Ghostown...........

Yup, you got it, Michelle. But just for accuracy's sake, it's nowhere near the size of a couple of continents. Last I read, there were about 14,000 regions, which is about 900 million square meters, or about 350 square miles. That's just slightly larger than the size of New York City, if you don't include its waterways.

NYC, though, has over 8 million people in it at all times, about 160 times as many as SL typically has. Imagine evacuating 99.4% of New Yorkers, and you've basically got SL. New York would seem pretty empty, too, with 50,000 people in it.

Only 14,000? Has to be more than that. I was basing my estimate on the fact that in Oct 2008 there were 127,417,424 m2 SOLD by residents (that's all I could find without digging for more. The number has to be out there). 1944.24 regions worth. Surely 13.8% of the world didn't turn over in a month? Must be a lot more out there than that!

...but ok, continents, no

http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

(Avg price of L$1.6/m?!)

damn i miss it

Looks like you were right. According to yesterday afternoon's blog posting, I was less than half way there in my estimate. I thought there was something just shy of a billion square meters of land in SL. It turns out it's actually almost 2 billion!

2 billion square meters is rougly 30,500 sims. So just for the hell of it, if we redo my earlier math, 52,000 people online comes out to just 1.7 people per sim. So if you get 30 people to an event, you do it by evacuating 16 other regions. Yup, definitely ghost-town material.

For SL to feel uniformly crowded, we'd need about 2-300 times the active population we've got now.

Or you remove some of the land, which is what effectively will happen has landowners covert 4 openspace sims into 1 full sim, reducing the land area in some parts by a quarter.