Holy crap, Australia has approximately the same population as New York City. That's nearly an order of magnitude less than I would have guessed. I had no idea!
Depends where you draw the line. The 5 boroughs alone is about 8M, but the broader metropolitan area is something like 20. (And even beyond that it's still pretty densely populated compared to most places.)
An order of magnitude higher and it'd be of similar magnitude to the entire USA.
I tend to think of Australia as pretty similar (if literally polar opposite) to Canada. Similar population and standard of living on a similarly large but largely inhospitable landmass.
Australia has almost everything wrong you can think of climate-wise: cold Antarctic currents hitting the west coast causing dry winds with little moisture, on the east coast there's a narrow strip between the coast and the long N-S mountains that gets moisture, but even then the mountains are barely high enough to trap winds and cause rainfall. The very north gets monsoons, the inland is a baking desert and only the very south is temperate.
If you want an idea of scale, there's a single cattle farm in Australia operated by less than a dozen people that is larger than Texas.
To a good approximation Australia is a desert surrounded by a narrow, narrow strip of livable land. It would be pretty remarkable if it had a population close to that of the US.
An order of magnitude! That would be imagining that Australia has >200 million people. Given that the US has a little more than 300 million, well... No, they aren't comparable.
Australia by an large is an inhospitable island with only a few pockets of population.
A few years ago I wanted to make my movie-watching more representative of relative populations of countries, so I made this list. Most strikingly, about 4 movies in each 100 I watch should be from USA.
Percentage of world population:
China 18.5 -
India 17.7 -
USA 4.25 -
Indonesia 3.5 -
Pakistan 2.8 -
Brazil 2.7 -
Nigeria 2.6 -
Bangladesh 2.1 -
Russia 1.9 -
Mexico 1.65 -
Japan 1.6 -
Ethiopia 1.5 -
Philippines 1.4 -
Egypt 1.3 -
Vietnam 1.25 -
DR Congo 1 -
Turkey 1 -
Iran 1 -
Germany 1 -
Thailand 0.9 -
UK 0.9 -
France 0.8 -
Italy 0.8 -
Tanzania 0.8 -
South Africa 0.8 -
Myanmar 0.7 -
Kenya, South Korea, Colombia 0.6 -
Spain, Uganda, Argentina, Algeria, Sudan, Ukraine 0.6 -
Iraq, Afghanistan, Poland, Canada, Morocco, Saudi Arabia 0.5
It would be fascinating to ask people around the world - "What percentage of the world's population lives in your country?"
Norway is very sunny in summer. You can see the midnight sun in the north but even in the south it’s enough light to be outside all the time around June.
In the extreme north it’s worse: “ In Svalbard, Norway, the northernmost inhabited region of Europe, there is no sunset from approximately 19 April to 23 August.”
Well, I clearly live in Norway having given that example. It was a joke about the current weather situation in North (but not extreme North) as it is one of the more timid Summers in recent years.
(Sweden here). In those times of climate change, I find having a timid summer reassuring. I know this isn't rational at all, but it gives me a tiny bit of hope.
Seems related to the fact that you can draw a surprisingly-small circle over part of Asia and have more people inside the circle, than out. Human geography is very uneven.
Yep, that's the one. Ballpark 7% of the Earth's surface, or 15% of the land-surface area (guesstimate based on the whole circle being about 22% of the land surface area—but much of the circle is over water). Over 50% of the population.
Quite probably only if we're ignoring the z-axis (depth), at least when talking over minerals. I think it will be a game-changer if a few km of rock won't be a hindrance anymore. If that ever comes, that is.
There’s a huge amount of gold (and other stuff) dissolved in seawater. Something like 20 million tons of it. The trouble is that it’s too evenly distributed.
Well, right, it's the intuition/viewpoint that takes it to "huh, neat and a little surprising, but believable" rather than "no fucking way!" that's similar, I'd say. If you're familiar with one of these (or other, similar) bits of trivia, the other one's probably more believable on your first encounter with it, because you've already been exposed to the underlying insight that makes it possible.
I think you should specify the northern border of the contiguous states. Otherwise, I bet 99% of Canada’s population lives south of Alaska northern border.
I hesitated to be more specific, but figured (probably wrongly so, should always be explicit when stating things like this) that it's implicitly obvious it's about the ~49th parallel border. In fact you can draw the line well below that border[0].
Another way to put it is that half of Canadian's population lives ~between Toronto and Montréal.
Yeah, it's wrong. There isn't even a single CME strong enough to cause aurora every day, let alone strong enough to cook us, and let alone multiple times per day.
It is wrong. During the peak of the solar activity cycle, the sun produces about 3 coronal mass ejections a day. During the bottom of the cycle, though, it only produces one about once every 5 days. They do sometimes hit the Earth, too. The largest known was the Carrington Event in 1859, which started some of the US telegraph network on fire. There was one in 1989 as well.
I don't know that there has ever been a CME strong enough to cook all animals on the side of Earth facing the sun, though. The sun is pretty far away and Earth has a nice magnetosphere that is one of the reasons life exists in the first place. It protects us from stuff like this.
Incidentally, a CME cooking the entire Earth was the plot of a pretty terrible Nic Cage movie called Knowing a decade or so back.
I'm not sure about the cooking power but in terms of the scale of things, if the earth were a golf ball, a 2000km wide coronal mass ejection would indeed be like shooting a bullet in a random direction at a golf ball half a kilometer away.
Your metaphor is totally off. For one thing, even the biggest CMEs aren't powerful enough to literally cook us. Partly because of solar size, distance and composition, and partly because our Earth has its own protections via the atmosphere, our robust electromagnetic field and a few atmospheric factors. Secondly, random bullets fired off in random directions remain as small dense objects. That metaphor works better for asteroids randomly bounding around the solar system. CMEs on the other hand expand and spread to pretty huge sizes as they fly outward into the Solar System. This makes them much more likely to arrive.
Wow, what a fun statistic! Even if it's pushing the common definition of "sunlight" quite a bit.
Also makes me wonder what fraction of the world population is awake at a given time, and what that fraction looks like plotted against 24 hours of the day.
A practical issue- if you have a world-distributed workforce or an international news agency, what's the best geographical location for the headquarters?
Does this actually matter? Internet cabling vs magical straight lines would amount to less than 1 second difference, so emails/slack/discord/IRC/etc (basically anything except video chat) would barely notice.
London has long benefitted from its position allowing its working day overlapping everywhere from the US West coast to Japan, even if barely at those extremes. Most of the world's population lies between UTC-5 and UTC+5 I believe.
Given India is UTC+5.5 and China is UTC+8, plus many other large countries are outside that range (Indonesia, Japan, Bangladesh, Mexico, Phillipines) I think you need to stretch it a bit
Given OP's 10 hour range, UTC+0 to UTC+10 is almost certainly going to be the 10 hour range that includes the most people. It includes all of Asia, Europe and Africa, and excludes both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
UTC+8 is all of China and UTC+5.5 is all of India, and in between are high population countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, so UTC+5.5 to UTC+8 has to be included.
UTC+11 to UTC-8.5 is the Pacific Ocean and has maybe 10 million people total, while UTC+0 has >100 million in UK, Portugal and part of Western Africa so UTC+0 must be part of the range.
That only leaves the choice between UTC-1/2 and UTC+9/10. UTC-1 and UTC-2 have under a million with only a few small islands while UTC+10 has most of Papua New Guinea with 6 million.
I've certainly seen "most" used to mean "almost all", and it appears as though you're feeling a little annoyed to see it used that way because you consider it misleading.
I've also frequently seen "most" used to mean "a majority", though, in which case GP's use of the term is precisely consistent with the facts in their source.
Seconding the UK. I live in Edinburgh (Scotland) and I can meet with people from west coast US as far as China with very minor adjustments to my working day. I have natural half day overlaps with east coast US, and most of my day overlaps with major outsourcing locations (except the phillipines, but can be managed with a 1 hour adjustment)
- the most people are awake at around 14:00 UTC. That's 23:00 in Japan (the easternmost big population, at UTC+9 - sorry eastern Australia!) and 6:00 PST/7:00 PDT; most people who would be sleeping are in the Pacific.
- the most people are asleep at about 22:00 UTC - that's 23:00/00:00 in Western Europe (depending on the season) and 06:00 in China, so you get those two big population centers (and India in between them) sleeping.
That's interesting. You can see a difference between N and S hemispheres on the same longitude, e.g. North East USA vs Peru and Japan vs East Australia.
Growing up in a household where we'd be constantly reminded of the longest day of the year and then have summer vacation reminders of "the days are getting shorter now" I'm not sure how I feel about this statistic...
It's not clear to me why the same isn't true for the 7th of June - ie, 17 days the other side of the solstice (for fuzzy values of solstice, depending where you're standing, etc).
This puzzled me too but I don’t think it’s quite symmetric? Try taking a non-spherical object as a model “Earth” — I used my earphones case — then tilt it at a fixed angle and maneuver it around a “Sun” before and after the solstice. I think you’ll find that before and after are not quite symmetric and different corners of your object are angled towards the “Sun”. (Please correct me if I’m wrong on this I still haven’t fully convinced myself.)
Not to be "that guy", but claiming that 4:15am in California (11:15 UTC) is daylight is really stretching it, at least going by this morning. Also sunrise here is ~5:50 AM. Even for a 7am meeting I typically need lights on in my office until partway through. The room has both eastern and southern exposure in the south-east corner (my desk is literally by the windows).
The article points out that it will be astronomical twilight, which most people aren't able to notice visually:
> This is especially true for those who reside on the outermost edge of the twilight zones, within the darkest twilight phase called astronomical twilight. Here, the Sun is 12-18 degrees below the horizon. At that angle, the indirect sunlight becomes so thin that it is usually indiscernible to the naked eye.
The article suggests 83% to 90% (not 99%) of people will find it to be light out (daylight or civil twilight) ... not including Californians.
Sunrise means that the sun is fully above the horizon. Dusk is when the sun light is starting to appear but the sun is still below the horizon. So yea I think the original 99% is experiencing daylight is from from accurate but almost everyone will be experiencing sunlight… technically.
Other comments have already mentioned the Valeriepieris circle [1] ~4,000 km in radius which contains over half the world’s population. Another relevant phenomenon is Earth’s land and water hemispheres [2].
timeanddate.com has a great weather viewer. Just wanted to say that. wunderground.com has turned into an awful mess since IBM bought it, did a poor web 2.0 treatment on it, and now I think accuweather (who effectively has a monopoly on weather data) bought them? weather.com is full of ads, as is any other weathre website these days. for whatever reason.
timeanddate.com has a clean, fast interface, and if you don't like ads they have an ad-free option
121 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] thread7 billion people => 7000 Million.
1% of that, 70 Million.
Population of australia, 25.7 Million people. So not only less than 1%, less than 0.5%
Lol and I think Sydney is getting “too busy”
I tend to think of Australia as pretty similar (if literally polar opposite) to Canada. Similar population and standard of living on a similarly large but largely inhospitable landmass.
If you want an idea of scale, there's a single cattle farm in Australia operated by less than a dozen people that is larger than Texas.
Texas is rather larger than Anna Creek, at 676,587 km2 of land according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas .
Australia by an large is an inhospitable island with only a few pockets of population.
Percentage of world population: China 18.5 - India 17.7 - USA 4.25 - Indonesia 3.5 - Pakistan 2.8 - Brazil 2.7 - Nigeria 2.6 - Bangladesh 2.1 - Russia 1.9 - Mexico 1.65 - Japan 1.6 - Ethiopia 1.5 - Philippines 1.4 - Egypt 1.3 - Vietnam 1.25 - DR Congo 1 - Turkey 1 - Iran 1 - Germany 1 - Thailand 0.9 - UK 0.9 - France 0.8 - Italy 0.8 - Tanzania 0.8 - South Africa 0.8 - Myanmar 0.7 - Kenya, South Korea, Colombia 0.6 - Spain, Uganda, Argentina, Algeria, Sudan, Ukraine 0.6 - Iraq, Afghanistan, Poland, Canada, Morocco, Saudi Arabia 0.5
It would be fascinating to ask people around the world - "What percentage of the world's population lives in your country?"
> Sunlight
pick one
In the extreme north it’s worse: “ In Svalbard, Norway, the northernmost inhabited region of Europe, there is no sunset from approximately 19 April to 23 August.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#/media/Fi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gold-ocean-sea-hoax-sc...
> Wind
I know you know and this is just stupid pedantry but it made me cackle
... the future.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Globe_-_Pacific_Ocea...
Another way to put it is that half of Canadian's population lives ~between Toronto and Montréal.
0: https://i1.wp.com/metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/c...
Based on the map, another way to put it, is:
Most Canadians live south of Seattle.
To cook our power grid, small enough to be surprisingly common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms
It would be like you stepping outside and shooting a bullet in a random direction a few times a day, with Earth being a golf ball miles away.
The golf ball would be destroyed by a bullet. But your odds of hitting it are very low.
Of course, over time the odds become an inevitability.
I don't know that there has ever been a CME strong enough to cook all animals on the side of Earth facing the sun, though. The sun is pretty far away and Earth has a nice magnetosphere that is one of the reasons life exists in the first place. It protects us from stuff like this.
Incidentally, a CME cooking the entire Earth was the plot of a pretty terrible Nic Cage movie called Knowing a decade or so back.
Also makes me wonder what fraction of the world population is awake at a given time, and what that fraction looks like plotted against 24 hours of the day.
Sufficiently advanced technology
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrin...
UTC+8 is all of China and UTC+5.5 is all of India, and in between are high population countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, so UTC+5.5 to UTC+8 has to be included.
UTC+11 to UTC-8.5 is the Pacific Ocean and has maybe 10 million people total, while UTC+0 has >100 million in UK, Portugal and part of Western Africa so UTC+0 must be part of the range.
That only leaves the choice between UTC-1/2 and UTC+9/10. UTC-1 and UTC-2 have under a million with only a few small islands while UTC+10 has most of Papua New Guinea with 6 million.
So if you want to be as close as possible to as many people as possible, somewhere in Myanmar would be a better choice than London.
Of course the calculus changes if you also consider how much money each of these people has access to.
“More than half of” is one of the definitions
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55920/is-most-eq...
I've also frequently seen "most" used to mean "a majority", though, in which case GP's use of the term is precisely consistent with the facts in their source.
That changes the equation
- Access to capital? - close to "action"? - Airport hub city?
Some quick guesses:
- the most people are awake at around 14:00 UTC. That's 23:00 in Japan (the easternmost big population, at UTC+9 - sorry eastern Australia!) and 6:00 PST/7:00 PDT; most people who would be sleeping are in the Pacific.
- the most people are asleep at about 22:00 UTC - that's 23:00/00:00 in Western Europe (depending on the season) and 06:00 in China, so you get those two big population centers (and India in between them) sleeping.
http://census2012.sourceforge.net/images/geovideo_lowres.gif
Source: http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html
https://www.yahoo.com/now/ozone-hole-found-over-tropics-1538...
> This is especially true for those who reside on the outermost edge of the twilight zones, within the darkest twilight phase called astronomical twilight. Here, the Sun is 12-18 degrees below the horizon. At that angle, the indirect sunlight becomes so thin that it is usually indiscernible to the naked eye.
The article suggests 83% to 90% (not 99%) of people will find it to be light out (daylight or civil twilight) ... not including Californians.
(1) If astronomical twilight and other indirect sunlight counts, then moonlight counts doubly so!
(2) If indirect and thus spatially separated sunlight counts, then temporally removed sunlight, in the form of airglow, should count as well!
Given that, the caviet of direct and indirect sunlight is a huge factor not quantified.
I hadn't realized we were closed to 8B than 7B now.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_and_water_hemispheres
timeanddate.com has a clean, fast interface, and if you don't like ads they have an ad-free option
"The old Axolotl" - Jacek Dukaj