Why This Tiny Island Has More People Than Russia

this is java it's an island located in southeast asia that's a part of the indonesian archipelago and it's only the fifth largest island of indonesia the country four of indonesia's islands are larger than java and yet java has tens of millions more people than all four of those other islands combined in fact java is only the 13th largest island worldwide but with its enormous population exceeding 148 million people java is also by far the world's most heavily populated island dramatically beating out all 12 of those bigger islands in front of it like honshu in japan that even includes tokyo earth's biggest city and great britain in the united kingdom but what's perhaps the most insane fact to try and wrap your mind around is that java which is only the world's 13th largest island has a higher population than russia the world's largest country java has 148 million people while russia has only 146 million people and this is despite the fact that java is approximately 123 times smaller than russia is in terms of land to put in another way java is located very close by to australia an entire continent in its own right and yet java has well over five and a half times the entire australian population if it were its own independent country this medium-sized island all on its own would be the world's ninth most populous and because it's so small this makes java one of the most densely populated places on the planet the biggest city on the island and the capital of indonesia for now jakarta contains the second highest metropolitan population of any city in the world at over 33 million people barely behind the number one spot of tokyo over on the world's second most populated island all of this adds together to beg one of the biggest and most fascinating questions of modern 21st century human civilization at least in my opinion why and how does this relatively small island have so many freaking people on it there are many explanations but let's begin first with what is essentially both java and indonesia's greatest civilizational strength and also greatest weakness volcanoes you see indonesia is by far the most volcanically active country in the world with 74 different volcanoes that have been recently active over the past 200 years and with over 1 000 cumulative eruptions happening within historical times the next two most volcanically active countries in the world the united states and japan each have had only 63 and 62 active volcanoes over the past two centuries in comparison and in indonesia's case many of these 74 active volcanoes have proven to be among the deadliest and most destructive ones in all of human history the eruptions of mount semeles way back in 1257 and mount tambora a bit more recently in 1815 are each believed to be the two most powerful volcanic eruptions seen anywhere on our planet since the birth of christ the latter 1815 eruption of tambora was so violent it resulted in the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and it ejected so much material into the atmosphere it generated this second coldest year ever seen on record since the 1400s then in 1883 this volcano called krakatoa exploded with such ferocity it is believed to have produced the loudest sound to have ever happened in human history heard nearly 5 000 kilometers away in the island of rodriguez near to madagascar across the entire indian ocean more than 36 000 people were directly killed in the immediate aftermath of krakatoa's eruption and the ensuing tsunamis that it caused of the 74 active volcanoes that can be found across indonesia today 45 of them can be found across just the island of java alone in a continuous chain spanning the entire island's length these volcanoes include ones like mount merapi the most active volcano in the entire indonesian archipelago that usually erupts around every two to six years and has been doing that fairly commonly for around the past 2 000 years recently it erupted in 1994 and again in 2006 and then again in 2010 and each time this volcano erupts today is pretty bad because one of java's biggest cities is basically located directly next door to it right here yogyakarta population three and a half million people this major city is only 28 kilometers away from one of the most active volcanoes on planet earth and many thousands of people literally live within satellite villages that extend right up the volcano slope itself this is why the 1930 eruption of merapi ended up killing more than 1300 people and why the most recent 2010 eruption sadly claimed the lives of another 353 people over thousands of years all of these volcanoes across indonesia have killed hundreds of thousands of people throughout their explosive histories and that might make it seem like a pretty unattractive place to live and settle a civilization around but alongside all of the death and destruction the volcanoes also bring life and opportunities all of these volcanoes exist here because of what's going on just beneath the surface it is precisely here far beneath the island's surface that the indo-australian tectonic plate borders the sunda plate and is currently subducting beneath it this subduction of the indo-australian plates crust beneath the sunda plate generates magma and forces it to rise up to the surface which is the geologic process that creates volcanoes you can easily notice that the boundary of these plates here is effectively an identical match with the arc of volcanoes across the islands of sumatra java and the many lesser islands extending further to the east each of the islands across this arc including java have been completely born out of this ancient and violent volcanic process their lands having steadily risen up above the ocean from the continuous accumulation of ash and sediment built up over millions of years worth of constant volcanic eruptions and while living alongside these volcanoes today presents acutely obvious dangers and risks it also provides incredible civilizational benefits as well whenever they erupt volcanoes spit out enormous quantities of minerals from deep within the earth in the form of ash after an eruption this mineral rich ash will eventually blanket and settle across the nearby area to the volcano and deposit those minerals into the soil this process naturally makes the soil incredibly fertile and productive for agriculture and with the many volcanoes of java erupting basically all the time they essentially continually resupply the island's soil with crucial minerals that act as incredibly potent and natural fertilizer this is crucial because the process of planting seeds and harvesting crops naturally uses up the available soil because the minerals within the soil get converted into edible plants if the soil isn't frequently replaced with newer minerals the soil gets used up and farming grows more difficult over time this is exactly why historically every early agricultural civilization first popped up around river valleys in the nile the tigers euphrates the indus ganges and the yellow yang sea because these rivers would periodically flood into their adjacent floodplains and deposit minerals from their mountainous sources that would continuously make the soils there suitable for farming volcanoes basically work the same kind of way continuously generating new opportunities in life through brief but awesome periods of natural destruction before the advent of industrial fertilizers in the 19th century nearly all heavy farming and agriculture took place in high risk high reward locations in either flood plains adjacent to rivers or in the cases of places like indonesia japan or pompeii in southern italy volcanic soil adjacent to active volcanoes and thus with an abundant supply of very rich soil that is almost continuously re-fertilized with minerals by the many active volcanoes sprouting up from the subduction of the indo-australian plate beneath the sunda plate java has always naturally been one of the most ideal locations in the world to produce a ton of food that can feed a ton of people long before the invention of industrial fertilizer was ever thought of but rich soil is only a small part of the overall explanation for java has many other geographic advantages towards food production as well for one thing the subduction of the indo-australian plate beneath the sunda plate that gave birth to indonesia string of volcanoes here placed the islands they formed directly within the tropics very near to the equator a region of the world that remains almost permanently warm all throughout the entire year with little if any seasonal variation and further the island's location in between the larger continental land masses of asia in the north and australia in the south directly exposes them to the seasonal patterns of rainfall brought about by the regional monsoon winds therefore pretty much all of indonesia's islands retain warm temperatures throughout the entire year and receive heavy amounts of rainfall throughout the entire year as well and java is no exception overall these factors converge to mean that java not only has rich and fertile volcanic soil but also a large constant supply of fresh water through heavy rainfall and constantly warm temperatures all year round the three perfect conditions required for massive food production through agriculture and specifically rice production which is the true source of java's incredible population size you see rice contains many advantages for a growth-based civilization that other staple food crops do not primarily because it contains a vastly higher concentration of energy one acre of rice crops on a farm is capable of producing 11 million calories compared to a measly 4 million calories for the same acre if its land were allocated instead to wheat therefore one acre of rice can provide nearly the same amount of calories for a population as three acres of wheat can and civilizations that grow rice can therefore sustain higher amounts of people on less available land than civilizations that grow wheat but not everyone can just switch over to growing rice because in order to successfully grow rice in any kind of large quantity you need four vital things warm temperatures a ton of water fertile soils and a large pool of available labor when using traditional methods of agriculture like your own bare hands rice is considered the absolute most labor intensive of all staple crops to harvest according to the food and agriculture organization one acre of rice takes approximately 198 to 395 man hours to harvest by hand without the use of any industrialized machines compared to only 23 hours per acre of wheat this means that under traditional pre-industrial methods rice naturally requires a significantly larger labor pool of workers to harvest than wheat does which naturally encourages larger populations and families of farmers which is fine because rice can sustain nearly three times as many people per acre as wheat can ultimately you can quickly see how rice farming naturally encourages this sort of feedback loop where the more acres are dedicated to growing it the more people it can feed and the more people it requires for labor to continue harvesting it and java is one of the greatest locations in the entire world for the specific task of growing rice because of rice's harvesting season it only takes roughly 120 days from the planting of a rice seed to the harvesting of a fully grown rice crop and since java has fertile soils warm temperatures massive rainfall and a big population of available labor all throughout the year every year the javanese have been capable of producing three crops of rice nearly every year for generations and this is how the island is capable of supporting a truly massive number of people for its relatively small size not many other places in the world possess anywhere near java's insane amounts of buffs towards food production while substantially larger both the islands of borneo and new guinea within the same indonesian archipelago may get similar amounts of rainfall and high temperatures throughout the year as java but unlike java neither borneo nor new guinea contain even a single active volcano ordinarily this would mean that with high amounts of rainfall over millennia these islands soils would be getting eroded and weathered away for a very long time but borneo and new guinea soil are each normally protected from this by their dense and lush coverage of rainforests in the sense that when plants die they rapidly decompose and replenish the soils with their nutrients enabling new plants to grow up in their place but when humans come in and clear out the rainforests of all their plants to use the underlying land and soil as a farm that natural cycle of the forest obviously ends up getting broken and without any volcanoes or significant floodplains present the soils have no other natural mechanism to replenish their nutrients from the constant rainfall-induced erosion and that means farming will quickly replenish the soils and that is the primary reason why borneo and new guinea despite being a lot larger than java and being in a geographically similar location cannot possibly sustain as large of a population because historically large-scale agriculture on each of them has pretty much been impossible it's no surprise then that today java alone produces about 56 of all of indonesia's rice and contains more than half of indonesia's entire population despite making up less than seven percent of indonesia's total land area as indonesian civilization and culture began increasingly centralizing around java and the capital city of jakarta over time because of all these natural agricultural benefits it began attracting even more people from across all of the other islands in the archipelago and indeed from the rest of the world for economic cultural and societal reasons as well people always travel to wherever they perceive there is greater opportunity and as jakarta and java increasingly became the political and economic center of the archipelago throughout history more and more people continued coming to it from elsewhere as technology and agricultural practices improved in the later 19th and 20th centuries famines decreased diseases were reduced industrialized agricultural practices in machines were added to the already crazy natural food growing buffs and the population of the island consequently skyrocketed for most of human history it was pretty much always the japanese island of honshu that was humanity's most populous island for a variety of very similar factors to java but by the 1980s java finally surpassed it for the title of earth's most populous island and the gap between them has only widened ever since then today java contains tens of millions of more people than honshu does and unlike japan the tremendous growth rate on java doesn't appear to be stopping anytime soon honshu and japan's population at large peaked back in 2008 and has actually been steadily decreasing every single year since then meanwhile java still recorded an impressive 11 growth rate during the decade between 2010 and 2020 which is half of the growth rate the island experienced back in the 1960s and 70s but still impressive even though the growth rate on java is steadily slowing down it's still large by developed nation standards and certainly higher than honshu's negative growth rate this implies that it's almost certain java will remain humanity's most populated island for a very very long time indonesia is by far the largest country in southeast asia and has the fourth largest population in the world after the united states the history of these islands are among the most fascinating in the world and they have always played a critical role in global geopolitics going back centuries these were the islands that christopher columbus was seeking for when he accidentally stumbled upon the americas instead their spices found nowhere else in the world at the time made the islands of indonesia some of the most valuable and economically important locations in the world to control and pulled in the attention of numerous european empires who each fought bitterly with the others over their domination one of the smallest of these spice islands was so immensely valuable at the time it was even traded for the island of manhattan in new york city back in 1667 at the crossroads of china and the united states in the 21st century indonesia's strategic importance will only continue to grow with time and these islands rich and fascinating history is told brilliantly in a brief history of indonesia sultans spices and tsunamis the incredible story of southeast asia's largest nation i listened to this story on audible and found it to be incredibly captivating and engaging since you just finished watching an entire video about indonesia i'd highly encourage you to give it a listen as well in order to gain more global context especially considering that my deal with audible will allow you to listen to it for free you see audible is the destination for audio entertainment they've got audiobooks podcasts guided wellness programs comedy routines and more personally i love reading but i rarely have the free time to actually just sit down and enjoy a print book audible meanwhile can be injected into any moment your ears are free it genuinely transforms doing the dishes commuting to work going grocery shopping and so many other chores into actually enjoyable and meaningful experiences a subscription gets you access to a huge catalog but for anything that's not on there you get one credit a month to download any other audiobook you want for free but by using my link that's available by clicking the button that's here on your screen right now texting real life lore to 500 500 or heading to audible.com real life lore you'll get a 30-day free trial meaning that you'll get a free credit to download any audiobook that you'll get to keep forever including a brief history of indonesia or anything else that you want you'll also be supporting real life lore while you're at it so head over to audible.com real life lore and sign up today and thank you for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 2,715,517

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know

Id: amEG0J20jRQ

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 08 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/ant_valley]

these comments... guys, do you even watch the vid?

[u/1412Elite]

JAWA ADALAH KOEENNTJIEEE

[u/SatyenArgieyna]

TLDR: Fertile soil, perfect climate, and rice production are the cause of Java's population boom

[u/pelariarus]

Thats why i still disagree with jokowis plan of food estate outside java sumatra. Their soil is just not that good, it will require immense wuantities of fertilizer

[u/prosperity_god]

kita seneng sempit-sempitan om... ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )

[u/cici_kelinci]

Karena Jawa pusat peradaban di nusantara ini

[u/Random_guy721]

Kayaknya dubbernya lebih excited dari biasanya wkwk. Kek dia sangat tercengang.

[u/visope]

at least our dictator cared about people in his twisted ways

(we don't talk about his psycho sons)

[u/[deleted]]

breeding terus tanpa mikir konsekuensi