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Comment by mindthegap | Hacker News Reader

> in an area half the size of the US.

Is that so? Europe seems to have slightly more than 10 million square kilometers in area and the US slightly less than that. Europe is certainly more fragmented, but looking at thetruesize.com, one can use a better area preserving map projection and it seems that Europe has more space.

(I still agree with your points in general though.)

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The EU (with 500 million people) is around half the size of the US. Europe including the land outside of the EU is much larger, as it includes vast areas in the former Soviet Union as well as Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Serbia and a few other small nations.

My bad, I was thinking we talked about Europe (and not only the EU).

OP was referring to the EU. If it would be about Europe, then the population would be 740 million.

Fair point, I somehow misread this as Europe.

It depends on your definition of "Europe" - the EU is indeed quite a bit smaller than the United States, but the continent of Europe is, as you have noticed, slightly larger in area than the United States.

I can still remember pointing this out to someone on HN who stated that Europe would fit inside Texas.

To be fair, Texans believe the rest of the US would fit inside Texas.

Despite the points others made (which are all very valid), using the entire European continent is not a fair comparison when considering “useable” land area. Same consideration with Canada, which is also technically larger than the USA. The far northern climates are just not appealing to mass populations generally. Take Canada for example (second largest country behind Russia), the vast majority of the population lives within 150mi of the southern border with the US.

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