A student of mine asked me about a fact she had seen in a video - that there are more honors students in China than there are students in America - which lead me to the wikipedia list of nations by population. There are certainly a whole lot of people in China and assumedly a lot of honors students there.
The top of the list, however, is only of mild interest to me. I can't possibly conceive of 1.3billion people, four and a half times the population of the United States. I can't really conceive of even a million people, taking us down the list to #157 Timor-Leste, a nation that I've admittedly never heard of. Instead, I scrolled further downward to see which was the least populous nation in the world. My guess was Vatican City - which ended up third from the bottom.
The smallest country in the world - according to Wikipedia, anyway - is the Pitcairn Islands - in spite of the fact that it is listed in its own Wikipedia article as being a British Overseas Territory (a category with its own article), making it a little less a country to me, but...
The idea of four islands, only one of which is inhabited and then only by sixty-six (or -seven depending on where in the article you read) is something that I can conceive of, especially when I can use Google Maps to zoom down on the four islands, a total of eighteen square miles of land at the peaks of a ridge of undersea mountains...
...the only inhabited island, in the southwest of the above image, Pitcairn itself...
...and finally down to Adamstown, the lone 'town' in the 'country'...
That's a sight - with added in roads and paths, admittedly - that I can wrap my head around. With the inhabited Pitcairn being only 1.8 square miles and the largest island - Henderson - being uninhabited and only 14 square square miles, I struggle to understand the lifestyle, though. They apparently eat primarily seafood - spiny lobster and fish - and fruits and veg that grow on the island's slopes. The three uninhabited islands are roughly 60+miles from Pitcairn, so people aren't regularly popping over to get the food there.
I guess eighty percent of the island revenue comes from tourism, as the only available way to get to Pitcairn is via ship from French Polynesia then by smaller boat into the shallow Bounty Bay harbor - where the Bounty (of Mutiny on the fame) actually sank, leading to the island's new populating in 1790. I'm guessing that at $5000 New Zealand per-person to get there and only eight trips made a year, it's a long shot that I'll ever be standing on the coast of Pitcairn Island.
Tragic...
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