Fact or Fiction

[dozydora]

Is it true that you could fit the population of the world on to the Isle Of White?

[fairkatrina]

as there are over 6.6 billion people alive in the world today (and that number is ever-increasing), and the Isle of Wight has a total land mass of 380km squared. For every obese American and European there are at least 10 under-nourished adults in the world, so one average adult can comfortably stand on a rectangle 500 cm wide by 400 cm deep (= 0.2 square metres), with the average child occupying half that area. Therefore the total area needed would be something like 1,327 sq km, much larger that the Isle of Wight.

[gen2]

They would fit if you stacked them 8 deep! The area of the IOW is of the order of 160 square km

[gen2]

Sorry dozydora, we have both assumed you meant the island off the Hampshire coast of England called the Isle of Wight. The exact size and location of the Isle of White is unknown to me. Did you mean Iceland?

[JerryB]

This was true when the population of the world was about 3 billion, which would have been in about 1950. In 1968, (world pop. approx 3.8 billion) the sci-fi author John Brunner wrote the novel Stand on Zanzibar, which predicted a global population of 7 billion by 2010, which would require the island of Zanzibar to fit everybody.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar

The next guy did the maths in 2002, with a global pop. about 6.2 billion, and he suggests they would all fit on both the Isle of Wight AND the Isle of Man, but we would need to use the beaches at low tide.

http://www.ampneycrucis.f9.co.uk/PARK/Populati on.htm

[JudgeJ]

Of course, none of you has considered how they would all get there. With the three ferry crossings running 2 boats an hour all day every day, assuming that they carry 1,000 passengers each, it would take more than 125 years to get them all across. (I�ve ignored the FastCat crossing from Portsmouth to Ryde and the Hovercraft crossing from Southsea to Ryde. They have too small a capacity to be of any use).

During this time, of course, many of the potential emigrants towards the back of the queue will die, to be replaced by many more that will have been born whilst their mothers were queuing for a boat. No, sorry, it�s a totally impractical proposition. Unless we build a bridge�..