Carrying Capacity and Catastrophic Quakes

Earlier this week, Sarah and I walked out to the bridge (Golden Gate, of course) and on our way back I looked at the City before me and started thinking about how dense a population sits on this 7-mile-by-7-mile square.  I thought, “Since we in SF depend on resources to be brought in and wastes to be shipped out, if we were cut off from the world around us, how many people could reasonably subsist in the City?”  Sarah indulged me and we agreed the number would be something south of the current one million inhabitants.

After a few quick Google searches, not surprisingly I found that there was a whole area of study out there ready to quench my curiosity, which can be roughly summarized as carrying capacity.  Now I have to admit, I suppose I initially thought about San Francisco’s carrying capacity in light of the opinions that some day soon, “the big one” will shake the City so hard we are cut off from civilization for an extended period of time and/or the western-most half of California will slip into the ocean.  For the record, I don’t find either option satisfactory.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t track down much information on the carrying capacity of San Francisco.

What I did find, were some really cool resources over at PBS NOVA, called World in the Balance.  It appears to track and analyze both current and historic world population growth, including fun graphs like Human Numbers Through Time and interviews from global population experts in Voices of Concern.  I’m still reviewing the World in the Balance site, so I’d recommend checking it out on your own, but I have learned one thing so far: As of the writing of this post, other than you there are 6,811,060,305 people in the world.  Don’t worry, Mom still thinks you’re very important.

- Matt

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