“Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above / Don’t fence me in”*…
All of humanity could fit in a building the size of this red box, though it wouldn’t be very comfortable…
The human urge to own land sometimes borders on the absurd… Do we have too many cities with too few people in them? (Answer: Yes!) But there’s an implicit question embedded in that notion of anti-NIMBY place-making, once posed by Leo Tolstoy: “How much land does a man need?”
Tolstoy’s answer was pretty grim. But leave it to a YouTuber to take that existential literary question literally by asking, “How much land does humanity need?”
That’s the issue enterprising online video-maker Joseph Pisenti explores on his channel, Real Life Lore.
Pisenti ups the ante on the density game by examining two more specific questions in three videos: How large would a city need to be to fit all of humanity, and how big would a building need to be fit every human being?…
More metropolitan musing– and all three of the videos– at “Could the Human Race Fit in a Single City?”
* Lyric from the song “Don’t Fence Me In”; music by Cole Porter, lyrics by Porter, adapted from a poem by Robert Fletcher. Originally written in 1934 for an unproduced film musical (Adios, Argentina), it was recorded a decade later by Roy Rogers, and (almost simultaneously) Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters; later it was covered by Ella Fitzgerald, and many others.
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As we speculate about space, we might spare a thought for Jean-Baptiste Poquelin; he died on this date in 1673. Better known by his stage name, Molière, he was a respected French actor who became one of the great comedic playwrights in Western literature. His worldy farces– The Misanthrope, The School for Wives, Tartuffe, The Miser, The Imaginary Invalid, and The Bourgeois Gentleman.– earned him popular adulation… and the scorn of moralists and the Catholic Church. At the time of his death, French law forbade the burial of actors in the sacred ground of a cemetery. But Molière’s widow, Armande, asked the King if her spouse could be granted a normal funeral at night. The King– a fan– agreed, and Molière’s body was buried in the section of a cemetery reserved for unbaptized infants. (Molière’s remains were later transferred to grand Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and re-laid to rest near those of La Fontaine.)
