The Smallest Possible Circles Containing 0.1%-100.0% Of The World’s Population

The video above shows the smallest circle you can make that contains anywhere from 0.1% of the world’s population all the way up to 100% of it.

It comes from reddit user alexmijowastaken who explains that:

This is version 2 of this https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/x9iio0/the_smallest_possible_circles_containing_1100_of/inojy6k/ comment on that post suggested I make a version of that post with smaller percentage increments (at the same speed) to see how the circles move and grow more smoothly. I liked that idea so that’s what this post is. I also found 2020 population data to use for generating this post. The last post used 2015 population data.

I kept it at 1% each second like the last post, but if you think it’s too fast now with the 10x increase in frames, here’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kja7upA9MvQ a version at 70% speed, here’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVYwbGBvx50 a version at 50% speed and here’s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm9egULJaLY a version at 10% speed.

Here’s the code I used to make the maps: https://github.com/alexmijo/PopulationCircles

I turned the 1000 maps into a video using ffmpeg. Thanks to this https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/x9iio0/the_smallest_possible_circles_containing_1100_of/inp8jr7/ comment for letting me know about that.

Population data source: https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/gpw-v4-population-count-adjusted-to-2015-unwpp-country-totals-rev11/data-download (2020 data, 30 arcsecond resolution)

The bigger ones don’t look like circles cause of the map projection. On a globe they would be circles. The projection is Eckert IV (equal area) (NOT MERCATOR lol)

This https://github.com/alexmijo/PopulationCircles#populationcircles has some more information on how and why I made this, as well as links to past maps I made using this software. I think there’s also some more information in this comment https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vc77av/oc_the_smallest_possible_circles_containing_25_50/iccfxwz/ from an older post I made using this software. This https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/x9iio0/the_smallest_possible_circles_containing_1100_of/inozpie/ comment explains the algorithm used to find the circles.

Fun fact: the center lands in all 7 stan countries

Here’s the version slowed down to 1/10th speed: