Originally Posted by
JohnBurke
They don't, and you're arguing for arguing's sake. I think you get the point.
If you want to take the time to determine world population by city by elevation and do the calculations, be my guest, as previously stated. Again, READ.
I don't think you get it, what you said logically makes no sense:
Statement : The worlds average elevation is 2,700msl
Conclusion: Most of the people in the world live at 2,700msl (or significantly above sea level).
There is no relationship whatsoever between those two ideas, they don't logically follow. The problems with that statement include the fact that people are not evenly dispersed across the land; people also historically tend to concentrate around low rivers, the mouth or significant forks.
The top ten cities in terms of population are:
1
Tokyo, Japan
37,833,000
101'msl
2
Delhi, India
24,953,000
751'msl
3
Shanghai, China
22,991,000
13'msl
4
Mexico City, Mexico
20,843,000
7,400msl
5 São Paulo, Brazil
20,831,000
2500'msl
6
Mumbai, India
20,741,000
26'msl
7
Osaka, Japan
20,123,000
122'msl
8
Beijing, China
19,520,000
150'msl
9
New York/Newark, United States
18,591,000
2'msl (I'm being generous, it comes up as 1 or 0 most of the time on google earth)
10
Cairo, Egypt
18,419,000
95'msl
The average of these is less than half of your figure, and Mexico City might just be an outlier, we'd have to sample more data to know. Typically, the most people in human history lived in the low lands in fertile country where the environment was not harsh, the biggest cities or metro areas in our country follow this pretty well, as with most countries, but it's not about that, it's about the statement not logically following. We know people aren't dispersed evenly by altitude.