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Comment by forthefuture | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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...

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