Tiny homes - a solution to the world population crisis

Capsule hotels are popping up all across the world, most notably in large, densely populated Japanese cities. Staying in a capsule hotel is cheap, but they do not offer much in terms of personal space. (Photo courtesy Wikimedia)

According to babycenter.com, a site dedicated to pregnancy and first-time-mother advice, there are slightly fewer than four million babies born every year in the United States.

There are exactly 31,536,000 seconds in a year, and assuming there will be exactly four million babies born in 2016, there will be a baby born every 7.9 seconds this year.

In just the last two hundred years, the world’s population has increased by six billion people. To put that number into perspective, a stack of one million $1 bills is about as high as a 30 story building, while a stack of one billion $1 bills reaches the outer layers of our planet’s atmosphere.

Imagine how tall a stack of six billion newborn babies would be, standing on top of each other’s tiny heads in a tower of tykes to outer space. The math shows, using the average height of newborns measured at 51 centimeters, that this stack would be about 2 million miles high.

Now think about how much space those six billion newborn babies would require to survive, how much space their families need for their homes and how much yard space they want for their green, watered lawns.

We live in a time when more people are being born every year when compared to any other period of human history. It took tens of thousands of years to reach a population of one billion. We hit seven billion people in 2011, and the United Nations predicted we would hit eight billion in 2025.

That means the United Nations believes that in a period of only fourteen years, there will be another billion people on the planet.

We live in a time when we as a species need to realize that we can’t have as much personal or living space as our previous, less claustrophobic generations had.

Enter the tiny homes movement.

The world’s population stayed largely the same for most of human history. It wasn’t until the agricultural and industrial revolutions that the human population shot up. (Data chart courtesy Wikimedia)

A tiny house will very rarely take up more than 500 sq. ft, but will still be able to completely sustain one or two people.

Tiny homes are an environmentally friendlier alternative to living in a house, where heat and electricity is wasted throughout a day warming and providing power in rooms where occupants aren’t even in.

Tiny homes are cheaper than normal-sized homes. Costing only about $40 thousand to build, after which there are no mortgages or rents to pay, utility costs are down as well — because the home provides exactly the correct amount to survive.

Tiny homes have even been used as places to raise families. Two parents who live in Virginia have raised a girl and a boy through to adolescence in a tiny house, an experience they said made their lives “richer.”

But most people do not see a tiny house as something that could actually improve their lives.

In a survey of buyers conducted by moyak.com, those surveyed said they wanted to own a home that took up more than 2000 sq. feet, while the average size of their homes they owned at the time of the survey was only around 1,700 sq. feet.

Tiny homes are the future, simply put. There is not enough room on the planet to sustain another seven billion people. Somewhere along the line, we as a species must decide what is more important: short term space, or long term survival.

I choose the latter.