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Comment by bfung | Hacker News Reader

If you take a step back and look at the earth via satellite layer via Google maps, it’s not as full as it feels on the ground. Quite the opposite.

A sibling comment about people cramming into the same area seems way more accurate.

Also, look up the population density of different countries:

* China has ~4x the people of the U.S. with similar land area

* India also ~4x US population and has 1/3 of landmass

* Russia has ~2x landmass of US, but only ~1/2 population.

There’s plenty of space for more people. Just gotta be less lazy and destructive and build, build, build. Finding how incentives align & not as game-able would also help.

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Arable land is a problem. Most of China lives in one third of the country, and even in that one third there are a lot of mountains that keep population even further concentrated. Russia has never figured out how to really population Siberia and it’s FarEast, it’s sort of a hostile area, although the areas next to China could easily be as populated as the adjacent areas in China. India has a lot of arable land for its size, which is why it is populated the way it is, and see Bangladesh for an extreme take on how dense a country can get with enough arable land.

US has plenty of world-class arable land though, that’s why it’s world’s largest food exporter.

Arable land is only to grow food.

> Most of China lives in one third of the country

Right, so U.S. has PLENTY of space ;)

I’ve been to rural China (village where my family and ancestors are), there’s tons of space to modernize and build still, China def not out of livable space.

Arable land probably has to do more with carrying capacity in terms of agriculture and water resources. Yes, you could build a huge city on the Tibetan plateau but you would have to truck in a lot of stuff to keep people alive.

Even the rural areas, you have to decide whether to keep them growing food (low density for China) or turn them into dense cites. Do too much of the latter and your cities starve. But you can’t really build cities on land unsuited for farming, since again you have to truck a lot of stuff in from far away.

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