July 8 99% of the world’s population in sunlight simultaneously? | Hacker News Reader

July 8 99% of the world’s population in sunlight simultaneously?

timeanddate.com

590 pointscft118 comments

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.

A practical issue- if you have a world-distributed workforce or an international news agency, what's the best geographical location for the headquarters?

Are we channeling through internet cabling or magical straight lines?

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.

> magical straight lines

Sufficiently advanced technology

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/mar/19/neutrin...

The core

The pressure to be successul must be intense there though

There is a large mantle of responsibility.

Wherever is most legally favorable from the perspective of liability and taxes, probably.

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.

Is that "most of the world's population" in the same sense as "Mohammed is the most common name?"

Well, is it?

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

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.

I think it has to be.

UTC+8 is all of China and UTC+5.5 is all of India, and in between are high population countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, so UTC+5.5 to UTC+8 has to be included.

UTC+11 to UTC-8.5 is the Pacific Ocean and has maybe 10 million people total, while UTC+0 has >100 million in UK, Portugal and part of Western Africa so UTC+0 must be part of the range.

That only leaves the choice between UTC-1/2 and UTC+9/10. UTC-1 and UTC-2 have under a million with only a few small islands while UTC+10 has most of Papua New Guinea with 6 million.

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.

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.

Most means "almost all". Your link says about 50%.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/most

“More than half of” is one of the definitions

Interesting. I think differently but seems there are multiple interpretations. Of course we feel most people would agree with our version ;)

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55920/is-most-eq...

I've certainly seen "most" used to mean "almost all", and it appears as though you're feeling a little annoyed to see it used that way because you consider it misleading.

I've also frequently seen "most" used to mean "a majority", though, in which case GP's use of the term is precisely consistent with the facts in their source.

Looks like most people disagree. ;)

It's probably one reason why Singapore is a popular location for multinationals to have an office.

Yes, you are not necessarily interested in the population barycenter, but more on the money barycenter

That changes the equation

What are you optimizing for? Once you clarify that your answer will be clear.

- Access to capital? - close to "action"? - Airport hub city?

Overlapping business hours

Seconding the UK. I live in Edinburgh (Scotland) and I can meet with people from west coast US as far as China with very minor adjustments to my working day. I have natural half day overlaps with east coast US, and most of my day overlaps with major outsourcing locations (except the phillipines, but can be managed with a 1 hour adjustment)

Other people are saying the UK, but if you want the same time-zone plus EU laws/customs/currency, you can choose Ireland.

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.

In Internet Census 2012, there's an animated gif of planet earth's day/night cycle as measured by which IP addresses respond to ping:

http://census2012.sourceforge.net/images/geovideo_lowres.gif

Source: http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html

That's interesting. You can see a difference between N and S hemispheres on the same longitude, e.g. North East USA vs Peru and Japan vs East Australia.

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.

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

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.

One 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.

Lots of things on Earth are unevenly distributed. Mineral deposits, water, fertile land, mild climates…

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.

Some elements are kind of well distributed but not others: gold for example, or minerals or hydrocarbons, or even wind.

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...

> elements

> Wind

I know you know and this is just stupid pedantry but it made me cackle

> Lots of things on Earth are unevenly distributed. Mineral deposits, water, fertile land, mild climates…

... the future.

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.

Makes sense. Rivers are the original infra.

Are you proposing The Spiralx Donut?

One might be advised not to go chasing waterfalls, but those are also typically close to the same rivers and lakes.

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...

Handy to know if ever challanged to draw a picture of earth as seen from space.

Precisely - more than anything else, this article reminded me just how much of our planet is covered by the Pacific Ocean.

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.

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.

Another factoid in this vein: more than half of Canada's population lives South of the USA's Northern border.

I think you should specify the northern border of the contiguous states. Otherwise, I bet 99% of Canada’s population lives south of Alaska northern border.

I hesitated to be more specific, but figured (probably wrongly so, should always be explicit when stating things like this) that it's implicitly obvious it's about the ~49th parallel border. In fact you can draw the line well below that border[0].

Another way to put it is that half of Canadian's population lives ~between Toronto and Montréal.

0: https://i1.wp.com/metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/c...

Really cool map!

Based on the map, another way to put it, is:

Most Canadians live south of Seattle.

Not 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).

The 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.

In 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!

Yes, being "in sunlight" and seeing reflected light from the sun are two different things.

(3) Starlink will also become a factor or heck, any of the planets visable in the sky as well.

Given that, the caviet of direct and indirect sunlight is a huge factor not quantified.

Sunrise means that the sun is fully above the horizon. Dusk is when the sun light is starting to appear but the sun is still below the horizon. So yea I think the original 99% is experiencing daylight is from from accurate but almost everyone will be experiencing sunlight… technically.

It'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).

This 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.)

Australia has less than 1% of the world population? Edit: yep, around 0.3%

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%

Less than two "australias" away from 8 billion now. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

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!

I'm pretty sure NYC has a population of like 7 or 8 million, about a third of Australias.

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.)

The broader metropolitan is not usually what people consider as NYC. New York state maybe

The broader area is more like that little corner of the state plus half of New Jersey.

New York MSA is 20M, CSA is 23M

NYC = NSW approx then.

Lol and I think Sydney is getting “too busy”

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.

Australia is basically Hot Canada.

Australia: Our brother to the hot south with more sex appeal and far less marriage material.

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.

Maybe single people are less likely to retire

Travelling there it felt like Big California.

Except that Canada is just cold while Australia has the whole evolutionary arms race thing going on.

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.

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 .

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.

Australia also happens to have the seemingly same amount of useable land space as NYC.

An 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.

Closer to 8 billion now. 7.753 according to google.

A 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?"

Interestingly asking wolfram alpha to calculate it, you get a cool little graph showing a history.... https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=population+of+new+zeala...

Other 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

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_and_water_hemispheres

Technically correct - the best kind of correct.

I'm gonna requisition you an upvote

timeanddate.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

ventusky.com is nice

Now I want to know on what date and time the lowest percent of the world's population will be in sunlight.

6 months and 12 hours later (or earlier) would be my rough guess.

...and if it is predictably half a year away?

Combine this data with the newly detected ozon-hole above the tropics.

https://www.yahoo.com/now/ozone-hole-found-over-tropics-1538...

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014622

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?

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

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.

Can't wait

Why is this downvoted? Is it wrong? I do like it as an explanation!

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.

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.

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.

Why do people just make up things like this? Did you hear it somewhere and never research it?

Your metaphor is totally off. For one thing, even the biggest CMEs aren't powerful enough to literally cook us. Partly because of solar size, distance and composition, and partly because our Earth has its own protections via the atmosphere, our robust electromagnetic field and a few atmospheric factors. Secondly, random bullets fired off in random directions remain as small dense objects. That metaphor works better for asteroids randomly bounding around the solar system. CMEs on the other hand expand and spread to pretty huge sizes as they fly outward into the Solar System. This makes them much more likely to arrive.

The basic reason is that the Pacific ocean is so big that it almost covers a full hemisphere.

<irony with a whiff of doom> Perfect timing for an X1000 solar flare.

"The old Axolotl" - Jacek Dukaj

> 7.7 billion people—roughly 99%

I hadn't realized we were closed to 8B than 7B now.

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...

A proxy for: the Pacific Ocean is really big.

This is interesting, but why is it written so strangely? The overuse of bold text is grating too.

> Norway

> Sunlight

pick one

In summer you can only pick both options.

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

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.

(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.

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