Not that anyone cares, but I don't want to live that way. I certainly understand how many love the urban life, I just prefer suburbia, thanks.
That being said, a more relevant question is what the societal effects would be. My first question is how this would affect crime rates. A quick search seems to indicate that crime rate may go up with population density, though other factors are, of course, more highly correlated (such as poverty).
Some of those other factors also correlate highly with high density areas. No clue what the causative links are ... could be that density has no effect, or even reduces crime rate, I suppose - I'm way to lazy to research it for ta quick hn comment!
I do know that being too close to too many other people makes me think about perpetrating violent crime, though! ;)
I live in a dense part of NJ, around 7000 inh/mi2. But I've got a single family home with a nice yard, and many of my neighbors have even more space than I do. We've got lots of trees and open spaces too. At this density we'd need 5 New Hampshires, but that's still not much and it would provide a much higher quality of life than packing in at 35000 inh/mi2.
I'm sure this is doable. Better still would be to create a few population centers of this density but slightly smaller. say 9 of them, 33x33. This would allow for redundancy of civilization (in case of disaster and whatnot). It also would allow better access to the appropriate resources (which is frequently a major motivator in which cities are successful). It still reduces the number of transport corridors, so trains an such become viable.
The problem comes for people like me: I enjoy my small city experience. I live a short walk from downtown, but have a house w/ yard (and a big garden), and a garage/workshop (mostly workshop as I don't actually have a car). Such space uses are unrealistic as density goes up.
Screw the man-made disasters, just think of how fast diseases would spread. IIRC, dense population centers were one of the contributing factors to the bubonic plague.
Another contributing factor was the lack of modern medicine. Plenty of communicable diseases exist today, and residents of dense neighborhoods are doing fine. If a disease kills too fast for a treatment to be discovered in time to prevent many deaths, it will probably be killing too fast to spread effectively. Swine flu killed ~14,000 people worldwide, so I'd put dying from an outbreak of a deadly disease at the same level of probability as a man-made disaster like terrorism. In other words, not likely enough to be of much concern.
NH is pretty big compared to the effective range of a nuke. A typical nuke in the middle of NYC wouldn't even destroy all of Manhattan, let alone kill everyone in NY. It would take a lot of nukes to carpet-bomb all of NH.
You just need to lay a few down the west side and wait for radioactive winds to take care of everyone else, but yeah, you have a point. I think most people vastly overestimate the blast radius of nuclear weapons.
A 1 megaton nuclear bomb detonated near the surface has a blast radius of about 1.7 miles. Pretty much nothing is left within this circle. Meaningful lethal damage only continues out to about 2.7 miles.
A 1.7 mile radius translates to roughly 9 mi^2. A 2.7 mile radius is roughly 23 mi^2. To carpet bomb New Hampshire, you'd need a lot of nukes. About 988 of them in fact.
Now 25 megatons is more interesting... you'd need about 68 of those to ensure <2% survival rate, or 25 of them if you are satisfied with <50% survival rate.
Of course, with good placement and strong winds, you could effectively kill 99% with only about 12-15 one megaton bombs. All that radioactive dust from the mushroom cloud comes down somewhere, and with a 15mph wind, that means a lethal dose within 90 miles of ground zero,
Even with the UK's very limited nuclear arsenal (compared to the US and Russia) it would be capable of wiping out the whole population of the US using its American-sold MIRV's.
One nuclear launch can easily land well over a dozen nukes with considerable tonnage.
The real question is what's more cost effective 1000 1-megaton nukes or 70 25-megatons? 1000 megaton total vs 1750 megaton total.
This ignores that a larger area with similar population density would require much more robust transportation systems than currently exists in, oh, the world. Have a happy mental visualization:
Take every car in America on the road right now. Divide by, say, 100, assuming that most are driving ~ 1 hour, and the new density would make their trips within 6 minutes after such a change, and the transport system fits 10 people into the space of one car.
Now, cram them into New Hampshire. And imagine rush-hour traffic.
I think you are missing the point.
First, the article doesn't care what you want.
Second, it is using the current population density of Brooklyn, and that is with the current transportation infrastructure. If your foreseeable maximum travel distance was 100 miles, none of this would be necessary. It is very unlikely you or 99% of the people would need cars. Transportation would be optimized for mass transit/walking/biking. It would probably feel less crowded than current day brooklyn.
I think you'd need something of a revolution in transport infrastructure to serve a Brooklyn that was the size of New Hampshire. With the current Brooklyn, the longest public-transit trips, if you're very unlucky with where you're going to/from, are about 90 minutes, and most are around 30 mins. But if you just organically grew out the same infrastructure to a Brooklyn the size of New Hampshire, it would take 5+ hours to get from one side of New Brooklyn to another.
But why would you _need_ to get from one side of New Brooklyn to the other any more frequently than you need to get from one side of the US to the other today?
Business travel (ie, flights, currently). Less than shipping, but still frequent.
Vacation travel. More frequent than business, but likely shorter distances (still often above 100 miles, though). Though I know of over a dozen people in my circle of friends who have travelled over 1000 miles to get to their spring / summer locations. And these are relatively poor college students.
The problem isn't based around an expected increase in frequency (though there would be, as things are closer), it's that a large number of people do need such large-scale transports, and shoving more of everything together brings up new problems (look at Chicago, the roads & tracks are fairly nightmarish in many places).
It would require a massive infrastructure project to build up an area that big and dense, so let's assume transportation is part of the plan. A mesh of rail lines could be put in with high speed rail with a few stops at the coarsest level of the grid, moderate speed rail with more stops in the middle, and the equivalent of the NYC subway system at the finest level of the grid. The system could be planned out so that no two points are more than a few train changes and an hour or two apart. That's much better than our current national transportation system.
Shipping could have a parallel system at the high speed and moderate speed, using shipping containers and (while we're at it) automated transfer systems for the containers. Maybe the whole place could be rigged up like a giant FedEx shipping center, with hundred-mile-long conveyor belts.
As a current resident of NYC looking to move away, I think this proposal would have a negative impact on the mental health and well-being of many US citizens.
For comparison, if Canada had a similar population density to England, you would fit its entire population onto the island of Newfoundland (not the province of Newfoundland and Labrador). Interestingly, Newfoundland was intended to be an independent country. This would leave the whole mainland of Canada (the worlds 2nd largest country) devoid of habitation.
Oil for sure indeed. It's not like you're getting it from your backyard now.
Pretty much the same goes for most of your food too.
Water is the only thing that would get tricky. But large chunks of the northern hemisphere have A LOT of water. Think Seatle, or for that matter, ALL of New England, especially northern New England.
Imagine trying to drive a truck load of food/supplies to the center of it. Driving a big rig (or would it be too small for the demand?) through 50 miles of Brooklyn sounds incredibly tedious.
With this sort of density you can use more efficient distribution systems than driving a truck down the street -- dedicated transport tunnels/tubes and a handful of distribution centers would eliminate most surface shipping.
Not very advisable. Though a lot of Cities on a grid with one square between them horizontally and vertically was a viable strategy in Civilization (the first part, of course).
This would be ruinous. Yes, it'd be great if we could compact and leave most of America pristine, but that's not what would happen. Leave all that open space and people will expand into it again, except likely as much more dense populations.
This would result in mind bogglingly large population growth, which Earth can't take right now. We need LESS dense populous, not more.
Are you saying that we would have increased population growth if the population was all packed together? By packing together we could do things such as use less electricity by being more efficient (less power loss due to transmission distances, less power used to pump water all over the place, less fuel spent moving all over the place, etc).
If we concentrated the population, we would not grow as fast. But that all depends on concentrating the population and then not allowing it to expand beyond some set borders, which doesn't seem like it'd go over well. Just look at the little countries running out of land, looking to their neighboor's turf as prospective expansion.
You'd need government or fences or armed forces preventing people from expanding- it is natural for people to expand.
Maybe I am incorrect in thinking so, but my idea was that while the birth rate may be lower, we'd (in the end) approach a higher net population density if we slowly sprawled from a single super-dense hub.
Brooklyn has obviously grown since it was created. The creep, as I understand it, is generally just as population-dense. That is the effect I am talking about.
That being said, a more relevant question is what the societal effects would be. My first question is how this would affect crime rates. A quick search seems to indicate that crime rate may go up with population density, though other factors are, of course, more highly correlated (such as poverty).
Some of those other factors also correlate highly with high density areas. No clue what the causative links are ... could be that density has no effect, or even reduces crime rate, I suppose - I'm way to lazy to research it for ta quick hn comment!
I do know that being too close to too many other people makes me think about perpetrating violent crime, though! ;)