If I would ask you to draw a small circle on the earth's surface, but that circle has
to have more people living within it than outside of it, where do you think you’d
put this circle?
Well, at first, you might be tempted to put the circle in the heart of Times Square in
New York City.
Though it’s not the correct answer, I can understand why you've thought of this place,
especially given that over 300,000 people pass through this place every day.
Moreover, the New York Metropolitan has a population of over 20 million people.
This place has more people compared to 70 countries combined.
Anyone could think that this is really the place that we are finding.
So, you’re forgiven.
But, what is this spot where there are more people inside than outside when you form a
small circle with it in the center?
Well, the true center of the world is at Mong Khet Burma, which is arguably on the other
side of the planet.
Unlike New York's Time Square, this town has a population of only about forty thousand
people and tourists do not usually visit this place.
However, if we’re going to draw a circle from here with a radius of three thousand
and three hundred kilometers and Mong Khet in the center, you'll find that even if we
just draw a small circle, the smallest circle in the Eath's surface to exact, there would
be more people inside than outside.
So yeah, this is the circle that we'll be discussing in this video.
I’ll share with you interesting facts about it.
So, let’s keep going!
The concept for this circle was first developed in 2013 when Reddit user valeriepieris, also
known as Ken Myers, presented a map that looked quite similar.
Instead of being centered on Mong Khet, this map was centered on the South China Sea.
It was surprisingly small, eliminating the entirety of Europe, North America, South America,
Africa, Australia, and even most of Asia.
Massive countries like the United States, Brazil, Egypt, and Russia were pretty much
entirely excluded as well, despite the fact that the interior of this circle is thought
to contain more people than the outside.
As a result of this claim, it has become a hot topic on the internet and in the news.
Since then, practically everyone from the Washington Post to experts at the London School
of Economics tried their best to prove that this claim is true.
So, how does everything become possible?
To begin, keep in mind that the circle encompasses all of China and India.
It's worth noting that these are the world's two most populated countries.
When we combine their population, we’ll get 2.8 billion people, which is more than
thirty-five percent of the global population.
This means that the combined population of China and India is greater than the population
of Africa, Europe, North America, and Australia.
However, the claim became much more valid because the circle contains many more heavily
populated areas than the countries mentioned.
For example, most of Pakistan, with 225 million people, is included in the circle, as with
Bangladesh with 172 million people, Japan with 125 million people, the Philippines with
111 million people, Vietnam with 98 million people, the Korean Peninsula with 77 million,
people and the islands of Chava, Sumatra, and Borneo with 220 million people.
But what's even more remarkable in this circle is that it also encompasses a large number
of uninhabited locations, including nearly all of Mongolia.
Mongolia is known as the world's most lightly populated country, wherein the are just two
persons you’ll see per square kilometer of land in this place.
The circle also contains China's Tibet and Xinjiang, two regions that, when we put them
together, we’ll get a landmass similar to that of India but have a population of less
than 30 million people.
Apart from that, the circle has even more water than the actual land, which is, of course,
no one actually lives there.
Surprisingly, the circle has numerous additional fascinating facts.
One of them is that there are far more Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims inside the circle than
outside of it.
It's understandable that the circle contains many Hindus and Buddhists, but the presence
of so many Muslims is surprising, given that the circle excludes the whole Middle East
and the Arab world, which are widely believed to be the epicenters of the Islamic faith.
This was made possible, however, by the substantially Muslim populations of the four countries that
are within the circle.
These are Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh with about 800 billion Muslims,
roughly twice the number of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa combined.
Even though the Muslim population of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh is just about 19 percent,
it is equivalent to nearly 44 million people, making it the largest Muslim population in
the world.
Adding to the number of Muslims are Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, and Turkey.
There's also China, which has more Muslims than Syria, and when you add the Muslim members
in Malaysia and the Philippines with the tens of millions of other Muslims living within
the circle, you will understand that there are really many Muslims living within the
circle than outside of it.
It also gives the idea that Southern and Southeast Asia are the true epicenters of the Islamic
population.
In 2015, London School of Economics Professor Danny Quah validated Reddit user valeriepieris'
assertion, but Quah was interested in taking the experiment much farther than Myers’
initial concept.
He discovered that not only was valeriepieris' claim valid, but that by adjusting the circle's
position slightly, he could drastically reduce it while still containing half of the world's
population on the inside.
He pushed the experiment even farther by creating an even smaller circle with a radius of 3
300 kilometers, having Burmese township Mong Khet in the center.
This makes Mong Khet the physical center of most of the world's population.
Even more fascinating is Quah's new map, which rests atop a 3D globe.
Half of the world's population currently resides within this small circle, which, unlike the
old map, almost totally excludes Japan, the world's 11th most populous country.
However, the circle's presence raises another question: how did the majority of the world's
inhabitants end up inside it?
The circle is positioned over a big area of Asia.
As you may be familiar with, Asia is the continent where the majority of people have been staying
for thousands of years, at least since 1000 BCE.
This small circle that encompasses the majority of humanity has been there for about 3000
years.
But, yes, this provides no genuine answers.
The real answer as to why the majority of the inhabitants manage to stay inside the
circle for such a long time is because of land and food.
China and India, when we measure their land area, are both massive countries with large
rivers that flow across farmland.
Today, India has more arable land than any other country on the planet, while China,
unexpectedly, is fourth behind Russia and the United States.
However, the reason why China had more people than either of those countries three thousand
years ago is that Russia’s cold temperature became a significant problem.
This is the reason why the country can't grow crops easily, and thus food is somehow hard
to find, whereas the United States just wasn’t part of the picture yet.
So, once again, China had a significant advantage over Russia and the United States due to thousands
of years of farming and development.
Because of China and India’s agricultural land and since there is no problem in temperature
to be able to grow crops, both the country’s civilizations were able to cultivate more
farms than they could anyplace else.
This leads them to have more villagers, more farmers, and more crops.
Rice, which provides substantially more calories per acre than other popular grains like wheat,
was the primary crop grown in China and India.
Rice produces approximately 11 million calories per acre, which indicates that when a civilization
decided to plant rice, it can feed approximately 16 people for every acre.
This would also lead to an increase in population.
On the other hand, wheat, which produces just approximately four million calories per acre,
was the most common grain produced across the Middle East and Europe in the past and
even into the present.
This means when a country decided to plant wheat, or has wheat-growing land, a civilization
could only feed six citizens each year for every acre.
When civilizations decided to farm rice, as China, India, and other eastern Southeast
Asian countries did, they were able to support more people than civilizations that chose
wheat.
This is the main reason why there are many humans in that small circle.
With this, I hope you understood why this place had always the largest population over
the years.
And if they strive to farm wisely, they will continue to have the highest population for
a very long time, given they have the countries that ranked first and fourth in terms of the
highest amounts of usable farmland in the globe, as well as having the right climate
to cultivate year-round.
So, one of the key causes of Asia's dense population is that it has a high source of
calories through rice for thousands of years.
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