Yes, these images are incidentally an excellent reminder to Europeans of how big the United States is. I read a lot of criticisms of the US from people overseas that seem to rest on a lack of understanding of the scale of the country. The US is huge. A volcanic plume that covers most of Britain or Spain would only cover about half of California.
You can wrap your head around it using "Measure distance" in Google Maps and comparing some in the US to Europe. Some examples:
- ~1,200 km will take you from London to Valencia. You can fit a straight line that long just in California or Texas.
- Miami to Seattle is about as long as Gibralter to Moscow. Tronheim in the Arctic Circle is closer to Cairo than Seattle is to Miami.
- Paris is closer to Tehran than San Diego is to Bangor.
Bit similar to how everyone misunderstands the size of Africa. Here's a nice toy to play around with for a couple of hours: https://thetruesize.com
So it makes sense to compare the US to Europe as a continent. Got it. What kind of criticism have you read that is wrong due to a misunderstanding of the scale of the US?
> What kind of criticism have you read that is wrong due to a misunderstanding of the scale of the US?
The main one is just not understanding how difficult transit and logistics is here. I've heard British people complain that we should just put high speed passenger rail all across the country like they did while not realizing that their country is literally 1% of the size of the US and more than ten times the population density.
The most sadly hilarious one I see fairly often is Europeans planning vacations to the states and intending to drive across the country in a few days so they can see all the big landmarks on the east and west coasts. It takes a lot longer than they realize.
US is more dense though (going by www.worldometers.info). I think these explanations “why we can’t have good things” are too simplistic. Ignore rail and fiber for a second, and look at commuter air travel for example: European market is much more competitive and prices are much lower than for comparable flights in the US.
Have you ever looked at how big earth is relative to Jupiter to the sun? And how far each one of them truly are from each other? We're terrible at sense of scale :)
You can wrap your head around it using "Measure distance" in Google Maps and comparing some in the US to Europe. Some examples:
- ~1,200 km will take you from London to Valencia. You can fit a straight line that long just in California or Texas.
- Miami to Seattle is about as long as Gibralter to Moscow. Tronheim in the Arctic Circle is closer to Cairo than Seattle is to Miami.
- Paris is closer to Tehran than San Diego is to Bangor.