Daniel sent us this one — he's been driving around the Negev, and he's struck by something that really is remarkable when you stop and think about it. Israel is one of the densest countries on earth, but you can drive south of Mitspe Ramon and find yourself in completely empty wilderness, nothing but landscape for as far as you can see. So he's asking — what percentage of Israel is virtually uninhabited? How does that compare to the U.and other developed countries? Is there a normal range of empty territory even in dense nations? And the practical question — if you actually wanted to build a house in one of these remote areas, what would stand in your way?
This is one of those questions where the numbers genuinely surprise people. Let me start with Israel because it's the most counterintuitive case. Israel's overall population density is about four hundred thirty people per square kilometer. That's dense by global standards — denser than India, denser than the Netherlands. But that number is almost completely misleading because of how the population is distributed.
The tyranny of the average.
More than half of Israel's population lives in the central coastal plain. The Tel Aviv metropolitan area alone — Gush Dan — that's about four million people packed into roughly two hundred square kilometers. The density there is over twenty thousand people per square kilometer. That's Manhattan-level crowding.
The density number is basically Tel Aviv doing all the heavy lifting while the Negev just lies there.
The Negev covers about sixty percent of Israel's land area — roughly thirteen thousand square kilometers out of twenty-two thousand total. And it houses about eight percent of the population. So you've got around seven hundred fifty thousand people spread across an area the size of Connecticut. That gives the Negev a density of about sixty people per square kilometer. But even that's misleading, because most of those seven hundred fifty thousand are concentrated in Be'er Sheva and a handful of development towns.
Within the sixty percent that's already sparse, there are vast sub-regions with essentially nobody.
The Southern Arava, the area around the Ramon Crater, the Paran Plateau — you're talking about thousands of square kilometers where the population density falls below one person per square kilometer. That's functionally uninhabited. Roads, military bases, the occasional Bedouin encampment, but no permanent civilian settlements of any size. If you define virtually uninhabited as fewer than one person per square kilometer, I'd estimate roughly forty to forty-five percent of Israel's territory qualifies.
Forty-five percent of one of the densest countries on earth is empty. That's the headline.
It's not unique to Israel. This pattern shows up everywhere. The United States — overall density about thirty-six people per square kilometer, so on paper it doesn't seem dense at all. But the actual distribution is wild. Roughly eighty percent of Americans live in urban areas, which cover about three percent of the land.
Three percent of U.land area houses eighty percent of the population. The Census Bureau tracks this — urbanized areas, meaning contiguous development with at least fifty thousand people, cover about three percent of the country. Meanwhile, if you look at counties with fewer than one person per square kilometer, you're talking about large portions of Alaska, certainly, but also vast stretches of Nevada, eastern Oregon, western Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming.
Loving County, Texas.
Loving County, Texas — population sixty-four at the last census, area six hundred seventy-seven square miles. That's a density of about zero point zero nine people per square mile. It's the least populous county in the contiguous United States.
There's something almost reassuring about a county with fewer residents than a medium-sized apartment building.
It's not just the U.Let me give you a few comparisons. Australia — overall density three people per square kilometer, one of the lowest in the world. But about eighty-five percent of Australians live within fifty kilometers of the coast. The interior — the Outback — covers roughly seventy percent of the continent and contains less than three percent of the population. Canada — overall density four people per square kilometer, but ninety percent of Canadians live within one hundred miles of the U.The territories — Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut — together cover about forty percent of Canada's landmass and house about one hundred thirty thousand people total.
There seems to be a pattern here. Even in countries that aren't dense overall, the population clusters aggressively.
That's the key insight. The real question isn't what percentage of a country is uninhabited — it's why human settlement clusters the way it does, and whether there's a universal pattern. And there kind of is. Geographers talk about the ninety-fifty rule or something close to it. Roughly ninety percent of the global population lives on about ten percent of the land. Half the world's population lives on about one percent of the land.
Half of humanity on one percent of the earth's surface. That's a compact we've all apparently signed without reading the terms.
Here's what I find fascinating. This clustering isn't just a developing-world phenomenon or a wealthy-world phenomenon. It's consistent across almost every country regardless of development level. There's a 2019 study in Nature — researchers at the University of Twente looked at global population grids and found that even controlling for climate, water access, and arable land, humans cluster far more than economic necessity would predict. We seem to just prefer living near other humans.
That's the unsettling part. We're not forced into this. We choose it.
The economic forces are real — jobs concentrate in cities, services concentrate in cities, infrastructure concentrates in cities. But you see the same pattern in countries with extremely different economic systems. The Soviet Union, for all its attempts to distribute population evenly through planned cities and forced relocation, ended up with the same clustering pattern. People drifted back to Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv.
The gravitational pull of other people.
Economists call it agglomeration effects. Every additional person in a city makes the city slightly more productive for everyone else, because they add to the labor pool, the customer base, the idea network. It's a feedback loop. Cities are basically human particle accelerators — the more collisions, the more energy.
Let's put some numbers on this. What's the approximate range of uninhabited territory across developed countries? Is there a normal band?
It varies enormously, but I'd say for developed countries, the range of territory with fewer than one person per square kilometer runs from about ten percent on the low end to over ninety percent on the high end. Iceland — about ninety-eight percent of the land is uninhabited, with most of the population around Reykjavik. Norway — roughly seventy percent uninhabited. New Zealand — about eighty percent. On the lower end, you've got countries like Belgium or the Netherlands — maybe five to ten percent qualifies as truly sparse, mostly nature reserves and reclaimed land that's kept deliberately empty.
Israel at forty to forty-five percent sits in the middle of that range.
Which for a country its size and overall density, is remarkable. Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey. New Jersey has about nine million people and essentially no truly uninhabited areas — the Pine Barrens are the closest thing, about one million acres of sparse woodland, but even that has towns scattered through it. Israel packs a similar population into a similar area but manages to have nearly half the country functionally empty.
Because of the desert.
Because of the desert, yes. But also because of deliberate policy choices, which I think we should get into because they connect directly to the practical question about building a house out there.
So let's say I'm watching a sunset over the Ramon Crater and I think — I could live here. What stops me?
The short answer is: land ownership, zoning, water, electricity, and access. In roughly that order of difficulty. Let me take them one by one, because each one is a different flavor of impossible.
Start with land. Who owns the Negev?
This is where Israel is unusual. About ninety-three percent of Israel's land is state-owned — managed by the Israel Land Authority. Private land ownership is mostly limited to the coastal plain and a few other areas that were privately held before 1948. In the Negev, virtually all the land is state land. You can't just buy a plot. The state leases land for development, typically in ninety-nine-year leases, but only in areas zoned for residential construction.
Step one — the land isn't for sale.
Not in the way most Westerners think of buying land. You're not going to find a real estate listing for forty acres near Mitspe Ramon with a view of the crater. The land simply isn't on the market. If you want to build, you need to convince the state to rezone a parcel and offer it for lease. That requires navigating the Israel Land Authority, the regional planning council, and usually the Ministry of Housing.
They have no reason to say yes.
They have active reasons to say no. Israel's planning policy for decades has been to concentrate population in existing urban areas and prevent sprawl. The National Outline Plan — TAMA 35 — explicitly designates most of the Negev as open space, nature reserves, military training zones, or agricultural land. Residential development is channeled into existing towns and cities. The goal is to preserve open space and avoid the infrastructure costs of servicing scattered settlements.
The emptiness isn't an accident. It's policy.
It's very intentional policy. And it's worth noting that Israel is small enough that this actually matters. If you allowed scattered development in the Negev, you could fragment the desert ecosystem fairly quickly. The country is only about four hundred twenty kilometers long and at its narrowest point about fifteen kilometers wide. There isn't that much open space to begin with.
Alright, so land is locked. But let's say hypothetically I get past that. What's next?
And this is the real killer. The Negev gets about twenty-five to two hundred millimeters of rain per year, almost all of it in brief winter storms. The southern Arava gets less than thirty millimeters annually. There's no surface water — no rivers, no lakes. Groundwater exists but it's deep, often brackish, and in many aquifers it's being depleted faster than it recharges.
You're not drilling a well.
You can drill, but the water you hit might be saline or require treatment. Israel has become extraordinarily good at desalination — the Sorek plant, the Hadera plant, Ashkelon — these are among the world's largest and most efficient. But desalinated water has to be piped. The national water carrier runs from the Mediterranean coast inland and southward, but it doesn't reach every corner of the Negev. If you're building somewhere remote, you're either trucking water in or paying to extend the grid, which can run hundreds of thousands of shekels per kilometer of pipeline.
That's before you power the pumps.
Which brings us to electricity. The grid does extend through much of the Negev, but not everywhere. There are off-grid Bedouin villages that rely on generators and solar panels. If you're building a single house miles from the nearest power line, the connection cost is on you. Solar plus battery storage is actually becoming viable — Israel gets about three hundred sunny days a year, and panel efficiency has improved dramatically. But a setup that can run air conditioning through a Negev summer — and you will need air conditioning, temperatures regularly hit forty-five degrees Celsius — that's a serious system. We're talking a hundred fifty thousand shekels minimum just for a robust off-grid power setup.
Land, water, power. What about just getting there?
If you're building near an existing highway — Route 40, Route 90 — you might be okay. But many of the truly empty areas are accessed by dirt tracks that wash out in winter floods. The Negev gets flash floods that can be dangerous — dry riverbeds become torrents in minutes. If you want a paved access road from the nearest highway to your house, and that house is five kilometers from the road, you're looking at road construction costs that can exceed the cost of the house itself.
It's almost like nature is telling us something.
Nature and the state, working in tandem. Let me also mention building codes. Israel has strict seismic codes — the Jordan Rift Valley is seismically active. The Negev gets cold in winter, below freezing at night in the highlands around Mitspe Ramon, so you need insulation and heating. You need a septic system because there's no municipal sewage. You need a building permit from the regional council, which requires approved architectural plans, environmental impact assessments if you're near a nature reserve, and archaeological surveys to make sure you're not building on top of something ancient.
Which in Israel, you almost certainly are.
The Negev is full of archaeological sites. Nabatean cities, prehistoric flint quarries, Byzantine monasteries, ancient agricultural terraces. Before you can break ground, the Israel Antiquities Authority has to sign off. If they find something, construction stops.
To recap: you can't buy the land, you can't get water, power requires a small fortune, the road will bankrupt you, and ancient Nabateans might veto the whole thing.
Yet people do build out there. There are isolated farms and homesteads in the Negev. The government has actually encouraged some of this through programs for agricultural settlement and tourism. There are the so-called individual farms — havot bodedim — scattered through the Negev. Some are legitimate agricultural operations, some are more like rural residences with a few goats for tax purposes.
Literally "lonely farms.
Which might be the most poetically honest zoning category in any country's planning code. But even these are tightly controlled. You typically need to demonstrate an agricultural business plan, and the land lease is conditional on maintaining agricultural activity. You can't just build a vacation home and call it a farm.
The empty wilderness stays empty.
And I think there's a broader point here about what uninhabited land actually represents. In most countries, truly uninhabited areas fall into a few categories. One — government-owned land that's deliberately kept empty, whether for military use, conservation, or resource management. Two — land that's economically nonviable for settlement because of climate, terrain, or distance from markets. Three — land that's legally restricted from development through zoning or conservation easements.
has all three in massive quantities.
federal government owns about twenty-eight percent of the country's land area. Most of that is in the West. Nevada is eighty percent federal land. Utah is about sixty-five percent. Alaska is over sixty percent. These are huge swaths managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the National Park Service. Some of it is open for recreational use but closed to permanent settlement. Some of it is designated wilderness where you can't even build a road.
Then there's the private land that's just too remote to bother with.
There are counties in Montana and Wyoming where you can buy land relatively cheaply — forty acres for less than a hundred thousand dollars in some places. But you face versions of the same challenges. No grid power, no municipal water, no paved access, and winters that will kill you if you're not prepared.
The romance of the frontier versus the logistics of the frontier.
The romance has a powerful hold on the imagination. I think that's part of what the prompt is really getting at. When you stand in an empty landscape and see nothing but desert or prairie or tundra stretching to the horizon, there's a visceral sense of possibility. You think — I could just be here. The land is right there. It looks available.
Availability is a legal and infrastructural concept, not a physical one.
The land is physically there. It's legally, economically, and practically unavailable. And that gap between the physical reality and the legal reality is where most of the interesting questions live.
Let me pull on a thread here. You mentioned that Israel's emptiness is partly policy-driven — the state actively prevents scattered settlement. How does that compare to other countries? Is Israel unusual in how aggressively it concentrates its population?
Israel is somewhat unusual, but not unique. The Netherlands has a similar philosophy — it's one of the densest countries in Europe, but it maintains a clear distinction between urban and rural land through strict zoning. The Green Heart — Groene Hart — is a deliberately preserved agricultural and natural area surrounded by the Randstad cities. It's about seven hundred square kilometers kept relatively empty in the middle of one of the most urbanized regions on earth.
The Netherlands is wet and green and naturally supports agriculture. Preserving emptiness in a desert is a different calculation.
It is, and it's worth asking what the Negev emptiness is actually preserving. Partly it's military necessity — the Negev has been Israel's primary training ground since the state was founded. Large portions are closed military zones. Partly it's environmental — the desert ecosystem is fragile, and species like the Arabian oryx and the Negev tortoise need undisturbed habitat. But partly, and I think this is under-discussed, it's strategic reserve. Israel is a small country with a growing population. The Negev represents future capacity. If you scatter low-density development across it now, you foreclose options for more efficient future development.
It's land banking at a national scale.
In a sense. Every dunam you allow to become a single homestead is a dunam that can't become part of a planned community with proper infrastructure and services. And Israel's population is projected to reach about fifteen million by 2050. At some point, the Negev will need to absorb significant population growth. The question is whether that happens through densification of existing towns or through new development.
Which brings up the fascinating tension. The prompt is about the wonder of emptiness. The response is about policy maintaining emptiness. But underneath that is a deeper question — is emptiness a resource we should be preserving, or a problem to be solved?
That's the philosophical core of it. And different countries answer that question very differently. Japan, for example — Japan is about seventy percent mountainous and forested, and those areas are largely uninhabited. But Japan also has a shrinking population and a crisis of rural depopulation. Villages are emptying out, schools are closing, houses are being abandoned. The Japanese government is actually paying people to move to rural areas in some cases. The emptiness isn't preserved — it's expanding, and it's seen as a problem.
Whereas Israel's emptiness is actively maintained against the pressure of a growing population.
And that makes Israel's case unusual among developed countries. Most developed countries with growing populations are seeing their empty areas shrink — exurban sprawl, edge cities, the blurring of the urban-rural boundary. Israel has managed to keep its desert largely desert despite significant population growth. That's not an accident. It takes constant policy effort.
Let's talk about the U.comparison more, because the prompt specifically asked about it. What percentage of the U.is virtually uninhabited?
If we use the same threshold — fewer than one person per square kilometer — I'd estimate roughly forty to fifty percent of the U.land area qualifies. Alaska alone is about seventeen percent of U.territory and has a density of about zero point five people per square kilometer. Most of it is uninhabited by any reasonable definition. Then you add the empty quarters of the Mountain West and Great Plains. The hundredth meridian is a real dividing line — west of it, rainfall drops below twenty inches per year, and population density drops with it.
The hundredth meridian. Wallace Stegner territory.
Stegner wrote that the West is defined by aridity. And aridity is the great filter for human settlement. If you look at a population density map of the United States, the line is stark. East of the Mississippi, there's a fairly even distribution of small towns and cities. West of the hundredth meridian, you get islands of density — Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Albuquerque — surrounded by enormous empty spaces.
Within those empty spaces, the same barriers to building that we talked about for the Negev.
With some important differences. In the U., you can actually buy land in remote areas. Private land ownership is much more extensive. You can find forty acres in rural Nevada or eastern Oregon for sale right now. The land itself isn't the barrier. The barriers are water rights, which in the West are a labyrinth of prior appropriation doctrine and senior water rights that may have been claimed a century ago, building permits, which vary by county but almost always require road access and septic approval, and the sheer cost of bringing utilities to a remote site.
Water rights in the West is a whole episode on its own.
It really is. The short version is that in most Western states, water rights are separate from land rights, and the most senior rights — meaning the first people to claim the water — get priority. In many watersheds, all the water is already allocated. You can own land along a river and have no legal right to use the water. You'd be buying land and hoping to drill a well, but groundwater is also regulated and increasingly depleted.
The romance of the American frontier runs into the reality of Western water law.
Which is, in its own way, just as Byzantine as the Israel Land Authority. Different mechanisms, same result — the land looks empty and available, but the legal and practical barriers to building on it are substantial.
I want to circle back to something you said earlier about the ninety-fifty distribution — ninety percent of people on ten percent of the land. Is that trend intensifying or weakening?
Intensifying, and dramatically. Urbanization is one of the most powerful demographic trends on the planet. In 1950, about thirty percent of the world's population lived in urban areas. Today it's about fifty-seven percent. By 2050, the UN projects it'll be sixty-eight percent. The empty areas are getting emptier, and the dense areas are getting denser.
Even with remote work?
Remote work was supposed to reverse this. During the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about the great dispersal — people leaving cities for rural areas, small towns experiencing revivals. And some of that happened. But the data from the last few years shows it was more of a ripple than a wave. The vast majority of remote workers stayed within commuting distance of major cities. The truly remote areas didn't see sustained population growth.
Because even if you can work from anywhere, you still want restaurants and hospitals and schools and other humans.
Broadband, which is still not universal in remote areas. And social networks. The agglomeration effects I mentioned don't go away just because your job goes remote. People still want to be near other people for all the non-work reasons.
The empty places will stay empty.
The empty places will stay empty, and the policy frameworks that keep them empty will likely persist or even strengthen. There's growing recognition of the value of undeveloped land for carbon sequestration, biodiversity, watershed protection. The environmental case for keeping empty places empty is getting stronger, not weaker.
Which brings us back to the prompt's wonder at the emptiness. There's something almost spiritual about standing in a place where no one lives and seeing nothing but landscape. And the answer to why that experience is possible is a complex stack of geography, law, economics, and policy. The emptiness is curated.
I like that. It's not natural emptiness — there's no such thing anymore, not in a world of eight billion people. Every empty place is empty because something is keeping it empty. Either nature makes it too harsh, or the market makes it too expensive, or the government makes it illegal, or all three.
The Negev is all three.
The Negev is a perfect trifecta. Harsh desert climate, high infrastructure costs, and a state that actively wants it undeveloped for military, environmental, and strategic reasons.
If a listener is standing at the rim of the Ramon Crater, feeling that sense of limitless possibility, the honest answer is — enjoy the view. The view is what you get. The view is the point.
The view is valuable. Israel's open spaces in the Negev are spectacular. The crater itself is a geological wonder — it's not actually a crater, it's a makhtesh, a erosion cirque, one of only a handful in the world. The colors at sunrise, the ibex walking along the cliff edge, the complete silence. That experience exists because the emptiness has been preserved.
The silence is curated.
That's the term.
Alright, let me try to pull together some numbers for the listener who wants a concrete answer. Israel — roughly forty to forty-five percent of the territory is virtually uninhabited, defined as fewer than one person per square kilometer. United States — roughly forty to fifty percent. Australia — probably seventy to eighty percent. Canada — similar, seventy to eighty percent. Russia — maybe sixty percent. On the lower end, the Netherlands and Belgium — five to ten percent. The UK — maybe ten to fifteen percent, mostly in Scotland. Japan — about thirty percent, mostly in Hokkaido and the mountainous interior. Does that sound about right?
Those are reasonable ballpark estimates. The exact numbers depend on how you define virtually uninhabited and how fine-grained your population data is. But the pattern is clear. Even densely populated developed countries tend to have a significant fraction of their territory that's effectively empty. Ten percent seems to be a floor, and the ceiling is very high — over ninety percent for places like Iceland.
There is a normal range, and it's wide. Ten percent to ninety percent. Israel at forty to forty-five percent is on the emptier side for a dense country, but not an outlier globally.
The practical answer to the building question is that in almost all of these empty places, the barriers are similar. Land tenure, water, power, access, and regulatory approval. The specific mechanisms vary by country — state land leasing in Israel, water rights doctrine in the American West, planning permission in the UK — but the effect is the same. The emptiness is defended.
That's the phrase I'm taking from this episode.
It's a good phrase. It captures the active quality of it. Emptiness doesn't just happen. It's maintained.
Now, Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In fourteenth-century Bruges, the guild of manuscript illuminators required new members to produce a single illuminated letter so intricate it contained a hidden self-portrait somewhere within the gold leaf — and the guild masters would examine it under magnification to verify the artist had not simply painted over a printed woodcut, a form of cheating they called "the devil's shortcut.
Printed woodcuts in the fourteenth century? I have questions.
The timeline there is a century off at minimum. But the hidden self-portrait in gold leaf is a lovely detail.
A lovely detail.
I think the open question for listeners is this. As the world continues to urbanize, what happens to the empty places? Do they become more protected, more valued as environmental assets? Or do they become more vulnerable to development pressure as cities grow and land prices rise? Israel's going to have to answer that question very concretely in the coming decades.
The Negev won't stay empty forever. The question is what kind of non-empty it becomes.
Whether the curated emptiness we have now was the right thing to curate. That's a judgment future generations will make, and they'll have the benefit of hindsight we don't.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for making this show possible. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts dot com.
If you enjoyed this, leave us a review wherever you listen. It helps other people find the show.
Until next time.
