On my radio program the other day, my guest made the point that you could fit the entire population of the world into Los Angeles. Since some people questioned that statistic, I thought I would provide some documentation.

Actually, the National Geographic website has already done the math. They have a quiz with the question: “Population 7 Billion—Could We All Fit in One City?” The quick answer is yes. “If all seven billion people on Earth stood shoulder-to-shoulder, we would fill Los Angeles.”

In the past, I have used the city of Jacksonville, Florida to illustrate the same point. It has the largest area of any city with over 800 square miles of land. If you assume that each person occupies an 18 inch square that means they would take up 2.25 square feet. If you multiply 7 billion by 2.25 square feet that equals 15,750,000,000 square feet.

That number seems large until you realize that Jacksonville, Florida covers over 800 square miles of land and that exceeds 23,000,000,000 square feet. There would be more than enough room even for some rather large and obese people.

Does that prove that the world is not overpopulated? Not necessarily. If you live in Hong Kong or Tokyo or Mexico City, you would definitely feel the world is overpopulated. If you live in Wyoming or Montana, I doubt you would feel that the world is overpopulated.

You may have also heard the other statistic about the space necessary to put all of the world’s 7 billion population in a small home. If each person had a 1,000 square foot home, you could fit all of those homes in the 268,581 square miles of the state of Texas.

The point of all of this is that we aren’t running out of space for people. We may be running out of certain resources. We may need to build dynamic economies in third world countries. We certainly need to end the exploitation of the poor by dictators in many countries around the world. But we certainly aren’t limited by space.