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Most people's perception of the actual size of countries across the world are wrong, and most of the reason is because we're used to seeing this world map all the time.

Like literally all the time.

Google maps, apple maps and classrooms all across the world use this map, and it's not entirely representative of the true size of actual countries.

I already made a whole video nearly four years ago explaining why and how this map distorts the shape of countries.

But there's a lot of things that I didn't mention back in that video, So consider this one a long overdue part.

Two.

So let's get started first with islands.

I think it's fascinating to look at an actual size comparison side by side of the world's 15 largest islands, which, in order are Greenland, New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar, Baffin, Sumatra, Hondshew, Victoria, Great Britain, Ellesmere, Sulawesi.

The south island of New Zealand, Java, the north island of New Zealand and New Finland.

Now there's a lot of interesting stuff to unpack here.

First off, let's look at the populations on all of these islands.

Some of them, like Bath in Victoria and Ellesmere, despite being huge, are almost uninhabited, while Java, Han Shu and Great Britain are all incredibly crowded in comparison.

The relatively small island of Java has more people living on it than the entire population of Russia.

But their size differences well, pretty drastic.

Great Britain is a lot smaller than both the islands of New Zealand when they're combined, despite Great Britain being home to over 60 million people and New Zealand not even being home to five million.

But that's nothing when compared to Japan.

New Zealand is roughly the same size, but Japan is home to almost 127 million people, 25 times more than the number of people in New Zealand.

And Japan itself is pretty huge.

Here's what it looks like just off the east coast of the United States, where you can see that it stretches from Maine all the way down to Cuba or for a European perspective.

Japan stretches from ST Petersburg in the north to below Sardinia in the south.

But Japan is actually quite small when compared to the size of Indonesia, which will probably be bigger than you thoughts.

For starters, here's Indonesia's actual size placed over the United States, and the distance from one side over to the other is actually greater than the distance across the entire continental U.

S.

And for a European perspective, the distance across Indonesia is greater than the distance of Ireland from Uzbekistan.

Or, for another perspective, here is Indonesia.

When compared toa Russia.

Indonesia is really, really big.

But there's other weird, unexpected island geography is out there to.

For example, let's take the Republic of Ireland and South Korea.

You may think that finding a similarity between them would be really difficult, but you might change your mind when we overlap their borders with one another.

Ireland and South Korea have very similar shapes and sizes, despite Ireland having a population of only 4.8 million and South Korea having a population of over 51 million.

So while they may be similar in size, they aren't in name to places that are, though, are Georgia and Georgia.

Georgia, the state is more than twice as big as Georgia, the country and with almost three times the population as well.

With that in mind, I think of Georgia ever got into a fight with Georgia.

I think that Georgia would most likely went out now.

In my last video, I talked about how much bigger Africa is that most people seem to think it is.

But I didn't talk about individual African countries and their sizes.

Somalia immediately jumps to mind first because, well, it's really big placed over the U.

S.

In actual size, Somalia stretches up from Detroit in the north, down to Florida in the south and spans basically the entire East Coast for the European perspective.

Somalia stretches from London through Germany and France before finally hitting Valencia in Spain.

But there are other big African countries, too.

Kenya is almost the same size as Texas in the United States, or weirdly similar in shape to the old borders of the Holy Roman Empire when placed over Europe.

But none of these compared to the Jupiter of Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which really is massive in every sense of the word placed over America.

The DRC stretches from Miami in the south, juts out past Dallas in the West and all the way up above Chicago and getting even into Canada up in the north, placed over Europe instead.

The DRC stretches from the south of Greece to Spain in the west and up to Belarus, Lithuania and Denmark.

Up in the north, the DRC and Africa alone takes up a significant part of an entire continent in land area.

But we're still not done next up.

We have to spend some time talking about Chile.

Chile is well, it's long, very long.

So long.

In fact, if you flipped it on its side, you could nearly spanned the entire length of the US Canadian border with it.

And if you moved it over a bit, you could also spanned the entire Atlantic Ocean from Canada to Paris.

If you place Chile back to normal but kept it in Europe, it would stretch from the top of the continent in Norway all the way down beneath Crete and near Libya in the south, Chile is therefore taller than Europe is on entire continents, which is kind of one of the main points that I'm trying to make in this video.

Europe is a lot smaller than most people think it.

ISS traveling across Europe can take you through multiple languages and cultures in a short amount of time, which can give the illusion of a bigger size.

But don't be fooled to put into perspective just how much bigger the lands were that European empires went out and conquered and subjugated in the centuries past.

Here's a few examples The Indian subcontinent, once ruled entirely by Britain, is almost as big as Europe is itself and takes up almost every country west of Ukraine and Romania.

And that wasn't even the only massive British possession.

Let's take Australia a genuine continent in its own right.

That pretty much does cover all of Europe, from Portugal to Moscow and from Turkey to the Norwegian See the continental US over Europe to is basically also the same size as the continent stretching from Portugal in the west to a little beyond Moscow in the east.

But we're not done yet, making Europe feel like a tiny place.

Let's take Brazil next, which like the others before this basically spans most of the entire continent as Well, seriously, just stop and look at this for a moment.

You can fit practically all of Europe inside of Brazil, and it was ruled for centuries by just this tiny little nub here.

A the end.

And this is why Brazilian Portuguese is more widespread than Portuguese Portuguese.

Anyway, none of these really compared to what, in my opinion, is the biggest shocker in this list, which is China.

When placed over Europe, China's gargantuan size is truly understood by most of us in the West.

For the first time, China pretty much is the size of Europe, except it's all ruled by a single government.

Its population is roughly double the size and it's over 91% made up by the same cultural and ethnic group.

In short, from a European slash Western perspective, the world is sometimes shown to us from our point of view, which makes our countries or our continents seem much bigger than they actually are.

The fact is, the world is a huge place, and the West is just a small part of it.

If you want to go on from here and learn more things about our planet, that will blow your mind.

Curiosity Stream has a fantastic short documentary on the lost eighth continent of our planet that was only recently discovered.

Zealand DEA.

There's plenty, and there you'll learn about how an entire continent could remain undiscovered for so long.

And this is just one of thousands of top quality nonfiction shows and documentaries that you can watch on curiosity stream.

Of course, the library you get through curiosity Stream subscription is now much larger.

Thanks to their bundle deal with Nebula, the streaming video platform created by myself and a ton of other educational creators, We may Nebula to be the home of our bigger and more ambitious upcoming projects.

My next original on the site, which is coming soon, is going to be a 20 minute plus documentary examining the mystery of the D.

B.

Cooper case and will release exclusively on Nebula soon.

So to make sure that you get to see that along with all of the other awesome originals by other creators, sign up for the Curiosity Stream Nebula bundle deal at curiosity stream dot com slash real life floor.

It's very easy to dio any subscription there comes with Nebula, and it only $20 for an entire year.

This is the best deal in the world of streaming and, as always, thank you for watching.