A picture is worth at least 1000 words I’m told. So, I’m hoping this post is enough simply due to the inclusion of this map/confusing graphic.
Please, take a moment to gaze at it in all it’s splendor.
This graphic clearly needs explanation. New York is labeled where Madrid roughly is in the Europe underlay. Beijing is roughly where Munich would be. The land route from Madrid to Munich takes roughly 16 hours which is about as long as a flight from New York to Beijing. The rest of the graphic is somewhat to scale so Mexico City (CDMX) is a short flight from New York and a much longer flight to Tokyo (please don’t ask why CDMX has been placed near Ibiza, or why Dhaka is floating in the English channel). Also, the connection represent *current* flight routes so these routes are economically viable.
Holding sway over these cities alone would account for influencing the lives of 250M people (world population in 900AD1) not to mention the many multiples of people that are indirectly influenced by these cities.
If you were to somehow influence the next 10 cities (including Karachi, Kolkata and Istanbul), that would bring you to 400M people (world population in 1200AD).
If we were to somehow infiltrate, expand and govern the top 136 cities (all the way down to our beloved Seattle), we would be in charge of a whopping 1.1 BILLION people. This was the world population in 1850 but is also effectively present day world domination.
Fellow One Weird Thought-ers. You know what to we must do. We’ll unpack this one in the podcast. Hope you tune in.
Aside - I pulled most of this (fascinating) data from a UN report on population - it’s not too dense so feel free to go through it if you’d like a better picture of the world’s cities!: https://population.un.org/wup/publications/Files/WUP2018-Report.pdf
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html for world population estimates