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Comment by notafraudster | Hacker News Reader

This is an aside to the overall story, but

> At any given time, there are more than 1.4 million seafarers plying the world's waterways, according to the International Chamber of Shipping.

I mean, I guess this is obvious because SOMEONE has to ship all the stuff everywhere, but that's a truly crazy number of people to me. I guess it goes to show that the oceans are almost unfathomably huge that they can still be completely empty, even though a million people are living there on a daily basis.

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1.4 million is an exceptionally small number of people compared to the size of the oceans.

You could fit all 7+ billion humans in New Zealand if we all lived as densely as Manhattan. [1]

So 1.4 million people on the oceans is still virtually empty overall. Think about it this way. There are 3.2 million Mongolians and Mongolia is quite large -- thus, Mongolia is extremely empty. There are less than half as many seafarers as Mongolians, and they are spread over a much larger area.

That being said -- those seafarers are actually mostly just in shipping lanes -- which are actually quite crowded. So crowded such that when they intersect with whale migratory routes, the likelihood of impacts is extremely high.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3016331/think-the-world-is-crowd...

I'm just trying to imagine a city the size of New Zealand, Australia devoted to agriculture and the rest of the planet devoted to nature. That would be quite a statement with respect to stewardship of the planet.

Can’t we choose places that are a little closer to the rest of the planet?

No, that's the beauty of it :)

If the point is the keep them as a nature preserve, their distance is probably a feature.

I kind of want some nature in my life. Cities with the density of Tokyo or New York aren’t exactly known for that, so it has to be in reach.

New Zealand is now a city in Australia?

How on earth did you get that from what I wrote?

I think they just nitpick rather than genuinely misunderstand your point, but yes the 'Place, Bigger-place' is a common form of toponyms in American English.

I think it was sufficiently disambiguated by the word 'dedicated', it wouldn't be possible to have Australia both dedicated to agriculture and to have a city the size of New Zealand inside it. But thank you for explaining.

Misparsed it as something with structure like this, "I'm just trying to imagine a city the size of [Chicago, Illinois] devoted to agriculture[,] and the rest of the planet devoted to nature." I did the same thing and had to read it twice.

It's just a joke based on the structure of your sentence. Should have included a /s or something I guess.

I had the same thought (both my initial misreading, and the idea of making the joke).

I went to primary/secondary school in the United States. I feel like this joke is the sort of thing that an English teacher would say to me in response to me writing something like this (which I'm sure I did). I think part of the humor (for me, at least) is the refrain of that particular (and common) criticism :)

A with placed between New Zealand, and Australia, would not have gone amiss.

I think "Australia devoted to agriculture" is meant to be a separate clause.

New Zealand is a state of Australia according to the Australian constitution. It's just that New Zealand thought that was a bit silly and never paid it any attention, and Australia thought that was fair enough.

Holy crap, this is actually true. I thought it was a joke.

https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2017/12/revealed-...

Yep! I can never find them, but there were even World War style anti-australian propaganda posters depicting Australians as white supremacist monsters coming to take over NZ. I don't know who they were distributed by at the time and I can never get a Google search to turn anything up.

A bit of irony however, with New Zealand being home some of the remaining pristine pockets of nature and home to some truly unique wildlife.

It would be like asking if you would trade Madagascar for the rest of the earth to be returned to nature?

I feel like New Zealand and Australia are the two least suited countries for this idea.

New Zealand is very mountainous and subject to earthquakes and volcanos. Australia is half desert.

I wonder what the best location to concentrate the world's population and agriculture actually would be. My guess would be North America, India, or China.

Western Europe perhaps - geologically stable, temperate climate - UK area is ~ same as NZ, France is far larger so France would be a solid choice.

Hello eggs, meet your new basket.

> You could fit all 7+ billion humans in New Zealand if we all lived as densely as Manhattan. [1]

Can stop spreading these factoids as if they would be feasible in any way?

You can't just stick people vertically on a small plot of land ad infinitum, it doesn't scale. Think about all the services required for all 7 billion people to function properly, New Zealand would collapse on itself.

I ran some calcuations, and the mass of 7 billion people at an average of 60kg each, spread uniformly over New Zealand, would definitely not cause it to collapse, sink, crack, or tip over. Please stop using such hyperbole.

I think they mean the utilities and services, not the land mass.

Your sibling pointed out what I was talking about; transportation, sanitation, food services, EVERYTHING that makes a city function.

You cannot scale that efficiently in your proposed scenario in reality, it is absurd.

Don't worry, New Zealand is safe. This imaginary scenario exists only as a fun thought experiment!

From what I read recently, New Zealand was already struggling to cope with its tourist population. That means they're already on the edge. Probably not a problem anymore since COVID, but we'll see what happens when/if things go back to normal.

There's that famous story of that Marine who fell off a boat and survived at sea for 36 hours.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-11-30-951130...

I cannot for a second imagine the absolute horror of feeling THAT alone with god knows what beneath you. But imagine the good fortune required for a random fishing boat to pass by and find you.

Or this guy who fell off a fishing boat in the middle of the night and survived, two sharks at one point circling him:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/a-speck-in-the-s...

Relevant username.

Also, that guy who survived in a pocket of air in a capsized boat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oqnpEozQYo

The vast majority of them are along shipping routes, which are generally pretty crowded.. at least relative to the open ocean.

For context, that's roughly comparable to the respective populations of Equatorial Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, or Estonia.

1.4 million people though doesn't equal 1.4 million ships. Divide it by let's say 15 people per ship and then all you have is a little less than 100k ships. Which doesn't sound like a lot.

There's about the same number of people (not workers) in the air at any time.

And the air is orders of magnitude bigger.

Which is cool, we got our flying city, but unfortunately we made it evenly distributed.

Looking at Flight Radar, at least pre covid, was absolutely astounding every time. The scale of humanity is really incredible to me. There are more people in the air than live in my city.

When I first flew to a big city, Osaka, I flew over 3000km of desert before even getting out of my country, and then bam, everything was absolutely infested with life and activity. More 'stuff' than I had ever seen.

Looking at Flight radar not long ago, I saw the veritable stream of Japan Post cargo planes one after the other flying into HK or China, I forget. I remember thinking that just the postage was more planes than were aloft where I live for all commercial, travel and personal activity combined.

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