A bit of a programme I was listening to on the radio this morning struck me as an amusing idea. Current UK planning policy strongly restricts geographic population expansion, otherwise we’ll have concreted over our entire country in 5 years flat, which would lead to all manner of horrors, including southerners moving to Yorkshire because it’s become a commuter outskirt of London.

This leads towards a higher density of people in our existing towns and cities. Assuming that Newtonian physics applies, I can forsee a few possible outcomes:
a) eventually the density will lead to the population solidifying, probably within Tokyo style capsule hotels.
b) an equilibrium will be reached with a turnover of particles unable to withstand the pressure becoming equal to the number of new particles entering the container
c) we transform into a charged plasma and become more powerful than you could possibly imagine

The key point of the radio article was that 80% of the population has circadian rhythms that allow them to wake up at about 7.30 in the morning ready to go. The remaining people are genetically predisposed (clever people have written papers about this) towards being more alert and happy towards less popular times of the day; 10% of people are ‘owl’s and 10% are ‘lark’s.

This means we can increase our population centres by an additional 20% in the dimension we call time.How cool would that be? Although I wouldn’t like to draft the legislation for it..