10 ms·
July 8 99% of the world’s population in sunlight simultaneously?
- ComputerCat 4y agoGrowing 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...
- diedyesterday 4y agoThe basic reason is that the Pacific ocean is so big that it almost covers a full hemisphere.
- plasticchris 4y agoAustralia has less than 1% of the world population? Edit: yep, around 0.3%
- Izikiel43 4y agoYes. 7 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%
- greenpeas 4y agoLess than two "australias" away from 8 billion now. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
- goatlover 4y agoCloser to 8 billion now. 7.753 according to google.
- avalys 4y agoHoly 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!
- SamBam 4y agoAn 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.
- CodeSgt 4y agoI'm pretty sure NYC has a population of like 7 or 8 million, about a third of Australias.
- tempestn 4y agoDepends 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.)
- hackernewds 4y agoThe broader metropolitan is not usually what people consider as NYC. New York state maybe
- Dylan16807 4y agoThe broader area is more like that little corner of the state plus half of New Jersey.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- prpl 4y agoNew York MSA is 20M, CSA is 23M
- quickthrower2 4y agoNYC = NSW approx then. Lol and I think Sydney is getting “too busy”
- yesenadam 4y agoA 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?"
- keithnz 4y agoInterestingly asking wolfram alpha to calculate it, you get a cool little graph showing a history.... https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=population+of+new+zealand+%2F+population+of+the+world*100 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=population+of+new+zeala...
- skilled 4y ago> Norway > Sunlight pick one
- antihipocrat 4y agoIn summer you can only pick both options.
- speedgoose 4y agoNorway 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.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun
- skilled 4y agoWell, 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.
- efrecon 4y ago(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.
- corrral 4y agoSeems 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.
- ninju 4y agoI believe you are referring to the Valeriepieris circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#/media/File:Valeriepieris_circle.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#/media/Fi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle
- corrral 4y agoYep, 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.
- Beldin 4y agoOne of the claims of the circle was that over half of it was water. So then your guesstimate can be lowered to less than 11% of land surface area.
- mc32 4y agoLots of things on Earth are unevenly distributed. Mineral deposits, water, fertile land, mild climates…
- firebaze 4y agoQuite 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.
- 4y ago
- bombcar 4y agoTechnically correct - the best kind of correct.
- chadlavi 4y agoI'm gonna requisition you an upvote
- rufus_foreman 4y agoDuplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014622
- h2odragon 4y agoWhen does the mega sunspot or whatever hafta fire a large mass ejection at us, and how strong would it have to be, to cook most of humanity?
- ben_w 4y agoTo cook us, it would have to be stronger than is actually possible given the mass, distance, and age of the sun. To cook our power grid, small enough to be surprisingly common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_storms
- MacsHeadroom 4y agoThe sun fires multiple ejections a day big enough to cook us. They just all miss. 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.
- marcofatica 4y agoCan't wait
- quickthrower2 4y agoWhy is this downvoted? Is it wrong? I do like it as an explanation!
- davidcuddeback 4y agoYeah, 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.
- nonameiguess 4y agoIt 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.
- avalys 4y agoWow, 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.
- cft 4y agoA practical issue- if you have a world-distributed workforce or an international news agency, what's the best geographical location for the headquarters?
- cupofpython 4y agoAre we channeling through internet cabling or magical straight lines?
- WJW 4y agoDoes 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.
- mr_toad 4y ago> magical straight lines Sufficiently advanced technology http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrino-based-communication-is-a-first http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrin...
- beebeepka 4y agoThe core
- dylan604 4y agoThe pressure to be successul must be intense there though
- quakeguy 4y agoCombine this data with the newly detected ozon-hole above the tropics. https://www.yahoo.com/now/ozone-hole-found-over-tropics-153822288.html https://www.yahoo.com/now/ozone-hole-found-over-tropics-1538...
- s3ctor8 4y agoThis is interesting, but why is it written so strangely? The overuse of bold text is grating too.
- cardamomo 4y agoNow I want to know on what date and time the lowest percent of the world's population will be in sunlight.
- FooHentai 4y ago6 months and 12 hours later (or earlier) would be my rough guess.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago...and if it is predictably half a year away?
- Jedd 4y agoIt'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).
- divbzero 4y agoThis 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.)
- vlovich123 4y agoNot 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).
- schoen 4y agoThe 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.
- xattt 4y agoIn the interest of cranking up the pedant-o-matic machine: (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!
- JamesUtah07 4y ago
- perryizgr8 4y ago> 7.7 billion people—roughly 99% I hadn't realized we were closed to 8B than 7B now.
- divbzero 4y agoOther 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]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_and_water_hemispheres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_and_water_hemispheres
- hadlock 4y agotimeanddate.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
- lstodd 4y agoventusky.com is nice
- NGC404 4y ago<irony with a whiff of doom> Perfect timing for an X1000 solar flare. "The old Axolotl" - Jacek Dukaj
- femto 4y agoA proxy for: the Pacific Ocean is really big.