What is the most habitable place on Earth?
Monocle's Quality of Life Survey
The 2021 Monocle Survey determined the world's most livable city was Copenhagen, followed by Zurich, Helsinki and Stockholm.
Arable land (% of land area) in India was reported at 52.26 % in 2020, according to the World Bank collection of development indicators, compiled from officially recognized sources.
China is home to about 18 percent of the world's population. Despite the fact that China has the third biggest landmass, 94% of the country's population lives on just 43% of the country's total land surface. There is a diagonal line running from Heihe to Tengchong that divides the majority of the people.
The total land surface area of Earth is about 57,308,738 square miles, of which about 33% is desert and about 24% is mountainous. Subtracting this uninhabitable 57% (32,665,981 mi2) from the total land area leaves 24,642,757 square miles or 15.77 billion acres (43%) of habitable land.
There is one part of the world where nothing thrives, however: the Atacama Desert in Chile. The principal reason is the lack of water: some parts of the Atacama have not seen rain for decades. The acidic soil and high altitude – leading to relatively high levels of ultra-violet radiation – don't help either.
Kepler-452b (sometimes quoted to be an Earth 2.0 or Earth's Cousin based on its characteristics; also known by its Kepler Object of Interest designation KOI-7016.01) is a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting within the inner edge of the habitable zone of the sunlike star Kepler-452 and is the only planet in the system ...
| Rank | Country | Arable land (%) |
|---|---|---|
| — | World | 10.6 |
| 1 | India | 50.4 |
| 2 | United States | 16.8 |
| 3 | Russia | 7.3 |
Even though China is the world's most populous country, much of its land is uninhabitable or near uninhabitable. The western half of the country is mostly desert. The central and southern portions of the country is covered with rugged mountains and the northeast is heavily forested and bitterly cold in the winter.
The largest country in the world is Russia with a total area of 17,098,242 Km² (6,601,665 mi²) and a land area of 16,376,870 Km² (6,323,142 mi²), equivalent to 11% of the total world's landmass of 148,940,000 Km² (57,510,000 square miles). See also: Most Populous Countries.
However, large parts of Russia are uninhabited or uninhabitable because permafrost (soil that remains frozen throughout the year and is unsuitable for agriculture) covers more than 60% of Russia's territory.
How much of us is uninhabited?
Those empty blocks add up to 4.61 million square km (1.78 million sq. mi), which corresponds to just under 47% of the total area of the United States. So, despite having a population of 310 million – the world's third largest, after China and India – close to half of the U.S. is bereft of human habitation.
Around 27% of China is covered in desert. There are now dunes forming just 44 miles from Beijing, and some estimates put the Gobi's crawl south toward the capital at a pace of almost 2 miles per year.
habitable land use means development that facilitates the occupation or use of buildings or rooms by persons for accommodation.
1. Ethiopia's Danakil Depression and its landscape, which consists of burning salt, volcanic rock, and sulfuric acid, is considered the most uninhabitable place on Earth.
Around 30% of India's land is sparsely populated .
This make it difficult to stay there. Also there are certain tribes which make other people difficult to live in such terrain.
Antarctica is the only continent with no permanent human habitation. There are, however, permanent human settlements, where scientists and support staff live for part of the year on a rotating basis.
Water vapour has been detected on a potentially habitable super-Earth known as K2-18b, located about 110 light years away. The exoplanet was first spotted in 2015 by Nasa's Kepler spacecraft but analysis of data has revealed new details that have not been seen on a super-Earth before.
Scientists broke open bits of oceanic crust and found them full of microbes—suggesting similar life could survive on other planets. In 2013, scientists were stunned to find microbes thriving deep inside volcanic rocks beneath the seafloor off the Pacific Northwest, buried under more than 870 feet of sediment.
Earth was never formally 'discovered' because it was never an unrecognized entity by humans. However, its shared identity with other bodies as a "planet" is a historically recent discovery. The Earth's position in the Solar System was correctly described in the heliocentric model proposed by Aristarchus of Samos.
Scientists have discovered two 'super Earth' type planets about 100 light-years from our Earth where 1 year is 8.5 days. Two planets discovered by a team of international scientists have been observed to be orbiting a small, cool star called TOI-4306 or SPECULOOS-2.
Can we live in super-Earth?
Rocky planets larger than our own, so-called super-Earths, are surprisingly abundant in our Galaxy, and stand as the most likely planets to be habitable.
1: Titan. If Mars is already a little too crowded for you, consider Titan, a moon of Saturn, and the only such body known to have a dense atmosphere. "It's got an atmosphere mostly nitrogen just like Earth," Green explains.
Habitability. Robert Zubrin has pointed out that Titan possesses an abundance of all the elements necessary to support life, saying "In certain ways, Titan is the most hospitable extraterrestrial world within our solar system for human colonization." The atmosphere contains plentiful nitrogen and methane.
1. Mars. Mars takes the top spot for several reasons. We know it was once habitable billions of years ago, when it had lakes and rivers of liquid water on its surface.
In the Solar System's habitable zone, there are only three natural satellites—the Moon, and Mars's moons Phobos and Deimos (although some estimates show Mars and its moons to be slightly outside the habitable zone) —none of which sustain an atmosphere or water in liquid form.
Then, just last year, scientists discovered another Earth-like planet orbiting one of our closest neighboring stars, Proxima Centauri. Currently, this planet is the best candidate we have for supporting human life.
The planet Saturn is probably the best known and most beautiful planet in the Solar System. Saturn's rings are far more extensive and more easily seen than those of any other planet. Saturn is the second largest planet in the solar system with a diameter of 120,000 km.
Besides Earth, Mars would be the easiest planet to live on. Mars has liquid water, a habitable temperature and a bit of an atmosphere that can help protect humans from cosmic and solar radiation. The gravity of Mars is 38% that of the Earth.
Although you might think it would be cool, humans could not live on the moon! (Maybe one day in the future…) The moon has almost no atmosphere, so there's no air for us to breathe.
Potential for Life
The surface of Pluto is extremely cold, so it seems unlikely that life could exist there. At such cold temperatures, water, which is vital for life as we know it, is essentially rock-like. Pluto's interior is warmer, however, and some think there could even be an ocean deep inside.
Can humans live Jupiter?
Jupiter's environment is probably not conducive to life as we know it. The temperatures, pressures, and materials that characterize this planet are most likely too extreme and volatile for organisms to adapt to.
Water vapour has been detected on a potentially habitable super-Earth known as K2-18b, located about 110 light years away. The exoplanet was first spotted in 2015 by Nasa's Kepler spacecraft but analysis of data has revealed new details that have not been seen on a super-Earth before.
The troposphere, the lowest level of the atmosphere, is where humans live and where all weather occurs. The next level, going away from earth, is the stratosphere, where planes fly.
The order of the planets in the solar system, starting nearest the sun and working outward is the following: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and then the possible Planet Nine.
In addition, lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, niobium, molybdenum, lanthanum, europium, tungsten, and gold have been found in trace amounts.
While Mars' day and general composition is similar to Earth, the planet is hostile to life. Mars has an unbreathable atmosphere, thin enough that its temperature on average fluctuates between −70 and 0 °C (−94 and 32 °F), yet thick enough to cause planet-wide dust storms.
Titan is an icy moon with a surface of rock-hard water ice, but Titan also likely has a liquid water ocean beneath its surface.
