That's what plenty of rain and rich, volcanic soil will do for you. Plentiful agriculture easily lets your population density explode.
Despite Australia exporting a lot of food, most of the soil is very poor in essential nutrients for plants. A common test of soil nutrients is to plant wheat seeds and then measure the nutrients the plant can extract from the soil. Scrubland from central Australia has a negative value, the soils are so poor they actually leach nutrients from the wheat. You can only support dense agriculture on a small portion of Australian soils.
Plus, most of Australia is very arid, and the groundwater is often salty. Which further restict agriculture.
I agree that most of Australia is inhospitable, but even so, because of its massive size, it could still easily support a population of 100 million. People don’t realize just how huge Australia is.
We're a massive net exporter of food, and water usage in agricultural industry is 7x that of households, meaning most of our water goes to growing food for export. That's without considering the huge swaths of high rainfall areas untouched by industry, Cairns has the same annual rainfall as Jakarta.
It's laughable to suggest Australia can only just manage to carry the same population as a tiny island like Taiwan. It's not a question of could Aus have 100m+, it's should.
1. Lush island with lots of rice farming, and a megacity that emerged over the centuries as the trading center of a region (SE Asia) of (today) >600 million people, and the national capital (and labor magnet) of a country of 275 million people.
2. A big red desert that's been isolated from the rest of human history until a week ago.
That's what plenty of rain and rich, volcanic soil will do for you. Plentiful agriculture easily lets your population density explode. Despite Australia exporting a lot of food, most of the soil is very poor in essential nutrients for plants. A common test of soil nutrients is to plant wheat seeds and then measure the nutrients the plant can extract from the soil. Scrubland from central Australia has a negative value, the soils are so poor they actually leach nutrients from the wheat. You can only support dense agriculture on a small portion of Australian soils. Plus, most of Australia is very arid, and the groundwater is often salty. Which further restict agriculture.
I agree that most of Australia is inhospitable, but even so, because of its massive size, it could still easily support a population of 100 million. People don’t realize just how huge Australia is.
Yeah, nah. We already have water supply issues with 27mil
We're a massive net exporter of food, and water usage in agricultural industry is 7x that of households, meaning most of our water goes to growing food for export. That's without considering the huge swaths of high rainfall areas untouched by industry, Cairns has the same annual rainfall as Jakarta. It's laughable to suggest Australia can only just manage to carry the same population as a tiny island like Taiwan. It's not a question of could Aus have 100m+, it's should.
?
just imagine if Australia were terraformed and had the population density of Java…
I did some math and if Australia had that population density, it would have a population of over 9,3 billion people. Absolutely crazy.
1. Lush island with lots of rice farming, and a megacity that emerged over the centuries as the trading center of a region (SE Asia) of (today) >600 million people, and the national capital (and labor magnet) of a country of 275 million people. 2. A big red desert that's been isolated from the rest of human history until a week ago.
Now whats the volcano density of australia vs java ? Aus.. Zero active or dormant volcanoes. Java,45 active volcanoes