> At any given time, there are more than 1.4 million seafarers plying the world's waterways, according to the International Chamber of Shipping.
I mean, I guess this is obvious because SOMEONE has to ship all the stuff everywhere, but that's a truly crazy number of people to me. I guess it goes to show that the oceans are almost unfathomably huge that they can still be completely empty, even though a million people are living there on a daily basis.
1.4 million is an exceptionally small number of people compared to the size of the oceans.
You could fit all 7+ billion humans in New Zealand if we all lived as densely as Manhattan. [1]
So 1.4 million people on the oceans is still virtually empty overall. Think about it this way. There are 3.2 million Mongolians and Mongolia is quite large -- thus, Mongolia is extremely empty. There are less than half as many seafarers as Mongolians, and they are spread over a much larger area.
That being said -- those seafarers are actually mostly just in shipping lanes -- which are actually quite crowded. So crowded such that when they intersect with whale migratory routes, the likelihood of impacts is extremely high.
I'm just trying to imagine a city the size of New Zealand, Australia devoted to agriculture and the rest of the planet devoted to nature. That would be quite a statement with respect to stewardship of the planet.
I think they just nitpick rather than genuinely misunderstand your point, but yes the 'Place, Bigger-place' is a common form of toponyms in American English.
I think it was sufficiently disambiguated by the word 'dedicated', it wouldn't be possible to have Australia both dedicated to agriculture and to have a city the size of New Zealand inside it. But thank you for explaining.
Misparsed it as something with structure like this, "I'm just trying to imagine a city the size of [Chicago, Illinois] devoted to agriculture[,] and the rest of the planet devoted to nature." I did the same thing and had to read it twice.
I had the same thought (both my initial misreading, and the idea of making the joke).
I went to primary/secondary school in the United States. I feel like this joke is the sort of thing that an English teacher would say to me in response to me writing something like this (which I'm sure I did). I think part of the humor (for me, at least) is the refrain of that particular (and common) criticism :)
New Zealand is a state of Australia according to the Australian constitution. It's just that New Zealand thought that was a bit silly and never paid it any attention, and Australia thought that was fair enough.
Yep! I can never find them, but there were even World War style anti-australian propaganda posters depicting Australians as white supremacist monsters coming to take over NZ. I don't know who they were distributed by at the time and I can never get a Google search to turn anything up.
I feel like New Zealand and Australia are the two least suited countries for this idea.
New Zealand is very mountainous and subject to earthquakes and volcanos. Australia is half desert.
I wonder what the best location to concentrate the world's population and agriculture actually would be. My guess would be North America, India, or China.
> You could fit all 7+ billion humans in New Zealand if we all lived as densely as Manhattan. [1]
Can stop spreading these factoids as if they would be feasible in any way?
You can't just stick people vertically on a small plot of land ad infinitum, it doesn't scale. Think about all the services required for all 7 billion people to function properly, New Zealand would collapse on itself.
I ran some calcuations, and the mass of 7 billion people at an average of 60kg each, spread uniformly over New Zealand, would definitely not cause it to collapse, sink, crack, or tip over. Please stop using such hyperbole.
From what I read recently, New Zealand was already struggling to cope with its tourist population. That means they're already on the edge. Probably not a problem anymore since COVID, but we'll see what happens when/if things go back to normal.
I cannot for a second imagine the absolute horror of feeling THAT alone with god knows what beneath you. But imagine the good fortune required for a random fishing boat to pass by and find you.
Or this guy who fell off a fishing boat in the middle of the night and survived, two sharks at one point circling him:
1.4 million people though doesn't equal 1.4 million ships. Divide it by let's say 15 people per ship and then all you have is a little less than 100k ships. Which doesn't sound like a lot.
Looking at Flight Radar, at least pre covid, was absolutely astounding every time. The scale of humanity is really incredible to me. There are more people in the air than live in my city.
When I first flew to a big city, Osaka, I flew over 3000km of desert before even getting out of my country, and then bam, everything was absolutely infested with life and activity. More 'stuff' than I had ever seen.
Looking at Flight radar not long ago, I saw the veritable stream of Japan Post cargo planes one after the other flying into HK or China, I forget. I remember thinking that just the postage was more planes than were aloft where I live for all commercial, travel and personal activity combined.
It's sad, but at this point, I don't think we should let them back ashore. There's a point at which these sea people can't really adjust and are a danger to society. Something similar happened 3198 years ago and it collapsed all major civilizations. Egypt was never the same again.
Wow haha, only on HN would I read a sea peoples joke. Did you also watch that informative YouTube lecture [0] or did you find out about them elsewhere?
At a certain point whatever COVID risk this prevents is surpassed by the inhumanity of not letting these people go to their homes, to see their families and loved ones. I think a lot of what has been done in the past year will not be judged kindly by history. Bare life is not the only thing that matters.
I don't see how they can justify keeping these people trapped on ships while plenty of business and leisure travellers jet back and forth around the world.
I'd understand if we were actually enforcing a real quarantine with closed borders, but we're not. What makes these maritime workers such a greater risk? Is it just that they're not wealthy citizens of western nations?
I think the huge risk is that it takes days or weeks to travel between ports thus giving the virus time to incubate and show itself unlike flyers. We can't have people who mostly aren't a threat causing problems!
Seriously these people present less of a threat than jet travel but they are decidedly blue collar. Maybe that's the distinction?
It's even easier than that: quarantine any ship that has made port in the last 2 weeks and the crew was allowed to disembark and let any ship with no sign of disease where the crew has been onboard for 2 weeks to disembark. Then, the crews can disembark at least every 2 weeks, and it's pretty simple to verify whether a ship has allowed it's crew to disembark; check their port logs.
It's simple: they can't. Anywhere with non-trivial amounts of community transmission would have negligible additional risk by allowing those workers to enter, especially if symptoms are screened. A handful of new cases is a drop in a very big bucket. That's been true over almost the whole world for months, because covid has spread to pretty much the entire world.
These workers have been imprisoned because of politics, not science.
> plenty of business and leisure travellers jet back and forth around the world.
Not any more, the last few weeks have seen several countries completely prevent people setting off for leisure travel, closing their borders not just to entry but to exit. Australia did it already early last year.
The argument is that those travelers will return at some point and bring new COVID strains back, but I’m uncomfortable with countries banning their own citizens from freely leaving, that sounds like old Eastern Bloc restrictions (which were also ostensibly about protecting the common welfare), and it could be that some leisure travelers, if they could only leave, would be gone indefinitely and therefore would not necessarily be coming back during the lifetime of the current epidemic.
Australian here. Our rules allow you to leave if you've got a reason to be gone longer than 3 months. My sister lives overseas and has come back twice and been allowed to leave each time (at great expense). The rule is specifically about leisure travellers and business trips that could be done with zoom. If you've got a funeral to go to you get an exemption as well, for example.
> Our rules allow you to leave if you've got a reason to be gone longer than 3 months.
What happens if an Aussie simply says "There are some countries out there that are relatively unconcerned with COVID right now, I would rather be traveling them for the indefinite future instead of staying home"? Would the state still prevent him or her from leaving?
Do yourself a favor and watch the 2015 Turkish movie "Sarmasik" (Ivy). It's about a crew stuck aboard a stranded ship. It's well made and supposedly also a political commentary on Erdogan and other things.
Similar things happen without covid involved. Lack of pay and upkeep for fuel can strand ship and crew in a foreign harbour.
Back in 2002 a Russian transport ship and crew spend the summer moored by my birth town without being able to leave the ship. The crew hadn't received any pay for 9 months, lacked provisions, and refused to keep working. The shipping company send some goons to ruff them up, but ended getting arrested and deported. Eventually they sailed on, though I don't know the outcome of the conflict.
At the end of the 10's I attended a party on a large Russian freightship (in another city). The crew and ship had apparently been abandoned by their company without any communication, and they had been stuck on the ship for half a year. Never got it confirmed but I think they had made a deal with the party organisers to host parties to cover food cost and tickets home.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] thread> At any given time, there are more than 1.4 million seafarers plying the world's waterways, according to the International Chamber of Shipping.
I mean, I guess this is obvious because SOMEONE has to ship all the stuff everywhere, but that's a truly crazy number of people to me. I guess it goes to show that the oceans are almost unfathomably huge that they can still be completely empty, even though a million people are living there on a daily basis.
You could fit all 7+ billion humans in New Zealand if we all lived as densely as Manhattan. [1]
So 1.4 million people on the oceans is still virtually empty overall. Think about it this way. There are 3.2 million Mongolians and Mongolia is quite large -- thus, Mongolia is extremely empty. There are less than half as many seafarers as Mongolians, and they are spread over a much larger area.
That being said -- those seafarers are actually mostly just in shipping lanes -- which are actually quite crowded. So crowded such that when they intersect with whale migratory routes, the likelihood of impacts is extremely high.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3016331/think-the-world-is-crowd...
I went to primary/secondary school in the United States. I feel like this joke is the sort of thing that an English teacher would say to me in response to me writing something like this (which I'm sure I did). I think part of the humor (for me, at least) is the refrain of that particular (and common) criticism :)
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2017/12/revealed-...
It would be like asking if you would trade Madagascar for the rest of the earth to be returned to nature?
New Zealand is very mountainous and subject to earthquakes and volcanos. Australia is half desert.
I wonder what the best location to concentrate the world's population and agriculture actually would be. My guess would be North America, India, or China.
Can stop spreading these factoids as if they would be feasible in any way?
You can't just stick people vertically on a small plot of land ad infinitum, it doesn't scale. Think about all the services required for all 7 billion people to function properly, New Zealand would collapse on itself.
You cannot scale that efficiently in your proposed scenario in reality, it is absurd.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1995-11-30-951130...
I cannot for a second imagine the absolute horror of feeling THAT alone with god knows what beneath you. But imagine the good fortune required for a random fishing boat to pass by and find you.
Or this guy who fell off a fishing boat in the middle of the night and survived, two sharks at one point circling him:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/magazine/a-speck-in-the-s...
Also, that guy who survived in a pocket of air in a capsized boat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oqnpEozQYo
And the air is orders of magnitude bigger.
Which is cool, we got our flying city, but unfortunately we made it evenly distributed.
When I first flew to a big city, Osaka, I flew over 3000km of desert before even getting out of my country, and then bam, everything was absolutely infested with life and activity. More 'stuff' than I had ever seen.
Looking at Flight radar not long ago, I saw the veritable stream of Japan Post cargo planes one after the other flying into HK or China, I forget. I remember thinking that just the postage was more planes than were aloft where I live for all commercial, travel and personal activity combined.
We'll have to try seasteading or something.
(for everyone else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples )
haha pure gold.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4
https://youtu.be/B965f8AcNbw
and
https://twitter.com/Fall_of_Civ_Pod
I'd understand if we were actually enforcing a real quarantine with closed borders, but we're not. What makes these maritime workers such a greater risk? Is it just that they're not wealthy citizens of western nations?
Seriously these people present less of a threat than jet travel but they are decidedly blue collar. Maybe that's the distinction?
These workers have been imprisoned because of politics, not science.
Not any more, the last few weeks have seen several countries completely prevent people setting off for leisure travel, closing their borders not just to entry but to exit. Australia did it already early last year.
The argument is that those travelers will return at some point and bring new COVID strains back, but I’m uncomfortable with countries banning their own citizens from freely leaving, that sounds like old Eastern Bloc restrictions (which were also ostensibly about protecting the common welfare), and it could be that some leisure travelers, if they could only leave, would be gone indefinitely and therefore would not necessarily be coming back during the lifetime of the current epidemic.
What happens if an Aussie simply says "There are some countries out there that are relatively unconcerned with COVID right now, I would rather be traveling them for the indefinite future instead of staying home"? Would the state still prevent him or her from leaving?
Back in 2002 a Russian transport ship and crew spend the summer moored by my birth town without being able to leave the ship. The crew hadn't received any pay for 9 months, lacked provisions, and refused to keep working. The shipping company send some goons to ruff them up, but ended getting arrested and deported. Eventually they sailed on, though I don't know the outcome of the conflict.
At the end of the 10's I attended a party on a large Russian freightship (in another city). The crew and ship had apparently been abandoned by their company without any communication, and they had been stuck on the ship for half a year. Never got it confirmed but I think they had made a deal with the party organisers to host parties to cover food cost and tickets home.
Shipping is a hard business.