So, I, like, love geography. For a long time, I've had this urge to understand or know as much as possible about the surface of the Earth, especially those land bits. I’ve spent countless hours poring over my world map and scrolling through Google Earth, zooming in on the Verkhoyansk Range in northeastern Russia, tiny subantarctic islands and oases in the Australian outback.
An aspect of this knowing as much of the Earth as possible is that it doesn't so much matter to me how important, in human terms, the area is. As in, I don't care much what the population density is. To me, a Germany sized portion of the Earth's surface is a prima facie as appealing to this urge I have to understand, whether that area actually is Germany or some remote region of the Sahara desert. Having said that, I do find more diverse geographical feature dense areas more interesting, i.e. India, with its towering mountains, tropical jungles, desert, deltas and huge cities, is more interesting than the frozen wastelands of Antarctica, since (at least at the surface of the land ice) things are pretty much the same everywhere.
We have these mental categories called “countries”, into which we slot geographical information into. If you’re a geography nerd like I am, or perhaps even if you aren’t, you might know the most populous city in Egypt, the longest river in the Russia, the tallest mountain in Britain, the biggest island in Australia, the greatest lake in Canada. But since there's only one of these in each country, all the other ones are most likely unknown to you, unless you live in one of those countries. What this means is that there’s a sort of compression: out of all the tens of thousands of mountains in China, you might only have heard of one or two. Meanwhile, while in absolute terms you’re pretty unlikely to, out of the dozens of mountains in Liechtenstein, you are disproportionately (relative to the number of mountains, compared to China) likely to know the tallest one.
So you've probably heard of the Vatican City, right? Smallest country in the world. 0.44 km2. How about Russia? Largest country in the world. 17,100,000 km2. So Russia is about 38,863,636 times bigger. So those are the extremes, right, how about we take something less extreme than the smallest and largest countries on Earth. Take Israel. You probably know a bit about it, the capital, the climate, maybe a bit about what kind of biomes you’re likely to find there, perhaps roughly the population count. Now take Australia. You probably know categorically similar stuff about it. Now, does the concept of, and information about, Russia take up ~39 million times more space than the Vatican City in your mind? Does Australia take up 370 times more mental space? Of course not.
It’s the same with islands. You’re much more likely to have heard of Easter Island than the Sakha Republic, or anything in the Sakha Republic, despite the fact that it’s approximately the size of India, because islands stand out from the rest of the ocean, no matter their size.
To be sure, I’m not arguing that knowledge about geography should be all about having an exact idea of what the natural geography of every square kilometer of the Earth’s land surface is like. What I am arguing is that when it comes to understanding the Earth’s surface, in the sense that I am using it in, using countries as a unit is really arbitrary. One might be inclined to respond with something like “hurr durr you can’t see borders from space, countries only exist intersubjectively, you’re making an unoriginal point”. To this I would say, yes, true, but this phenomenon frustrates me, because most information out there is tied to political divisions. It’s kind of hard to learn much about, say, this
area, if there aren’t any names to research, no granular enough subnational divisions.
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