3s

Giants are gone and we are living in the times of pigmies.

What is the livable area of California, and what is the livable area of Australia?

What is the population of California, and what is the population of Australia?

Australia = 24 million in 296,790 square miles of habitable land.

California = 39 million in 163,696 square miles of total land.

California has twice as many people in an area half the size (not including inhabitable parts of California since half of it is a desert).

Is the Australian habitable land that low, though? From what I see, they seem to count all the subtropical land as uninhabitable and there's plenty of subtropical countries out there...

I'd definitely lean towards agreeing with you there. And on top of that, I live on the west coast of Australia, and there are people living fine from Albany (at the bottom) to Broome (at the top), but there's probably only 5% of the coast that has people living on it - scattered from top to bottom (but obviously mostly in Perth). Seems like there's a lot of empty space here. I have relatives that live in-land (in the "wheat belt"), and the climate is perfectly livable there. I think the only places where it is not-so-livable is in places like Marble Bar (second hottest place in WA), and yet there are still a bunch of people that live there - my friend grew up there.

Have a look at some of the sample pictures here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outback

and particularly, about a third of the way down, the aerial photography and the arid interior, and consider that that arid desert extends from the equivalent of Oregon to Tennessee, South Dakota to Oklahoma.

Seems like when you have major cities, population density varies so much that it's not a meaningful comparison?

Maybe better to compare available water or other resources. Cities in the desert are viable if you have water.

According to the World Bank, Australia gets almost as much rain as the United States.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.PRCP.MM?end=2014...

I spent a bit of time in Adelaide and found it to be quite easy to get around without using a car. The trains, light rail, and busses all did an excellent job, in my opinion.

A bit pricey perhaps, but I did manage to cover an awful lot of ground without a car while I was there.

> Australia has a livable area about the same size as does California.

California's population is 39M.

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