Assuming an average person when standing straight occupies about 1.5 square feet, you could fit the entire population of the earth in a square 25 miles x 25 miles = or 625 square miles.

Now considering the earth has about 57 million square miles of land, that is about 0.0011 percent of the landmass.

Incidentally if you put the entire population of the earth in one city with the population density of New York it would be as big as the state of Texas. Texas is about 0.5% of the earth’s land mass.

So with a tiny fraction of the size, effort and cost, we can build massive ark ships and every human can simply leave Earth. Even if we want more space than that, 20 times less dense than New York would still be 10% the size and cost of moving Earth (and has the advantage of us not risking destroying Earth entirely in the process somehow).

[–] ieightpi@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think my reasoning has more to do with keeping all of biodiversity with us. Why start over each time the habital zone moves, when we could just move it all.

Obviously it's easier moving a select group of living things. But who knows 🤷‍♂️

[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 1 points 2 years ago

Assuming we've "defeated" natural selection, or at least made it slower, humans will still be relatively the same. This is in comparison to the rest of life on Earth, which we assume will evolve at the same and/or faster rates as they always have. So the animals that you're talking about "saving" will have spent millions - billions? - of years adapting to the slowly changing environment. Rapidly moving the earth would change everything - tides, gravity, the length of the days and years - would just result in mass extinction anyway.

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Cause you need the rest of earth to keep those people alive.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/

[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 3 points 2 years ago

We're talking at very least hundreds of millions of years in the future and the alternative being literally moving the Earth. I think we can handwave an algae farm