A thought experiment that will change the way you look at the world
It started with a conversation in Turkey. My friend Alex Tsaplev, traveller, thinker, the kind of person who asks questions nobody else thinks to ask, turned to me one evening and said: “Do you know that every human being on Earth could stand in Abkhazia?”
I didn’t believe him. I did the math. He was right.
Abkhazia is a small, partially recognised territory on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, wedged between Russia and Georgia. It covers about 8,660 km². That’s almost exactly the amount of space you’d need to fit every single person alive today, each standing on one square metre of ground.
Eight billion people. Eight billion square metres. One tiny sliver of the Caucasus.
How is that possible?
The Numbers Behind the Thought
The world’s population currently sits at around 8.1 billion people. Give each person one square metre, a tiny personal bubble, just enough to stand in, and you need 8.1 billion square metres of space. Convert that to kilometres, and you’re looking at 8,100 km².
For context:
- Abkhazia covers about 8,660 km², so everyone fits with a little breathing room
- Cyprus covers about 9,251 km², also big enough with room to spare
- Antwerp province in Belgium covers about 2,867 km², so you’d need about three of those
- The Maldives covers just 298 km², nowhere near enough
- Texas covers about 696,000 km², meaning you could fit all of humanity into about 1.2% of it
The Earth’s total land surface is around 150 million km². That means if every person on Earth stood in the same place, the rest of the planet, 99.994% of all land, would be completely empty. Every mountain, every jungle, every desert, every city, all of it abandoned, waiting.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Why This Matters When You Travel
There’s something deeply humbling about this thought experiment, especially for travellers.
We spend so much of our lives convinced that the world is crowded. Airports feel chaotic. Popular destinations are overrun with tourists. Trains are full, cities are loud, beaches are packed. It can feel like there’s simply no space left to explore.
But the numbers tell a different story.
The Earth is enormous. Staggeringly, almost incomprehensibly enormous. And yet, all of us, every last human being alive today, could fit into a corner of it without much trouble at all. The remaining 149,991,900 km² of land? Empty. Quiet. Waiting to be discovered.
That thought has a way of reframing the journey. The world isn’t too crowded to explore. It’s too vast to ever fully see. The overcrowded tourist trail is a choice, not a necessity.
The Spread That Doesn’t Match the Space
Here’s where it gets even more interesting.
While all humans could physically fit into a space the size of Abkhazia, the actual distribution of people across the globe is wildly uneven. India and China alone are home to more than 2.8 billion people, over a third of everyone alive. Just seven countries (add the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil) account for nearly half of humanity.
Meanwhile, most of the world’s countries are remarkably empty by comparison. Mongolia spans 1.56 million km², bigger than France and Germany combined, yet has just 3.5 million people. That’s a population density of roughly 2 people per km². You could drive for hours without seeing another soul.
Greenland, technically part of Denmark, has around 56,000 inhabitants spread across 2.1 million km². Canada, the second-largest country on Earth, has 40 million people in a space that could swallow Europe whole.
And then there’s the opposite extreme. Tiny nations like Tuvalu with 11,000 people and Nauru with 12,000, sovereign countries smaller than many city parks, yet with their own governments, cultures, flags, and stories.
The Invitation Hidden in the Data
Every time you look at a map, or scroll through a list of countries and their populations, you’re really looking at an invitation.
An invitation to go to the places most people haven’t thought about. To Mongolia’s endless steppes, where the sky is bigger than anything you’ve ever seen. To Suriname’s untouched Amazon rainforest, where 630,000 people live alongside more biodiversity than most of us will ever encounter. To the remote Pacific islands of Kiribati, Palau, and the Marshall Islands, where the communities are small, the welcome is warm, and the landscapes are unlike anywhere else on Earth.
And perhaps even to Abkhazia itself. A place that barely appears on most maps, that most people couldn’t point to, yet one that quietly holds the key to understanding just how small we all really are.
The world can fit all 8 billion of us into a single, overlooked corner of the Caucasus. But it doesn’t. It spreads us out, unevenly, beautifully, fascinatingly, across oceans and mountains and deserts and river deltas, into cultures and languages and traditions that have evolved independently for thousands of years.
That’s not a reason to feel overwhelmed by the world’s diversity. It’s a reason to feel genuinely excited by it.
One Square Metre at a Time
Next time you’re standing in a crowded airport, waiting in a long queue, or fighting for space on a popular hiking trail, remember what Alex said over a drink in Turkey. Every human being on Earth could stand in Abkhazia.
The world is not too full. It is not too explored. It is not running out of places to discover.
It is vast, and ancient, and most of it is still quietly waiting for someone to show up and pay attention.
You might as well be that someone.
Curious about the population of every country in the world? Check out our full list here.
Leave a Reply