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A 2,500-mile radius in Asia contains half the world's population (2017)
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoAt first the article says it's a 2500 mile radius, and then it says it's a 2500 mile diameter. So which is it?
- Kikawala 7y agoRadius. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle
- newnewpdro 7y agoStrange for that wikipedia page to not contain a single graphic representation of what's being described.
- dangrossman 7y agoThe wiki's sources have a picture: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/more-than-half-the-worlds-population-lives-inside-this-circle https://www.cntraveler.com/story/more-than-half-the-worlds-p... Perhaps you'd like to be the one to ask the graphic's author for permission to add it to Wikipedia, or you'd like to create a graphic to add yourself.
- newnewpdro 7y agoI had loaded that page and didn't see one, I guess it must require javascript.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoThe DIAMETER of such an area is very roughly 12 percent of Earth's CIRCUMFERENCE. So you could (probably) lay 8 of these areas around the equator, give or take a a couple.
- oefrha 7y agoThe earth’s circumference is ~4E4 km; the diameter of this circle is ~8E3 km. That’s 20%, not 2%. 2% would be utter madness.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoThanks for pointing that out. Its different now
- rdlw 7y ago20%, not 2%. So just under 5 would stretch around the equator.
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoThanks for pointing that out. Its different now
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- toronto_tic 7y agoAnd most probably that's were everything started as well...!!!
- knzhou 7y agoThe continent that has contributed the most to global pandemics is Europe. By far.
- BurningFrog 7y agoHumanity comes from Africa. That's very settled. China might be where the first civilization emerged though.
- dehrmann 7y agoGuess that means more more than 2% of humans to have ever lived live in that circle.
- paulrouget 7y agoHow many humans have ever lived? And how do we calculate that?
- dehrmann 7y agoThe internet tells me 107B. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579
- quickthrower2 7y agoI ain’t feeling so special now!
- pesfandiar 7y agoOne challenging aspect of the calculation would be defining "human".
- herendin2 7y agoHard to define, but not important for this stat, because the ancient global population of proto-humans was so small that it's not even a rounding error in 107BN (the estimated total humans to ever have lived)
- symplee 7y ago*Spherical cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cap Bonus points for whoever calculates the ratio of the surface areas for the two spherical caps that contain half of the human population. (The circle's radius is ~4,000 km)
- Waterluvian 7y agoCan I cheat and use QGIS? Feel like if I got up off my butt and went to my PC it would take two mins. I assume we are simplifying to an oblate spheroid and not worrying about topography and such. Also I think this means technically its a Spheroidal Cap?
- symplee 7y agoIf we bring in topography, aren't we now running into a 3D version of the coastline paradox? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox So, yes, good point. Let's start with assuming a perfect sphere, then oblate spheroid, then topography, then only land (not water), and however crazy this thread gets with whatever else we haven't thought of :)
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> Bonus points for whoever calculates the ratio of the surface areas for the two spherical caps Hmpf, I went to all the trouble of deriving the surface area of a spherical cap (it's really easy, as surface integrals go), and it's listed right there in the wikipedia page. A = 2πrr(1 - cos φ), where φ is the angle between the center of the cap and the edge (measured from the center of the sphere). Assumptions: 1. The "radius" of the cap is 4000 km. 2. The "radius" of the cap is actually an arclength along a great circle of a sphere (the earth). 3. The radius (a real radius) of the earth is somewhere between 6300 and 6400 km. The formula for arclength along a circle tells us that φ is somewhere between 40/63 and 40/64. We can calculate the cap's percentage of the surface area of the entire sphere as (1 - cos φ) / 2. For an earth-radius of 6300km, this is 9.744%. For 6400km, this is 9.452%. For the smaller earth, the ratio of the cap's outside to its inside is 9.26:1; for the larger earth, it is 9.58:1. Rounding to two significant figures, like we used for the size of the earth, the ratio should be between 9.3:1 and 9.6:1. The ratio isn't really very informative, because the cap was drawn around where a bunch of people live, and "everything else" wasn't. This has artifactually put most of the ocean, where people cannot live, into "everything else". "Everything else" should probably be significantly deflated to adjust for this. The article messes up a similar point: > The population density of Greenland, for example, is just 0.1/sq. mi—that is, one person living on every ten square miles of rock and ice. But it's a lot easier to find company in Manila, which is literally one million times as crowded: 107,000 Filipinos per square mile. The population density of Greenland is mostly zero with some spikes. There's not a literal tenth of a person every square mile -- those people would all be dead. The population density in areas where local population density is more than zero is much higher. Manila is not actually one million times as dense.
- throwGuardian 7y agoPart of the reason is the Ganges & YangTse river deltas are the most fertile on Earth. While other regions typically yield 2 crops a year, these deltas average 3 to 4. Also, the climate is relatively moderate with no major high frequency calamities (like earthquakes and hurricanes).
- emmelaich 7y ago> .. no major high frequency calamities (like earthquakes .. And yet, it is one of the most geologically active areas on earth. The Ring of Fire, Deccan Plateau, bunch of volcanoes. I'm sure this has a lot do with it's fertility.
- ampdepolymerase 7y agoVolcanoes are very fertile.
- luhem7 7y agoThe Deccan plateau is one of the world's most geologically inactive areas. The ring of fire goes through the circle but isn't a major component of the circle. There aren't even a remarkably high destiny of volcanoes. What is active is the Himalayan mountain range.
- emmelaich 7y agoTrue, I should have added historically. Nonetheless, it's still close to geologically active areas. e.g. the Indian Ocean 2004 Tsunami.
- contingencies 7y agoDon't forget the Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Red River, Pearl River, whatever dominates Java/Sumatra...
- 101404 7y agoRed River? Do you mean Yellow River (Huang He?)
- foobar_llc 7y agoI guess that's why coronavirus blew up so fast.
- _-___________-_ 7y agoIt didn't really, outside of China, and there are many more countries than China in that circle.
- kissickas 7y agoThe reddit thread (where it was originally posted) has some good discussion. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1dqh7d/after_seeing_a_recent_post_about_the_population/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1dqh7d/after_seein...
- abbadadda 7y agoInteresting discussion there on climate and geography (in the vein of Guns, Germs, and Steel). Thanks for linking.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cam_l 7y agoReminds me of an awesome map from a few years ago. http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?human-hemisphere http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?human-hemispher...
- fizixer 7y ago2500 mile radius is no joke though. It's 10% of world's land area. edit: The circle in the article has plenty of water. I'm not counting that. So maybe land area in that circle is 5% of world's total land area (not 10%).
- thaumasiotes 7y agoIt's about 10% of the world's entire area, ocean included. It's much more than that of the land area. (But as you note, it includes water too. Not sure how much.)
- keanzu 7y ago2500x2500xpi = 19.6M World total area = 197M [0] World land area = 57.5M [0] Circle looks to me to be at least half water so it's about a sixth of the world's land area. Approximately 11% [1] of all land is arable worldwide. I suspect the percentage is higher inside the circle. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.ARBL.ZS
- fizixer 7y agoYou're right. My bad. I googled 'earth land area' and it showed ~196 million sq miles. And I used it without double check. (Google incorrectly reported the full surface area of earth.)
- cortesoft 7y agoThey don't talk at all about why it is so. Is it particularly fertile territory that can support this kind of density? Is there something about the geography of the area or the geography of the globe that makes it have so many more people than the rest of the world?
- ta999999171 7y agoRead the older comments in this thread...
- dmix 7y agoIntestestingly in the original Reddit thread they were talking about epidemics as around that time (2014 was the post date) the influenza H7N9 was hitting China, which was also impacted heavily by Chinese new year travels. Smaller rates than Corona but it still hit 1223 people and had a 30-40% mortality rate: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1dqh7d/after_seeing_a_recent_post_about_the_population/c9sxqqt/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1dqh7d/after_seein... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H7N9?oldformat=true#Reported_cases_in_2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H7N9... From what I understand influenzas tend to be the scarier than Coronavirus types of viruses in most projected pandemic scenarios. This is one of the downsides of high density areas, although for more cost effect for lower income people so density will only continue to grow in most of the world.
- andys627 7y agoA 30 ft radius in Davos contains half the worlds wealth
- yitchelle 7y agoBut only for a small percentage of the year.
- mlvljr 7y agodang! communist shills here again!
- quickthrower2 7y agoOr a 2 ft radius in wherever bezos happens to be.
- stickfigure 7y agoA 3,958.8-mile radius around the center of the earth contains 100% of the world's population.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- divbzero 7y agoThis noteworthy point can help our intuition. πr² = area of circle 4πr² = surface area of sphere Thus a 2,500 mile radius circle covers ~10% of Earth’s surface.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- quickthrower2 7y agoAstronauts?
- tim333 7y agoThere are quite a few in planes and up mountains.
- speedgoose 7y ago2500 miles ≈ 4000 km. Guys, switch to metric units already. Thank you. The rest of the world.
- ikeyany 7y agoI find it very interesting that a large portion of the UK uses yards to measure distances shorter than a few kilometers. I saw a sign that read "Exit - 500 yards" in London the other day.
- ak39 7y agoYou think that’s bad? Half the folks in this 2,500 mile radius are “laughing in their crores and lakhs”. Mildly infuriating for someone not used to arbitrary multiple names.
- fctorial 7y agoThat's still a 10 based system.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoWell, sort of. It's a sometimes-1000-but-usually-100 based system. That's a significant conflict with the standard English assumption of a 1000-based system (which appears in the metric system as the widespread use of kilounits, megaunits, milliunits...). Chinese uses a 10,000-based ("myriadic") system. Conversion is a gigantic pain. Calling these all "10-based" is more harmful, likely to confuse people, than helpful. You might consider the powers of ten that get their own unit in each system: English: 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, ... Indian: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, ... Chinese: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 12, 16, ...
- gus_massa 7y agoSpanish: 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 12, 18, 24, ... More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales [I had to look up if the official definition of trillion is 10^18 or 10^24. It looks like a nice question to get a good irrelevant discussion for the coffeetime after lunch, if you can collect a few mathematicians in a Spanish speaking country.]
- wsxcde 7y agoThis will likely change once Africa becomes the most populous continent, which is expected to happen somewhere around 2100.
- b0rsuk 7y agoNot unless Sahara is going to become a green grassland again. With the way the climate change is going, unlikely.
- marcthe12 7y agoActually the Sahara Savannah is cause my an increase in temperatures
- k__ 7y agoCouldn't they build more green walls until the sahara is covered?
- wsxcde 7y agoThree points are worth making here. Nobody lives in the Sahara, the population centers in Africa are in the tropical regions and the Mediterranean. Africa will be the only continent experiencing population growth post-2050. Africa's largest economy, Nigeria, is expected to become the third most populous country in the world by 2050. The effects of climate change on monsoon-dependent areas (the Mediterreanean coast of Africa and the semi-arid regions bordering the southern parts of the Sahara) are not well-understood and the effects are more complicated than everything will become a desert. For example, the Indian monsoon is expected to produce 10% more rainfall because higher temperatures allow the air to collect more moisture. This is going to be a huge boon for certain semi-arid regions of the country.
- BurningFrog 7y agoI also expect population prognoses to change many times before 2100.
- archivist1 7y agoIt's centered on the island of Hainan. I want to know what the center of mass is for that picture, since the humans are not uniformly distributed in that circle.
- dntbnmpls 7y agoTotal world landmass: 57,510,000 miles squared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... 2500 miles * 2500 miles * pi = 19,630,000 miles squared So that area represents about (19.63 / 57.51 ) 34% of the total world landmass. So 50% of humans live in 34% of the landmass. But harsh and relatively uninhabitable lands make up a large portion of the earth's landmass ( antarctica - 5,400,000, siberia - 5,100,000, canada - 3,511,023, australia - 2,947,336, , greenland - 836,330) = 17.8 million square miles. So the habitable areas are 57.51 - 17.8 = 39.71 million miles squared. So that circle represents ( 19.63 / 39.71 ) 49.4% of the habitable land. So in the end, about 50% of the world population lives in about 50% of the world's habitable land. Astounding huh? It's amazing what some math and common sense and understanding of geography takes away from a clickbait article based on a reddit post. As others have noted, that area is also primed for human habitation due to tons of fresh water rivers flowing from the tibetan plateau and rich fertile land along with year-round planting seasons due to its proximity to the equator.
- empath75 7y ago1/3rd of that circle is water. And a significant amount of it is also Siberia and Mongolia. Double check your math.
- dntbnmpls 7y ago> 1/3rd of that circle is water. Fine. Thrown in the saraha desert and a few other inhospitable areas and it'll make up that third. > And a significant amount of it is also Siberia and Mongolia. Are we looking at the same map? Hardly any part of siberia is included ( maybe the a tiny portion of the russian far east ). Feel free to take out the mongolian landmass if you want. > Double check your math. Did and my idea still holds.
- Jupe 7y ago| So in the end, about 50% of the world population lives in about 50% of the world's habitable land. Your math may be accurate, but your assessment of habitable land-mass seems to be off. I know and work with a number of people in Canada, and I've visited many, many times. I'd hardly consider the entire area of Canada "uninhabitable". (Per wikipedia [1], Canada has a total (non-water) area of 3,511,023 sq. mi.) 37 million people live Canada [1]. Also, just a quick visual check indicates that about 1/2 of the area within that circle is ocean. And, the population density of the Himalayas (which is in the circle) is arguably small as well. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada
- einpoklum 7y agoI would be interested to see how this circle looks on a Peters-projection map.
- lovemenot 7y ago>> A 2,500-mile radius in Asia containing half the world's population Ken Jennings: What is Valeriepieris circle?
- billfruit 7y agoBeyond the factoid, the article unfortunately does not delve into why the population is concentrated in such region. Especially India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, that is most of the subcontinent has very uncomfortable weather, but still is highly populated, I wonder why? Why didn't people in the early ages decided to move to more temperate climes?
- harikb 7y agoWithout artificial heating or cooling, it is far easier to survive India than many parts of say, US or Europe. So in terms of ancient civilization, India is the ideal climate
- lotsofpulp 7y agoIt didn’t use to be so uncomfortable. Even just two generations ago, the weather was much milder and even when uncomfortable, only for a couple months. Then everything got paved, all the trees were cut down so there’s no more shade, carbon emissions, population explosion, climate change etc. Even the cultural traditions which used to line up with seasons such as monsoons and spring don’t quite line up anymore.
- odiroot 7y agoUncomfortable? They can farm and build for most of the year. As opposed to us in central Europe, where everything stops for nearly half a year.
- joncrane 7y agoUncomfortable, but not fatal. A human being can relax and turn down its metabolic needs when it's hot, find some shade, go for a swim. Also due to both climate and fertile soil, there is abundant growable food so humans will almost never starve (and even when food is low, metabolic needs are also low). It's possible to simply exist without trying too hard in those types of areas. Contrast with areas such as NYC or Moscow, where it's almost impossible to simply exist for many months of the year.
- jtolmar 7y agoMountains mean rivers, rivers mean agriculture, and agriculture means more people. The Himalayas are the largest mountains in the world, and the countries flanking them have always been the most populous. Try an image search for "rivers of Asia" and you'll see a bunch of lines pointing near the center of that circle.
- hacknat 7y agoProbably close to 90% lives in Iran/Iraq 4000 years ago.
- samatman 7y agoI'm curious how true that is. Probably not very. The Nile, Yangtze, Yellow and Indus rivers were all somewhat densely settled by 2000 BC.
- est31 7y agoNote that the title is wrong. It's a circle on a map, not in real life and thus it's not a "2 500-mile radius". A sphere in real life would be distorted in the map. In fact, all the meridians and circles of latitude are circles in real life but on the map they don't show up as circles.
- krtong 7y agoI enjoyed this post on reddit explaining why China has such a large population [1]: "You might be familiar with how the Nile River in Egypt works from school. If you aren't - for 9 months out of the year the Nile has a moderate flow rate that is sufficient to support human settlement and agriculture. For the remaining 3 months the Nile's flow rate increases dramatically and it floods a huge area around its river banks. That flooding might sound bad but its not. Using soil for agricultural purposes will deplete it's minerals within about 100 years. That's a long time compared to a human life, but not compared to a civilization. When the soil runs out of minerals you can't grow anything in it anymore, and it turns out that this is the limiting factor for most civilizations. IE, a civilization will begin intensively farming its soil, deplete the soil, then starve to death. In the modern world we're able to replenish the soil's minerals with fertilizer. They were sort of able to do this in the ancient world as well, but this involved transporting huge amounts of animal manure which is difficult to do and, in practice, if an ancient civilization had to manually fertilize the soil it would result in very low agricultural yields. This is what makes the Nile's floods so good for the development of civilization - every time the Nile would flood it deposits a huge amount of new soil in the areas that got flooded. The source of that new soil was hills and mountains in Central Africa, so it was filled with minerals. Or to put it another way - every year the Nile naturally dumped a huge amount of fertilizer on Egypt. This natural fertilizing allowed Egypt to be by far the most productive agricultural region West of India for thousands of years - everyone from the Pharaohs to Alexander the Great to the Roman Empire fed themselves using the food that the Nile was able to grow. How does this relate to China? The Yellow River in China is the same type of river as the Nile. It spends most of the year with a moderate flow rate, then has massive floods for a few months that deposit a bunch of new soil along its banks. Where the Yellow River is different from the Nile is in its size. The Nile is a single, small river with practically no tributaries or lakes. The Nile's floods only cover a small geographic area located immediately adjacent to it. The Yellow River, on the other hand, is a massive system with hundreds of tributaries and lakes. When it floods, it covers almost the entirety of South East China - which is an area thousands of times the size of that covered by the Nile. The Yellow River basin has been among for the most productive agricultural areas on Earth for much of human history. Because the only limiting factor to population size is a region's ability to produce food, this also means that the Yellow River Basin (and by extension, China) has managed to maintain a huge population for the entirety of human history." 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/exghji/eli5_how_did_the_chinese_succeed_in_reaching_a/fg84swh?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/exghji/e...
- iancmceachern 7y agoI was just reading this interesting article on the topic. I particularly like the graph if population vs latitude. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-countries-like-India-and-China-so-densely-populated-What-are-the-circumstances-and-reasons https://www.quora.com/Why-are-countries-like-India-and-China...
- Someone 7y agoThat should have been scaled by, at least, length of the circle of latitude (there are fewer people the nearer you go to the poles not only because it is cold there, but also because there’s less area), preferably also by land area on the circle of latitude. Looking at the graph, I would guess that that combination explains quite a bit of the shape of the graph.
- tomq 7y agoA detailed follow-on study found a 4,000-mile radius sphere centered on the earth’s core contains ~100% of earth’s population. Scientists stunned.
- supportlocal4h 7y ago100% of the Earth's population lives within a 4000 mile radius.
- intpbro 7y agoA 2500 mile radius is a huge area