The Benefits of Manifest Destiny

Today I just thought that I'd write a bit about something that Eric mentioned in his last post: the crowds in Bangalore. WARNING: GEEK ALERT!!! I can't help it, I feel the need to bombard you with facts and figures so I just want you to be prepared, this is your last chance to stop reading before you actually learn something....





When Eric says that are a billion people here, that is not an exaggeration, India currently has a population of 1.1 billion (a whopping one-sixth of the total world's population), second only to China (1.3 billion). Now if you consider that China has a total land area 3,600,927 square miles while India only has a total land area of 1,147,949 square miles, you begin to get the feeling that it might be a little crowded here.





"So," you are asking yourself, "how does this compare to the United States?" Well, you are in luck, because it just so happens that I am going to tell you. The current U.S. population stands at a measly 300 million, under one-third of that of India. However, when you compare land mass, you can nearly fit three Indias in the United States (the U.S. has a total land mass of 3,537,418 sq mi)! So, when you begin to consider the population densities of these two countries, the disparity between the
two is quite vast. In the United States, the average population density (this is pretty much the number of people in a country divided by the total land mass of the country) is at around 17 people living per square mile. Not too crowded, right? Well, in India the average population density
is at 201 people living in every square mile. That is a bit more uncomfortable, wouldn't you agree? Now remember, that is just an average, so when you consider that there are two mountain ranges in India (the Western and Eastern Ghats) that are largely uninhabitable and additionally a large region that is underpopulated due to
instability in the region (Jammu and Kashmir), the total land mass number shrinks quite a bit. What this means is that certain regions of India are packed with people! Take, for instance, Kerala. Kerala is a small state that occupies the south-western most part of India. The state does not contain what are considered the major cities of India, but yet over 50% of all people in the state live at a population density of 558 people per square mile! Additionally, no person living
anywhere in Kerala lives at a density less than 124 persons per square mile. Finally, the population density in the major cities in India are over two times that of large U.S. cities like New York City, San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angles.





So I guess the point of this lesson in demography is that first, Eric isn't over- exaggerating when he says that India is crowded, and second, that Americans owe a big thank you to John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and John L. O'Sullivan, all proponents and/or major participants in the expansion of the United States (oh, except for all of those Americans that were displaced by westward expansion, but hey, they did get gambling (and small-pox) in exchange, so what could they possibly have to complain about???).