Distribution of global land-types per unit of land if divided between all people on Earth in 2023, which is 1.83Ha. If a football pitch is 1/2 a hectare, that is we each have 3.6 pitches.
The thing to notice is humans live in just half the goal area of the nearest pitch (where the house is) and crops take up 1/4 of that pitch. Forests take up a whole pitch (far end). But the most noticeable thing is that we give up almost an entire pitch to cattle grazing! It's worse than that because half the crops are fed to cows as well.
If we stopped eating cattle and using their products we could eat their crops instead and free up that whole pitch for ourselves, which is almost 1/3 of the land on Planet Earth if everyone did it.
This is equivalent to colonising 4.5 Moons! So all that work to get people to the moon will only achieve 1x moon maximum if we fully exploited. And after that it is all the way to Mars. What hassle.
However simply by not eating cows we will each gain 38.4% more land.
So Mark Twain takes a typically American one-eyed view and just looks at land like it is a physical thing.
But the amount of land we have depends actually on how we use it. Stop eating cows get a while new pitch each!
If we concrete it over and give it to private enterprise then we actually end up with very little. If we put it in public hands then we can share it and we end up with more than a whole planet. People in the US feel this very acutely as they have no right to be on most of their own country! Especially painful if you have fought for the land you are now kicked off by private owners. This is the core of US insanity.
Which of the people in this diagram have the most space?
The people in A have only 1/4 of the space. They are imprisoned by the 3/4 that they are not allowed on.
However the people in B each have the whole space and can go anywhere. Not quite anywhere, as the naked monks said to Alexander the Great, a man only has the land on which he stands. That is all which is truly his. So in B people can go almost anywhere. In America you may well do best to hide in a prison because with American Ideals you will kill the other 3 to have the whole place to yourself. But in more enlightened parts of the world there are agreements and culture which determine rules and behaviour in the shared Public space.
In the Mediterranean there is an island called Cyprus. It has a surface area of 9,251km². If all the people in Earth went there at the same time then we would be able to just about stand shoulder to shoulder in a space of just over 1 metre squared. If all humans went there, an invading alien fleet would have to search the whole planet to find a human and could easily overlook this small island! That is how little space humans actually need. The rest is just resources and for food we need just half that penalty area above.
The American myth is that by putting a wall around things to keep them for yourself makes you free. It is actually just a prison.
So the amount of land is actually determined more by how we use it than what it is. A good example is that under American Capitalism we will end up destroying Planet Earth and then we will have nothing.
If you want more land learn to use it well, and learn to share it. Then it becomes almost unlimited. And the better we get the more land there is.
Mark Twain is most incredibly profoundly wrong!
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