[HN Gopher] July 8 99% of the world's population in sunlight sim...
___________________________________________________________________
July 8 99% of the world's population in sunlight simultaneously?
Author : cft
Score : 234 points
Date : 2022-07-07 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.timeanddate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.timeanddate.com)
| cardamomo wrote:
| Now I want to know on what date and time the _lowest_ percent of
| the world 's population will be in sunlight.
| h2odragon wrote:
| When 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 wrote:
| To 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
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Can't wait
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Why is this downvoted? Is it wrong? I do like it as an
| explanation!
| davidcuddeback wrote:
| 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.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| hanoz wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| plasticchris wrote:
| Australia has less than 1% of the world population? Edit: yep,
| around 0.3%
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| 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%
| avalys wrote:
| 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!
| tempestn wrote:
| 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.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| Australia is basically Hot Canada.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Australia: Our brother to the hot south with more sex
| appeal and far less marriage material.
| adra wrote:
| I was just quoted a stat that said boomer retirees have
| sex way more frequently than any of their younger
| cohorts. So weird and depressing if true.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Travelling there it felt like Big California.
| spiralx wrote:
| 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| Anna Creek is 23,677 km2 according to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Creek_Station and
| 15,746 square kilometres according to
| https://www.williamscattlecompany.com.au/anna-creek .
|
| Texas is rather larger than Anna Creek, at 676,587 km2 of
| land according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas .
| CodeSgt wrote:
| I'm pretty sure NYC has a population of like 7 or 8
| million, about a third of Australias.
| tempestn wrote:
| 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.)
| hackernewds wrote:
| The broader metropolitan is not usually what people
| consider as NYC. New York state maybe
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The broader area is more like that little corner of the
| state plus half of New Jersey.
| prpl wrote:
| New York MSA is 20M, CSA is 23M
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| NYC = NSW approx then.
|
| Lol and I think Sydney is getting "too busy"
| dylan604 wrote:
| Australia also happens to have the seemingly same amount of
| useable land space as NYC.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| greenpeas wrote:
| Less than two "australias" away from 8 billion now.
| https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
| quakeguy wrote:
| Combine this data with the newly detected ozon-hole above the
| tropics.
|
| https://www.yahoo.com/now/ozone-hole-found-over-tropics-1538...
| avalys wrote:
| 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.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| https://blog.cyberclip.com/world-population-by-time-zone has a
| plot of population by time zone; I can't find numbers.
|
| 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.
| cft wrote:
| A practical issue- if you have a world-distributed workforce or
| an international news agency, what's the best geographical
| location for the headquarters?
| lbotos wrote:
| What are you optimizing for? Once you clarify that your
| answer will be clear.
|
| - Access to capital? - close to "action"? - Airport hub city?
| cft wrote:
| Overlapping business hours
| cupofpython wrote:
| Are we channeling through internet cabling or magical
| straight lines?
| mr_toad wrote:
| > magical straight lines
|
| Sufficiently advanced technology
|
| http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutri
| n...
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| beebeepka wrote:
| The core
| dylan604 wrote:
| The pressure to be successul must be intense there though
| thfuran wrote:
| Wherever is most legally favorable from the perspective of
| liability and taxes, probably.
| spiralx wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| Most of the world's population lives inside the
| Valeriepieris circle
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle which is
| covered by the time zones UTC+5 through UTC+8.
|
| 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.
| morepork wrote:
| 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
| morepork wrote:
| 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.
| ascar wrote:
| It also excludes the west coast. -7 to +9 goes from West
| Coast to Japan and Indonesia, placing UTC+1 (CET e.g.
| Berlin) in the middle.
| decremental wrote:
| Is that "most of the world's population" in the same sense
| as "Mohammed is the most common name?"
| skilled wrote:
| > Norway
|
| > Sunlight
|
| pick one
| antihipocrat wrote:
| In summer you can only pick both options.
| speedgoose wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_sun
| skilled wrote:
| 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.
| corrral wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Probably more related to the fact that if you look at the globe
| from above the Pacific, you see mostly water:
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Globe_-_Pacific_Ocea...
| ninju wrote:
| I believe you are referring to the _Valeriepieris circle_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle#/media/Fi...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeriepieris_circle
| corrral wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| Lots of things on Earth are unevenly distributed. Mineral
| deposits, water, fertile land, mild climates...
| firebaze wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| Some elements are kind of well distributed but not others:
| gold for example, or minerals or hydrocarbons, or even
| wind.
| mr_toad wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gold-ocean-sea-
| hoax-sc...
| paxys wrote:
| Sure, but there's still a big difference between 50% and 99%.
| In this case it wasn't just about population, most landmass was
| also covered.
| corrral wrote:
| 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.
| spiralx wrote:
| Doesn't 80% of the world's population live within 100km of the
| sea as well. And I'd guess most of the remainder live close to
| major rivers and lakes.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Makes sense. Rivers are the original infra.
| hanoz wrote:
| Are you proposing The Spiralx Donut?
| s3ctor8 wrote:
| This is interesting, but why is it written so strangely? The
| overuse of bold text is grating too.
| bombcar wrote:
| Technically correct - the best kind of correct.
| chadlavi wrote:
| I'm gonna requisition you an upvote
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014622
| ComputerCat wrote:
| 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...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-07-07 23:00 UTC)