[Spareribs]

I do think that many people are not very good with geography including myself. I remember by accident I learned about the city of Brisbane in Australia. I was looking for some online radio stations and discovered this city. Most Americans have never heard of it. I know I never heard of it so it was a revelation to me.

Schools teach only a limited amount of geography but the internet does a much better job on giving awareness of locations around the world. Even on YouTube, I will follow vloggers and learn about their city that they live in and be embarrassed that I never heard of it before.

 

[mutabor]

Even on YouTube, I will follow vloggers and learn about their city that they live in and be embarrassed that I never heard of it before.

 

 

 

[WraithApe]

I do think that many people are not very good with geography including myself. I remember by accident I learned about the city of Brisbane in Australia. I was looking for some online radio stations and discovered this city. Most Americans have never heard of it. I know I never heard of it so it was a revelation to me.
 

 
As Johnny Mac would say; you cannot be serious! I've a feeling you are though. Reminds me of an old uni mate of mine, who told an American girl he was from Athens, Greece (she thought Athens, Georgia initially) and she said "wow, cool - I've never been to Africa before!" 

 

 

[billybob_jcv]

Humans suck at having any sense of scale. The Earth is both much, much bigger than we think and much, much, MUCH smaller than we think. As of 2013, the population of the Earth was 7.125 Billion people. We simply can't grok a number that big. The number of stars in just our own Milky Way galaxy is estimated to be 200-400 Billion, and there may be over 200 Billion galaxies in the observable universe.

I'll bet you could easily name 50 or more cities other than the one you live in. Can you name 5 galaxies other than the Milky Way? How about just 2?

 

[Spareribs]

Good points. I do agree humans can have a bad sense of scale. I knew this one foreigner who thought that Atlanta was only just a few hours drive from New York and I had to explain to him that it's much better to fly by plane because it's much farther that he thought.

I think for many people, the only cities that they know are the ones that you hear in the news or in movies like London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc.. If it is a large city that rarely gets mentioned in the media, many people have never heard of it or at least naive people like myself.

Another example is that last year, I visited Fukuoka, Japan and had a great time. It is a major city in Japan with the population similar to Philadelphia (a major city in America). When I returned to America, nobody ever heard of Fukuoka and I had to explain to them that it was between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, many people have heard of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of the high profile World War 2 history that it was involved in. But Fukuoka is a larger city than those two.

 

[billybob_jcv]

I think our sense of scale is deeply rooted in our primate brains. We understand our immediate family group and a bit of our surrounding jungle. It's the same concept as the old joke about asking a Neanderthal to count his fingers: "One, Two, Many"


[VIDEO]http://www.youtube.com/watch?t=90&v=asM39tfblMQ[/VIDEO]