The Earth gets more crowded each twelvemonth . In just the past decade , the satellite has welcome about1 billionnew house physician . The large contributors to the booming universe are a handful of countries , and most of them hang within a 2500 - international nautical mile radius .
As friend of Mental FlossKen Jenningswrites forCondé Nast Traveler , the Valeriepieris circle incubate more than half the world ’s population . China and India , the world ’s two most populous nations , plus Indonesia ( the fourth ) and Pakistan ( the sixth ) , are all part of a section of Earth that stretches 2500 statute mile in all directions from a central point near Hainan , China ’s southernmost area . Bangladesh , Japan , the Philippines , and Vietnam , which all place in thetop 15most populous res publica , are also include .
Not only are the population of these situation high , they ’re also impenetrable . In Bangladesh ’s capital ofDhaka , for case , every straightforward statute mile holds about 115,000 citizen . ( For comparability , New York City , America ’s most dumbly populated urban center , countsroughly 27,000 per square mile . ) That explains how this circle can house billions of humans while also containing a lot of undecided ocean and empty desert .
The Valeriepieris R-2 is name after the American Reddit user who first shared the map in2013 . His real name is Ken Myers , and he was enliven to make the graphic after visiting Manila in the Philippines for a teaching fellowship and seeing at first hand how many hoi polloi were crammed into the tight area . The maths was check out by Singapore economic science prof Danny Quah age later , and he found that Myers had actually been generous with his calculations . Narrow down the circle to a 2050 mile radius , with Mong Khet in Myanmar as the center point , and it still fits close to half the earth ’s the great unwashed .
[ h / tCondé Nast Traveler ]
