[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)