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I’m not sure you know what learned means. You’ve missed literally dozens of other countries.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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Today I learned
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...what? Clearly also included on that map are China, Russia, Canada, and Greenland, at a minimum - I'm sure there are more.
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What about New Zealand, Palau, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, and Brunei?
That is an incredibly arbitrary definition, but still would seem to only rule out New Zealand. As far as I can tell 100% of the landmasses of Palau, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, and Brunei are opposite another landmass.
Very true, though I went with the larger countries since I thought they'd be more recognizable and didn't want to fit every single island into the title
And here I thought you'd get lava instead
gotta dig harder to get past the lava
Only reason someone would realistically dig that deep is to restart the core.
jakarta is a country? new zealand is not a country? vietnam counts even though not all of vietnam maps to a landmass on the other side?
this is extremely confused.
Sorry, finding an interactive map with simple country borders is surprisingly difficult. I tried OSM and Google and just wrote down the names I saw. My geography of southeast asia is obviously bad.
Suggest a better title, and I'll happily change
I'd argue that at least half of New Zealand isn't covered.
I do agree that vietnam shouldn't be in that list, but Cambodia should?
i dont see why political borders matter for this at all.
Fun? Otherwise hard to measure overlap of anything unless I start referring to topographic features / biomes / ecoregions which are less widely understood
Does this mean Looney Toons canonically takes place in either Chile or Argentina because of the digging straight to China?
I believe so
Masterful troll
That was definitely my intent apparently, I thank you
Ironic how US kids cartoons commonly portray "digging to China" as something americans can hypothetically do, to the point where a good portion of American adults just assume it to be true. Yet the only place where that's possible is South America.
Usually the people debunking the notion focuses on the fact that the Earth is molten in the center so you can't dig all the way through it in the same way you can't dig to the ocean floor from the surface (which is reasonable don't get me wrong), but they rarely mention the fact that China is not actually on the opposite side of the Earth to the US.
This isn't a political comment. I just find it interesting that this is something literally anyone can disprove with a dollar store globe but no one bothers to do that.
Am I stupid? If you can tunnel down and hit those other countries, than the opposite should be true, the countries you can drill down to are the same you drill down to from the other side, so that would include Canada and Southeast Asia according to this very map.
The definition I'm using is something like: "more than 80% of a country's landmass is covered by a landmass on the other side"
So china has parts where you hit land, but most of it hits ocean, and so it's not on the list.
80%? Why this ramdom number? Why not use 1 sigma, 2 sigma or any other terms with more statistical meaning?
And in a previous comment you implied 100% by saying "random point". Here, I made a screenshot of it.
Because Im using rough visual metrics on an image, and not precise numerical analysis on GDAL? Jesus H.
Hawaii, though not a country, you can def another land mass
Oh wow yeah, Hawaii is weirdly one of the few that would hit Africa haha
I also love how Japan, barely just barely scratches the coast of Argentina.
In the anime Darker Than Black, one of the plot points is a Heaven and Hell Gate centered around Tokyo and Brazil, with the implication that one is the antipode of the other. But they're not!
Brazil also has the largest Japanese population outside of Japan
Probably due to the expressway joining them through the earth's core.
Pretty fucked up that they displaced so many subterranean lizard people to build it.
Eh those Morlocks have been farming us for years, about time they got some pushback
Other countries like China and Colombia have partial coverage in some regions.
The Greenland and Antartica antipodes don't really count imo
Why not though? I could tunnel to antarctica throigh greenland.
Definitely, but it's near the poles, so I find it more obvious than eye-opening. It'd be like saying you could tunnel through the north pole to get to the south pole. It's true, but it's not interesting.
"It's true, but too obvious so it doesn't count."
Yep, well quoted. To learn something, it has to be something you didn't already know.
Then you said it wrong.
What you said was 'only countries' not 'only countries that weren't obvious to me'.
"Today I, the author of this post, Learned" seems implicit to me, but I suppose we all make our own definitions of the acronym
That is a separate thing from what you literally wrote:
TIL that Chile, Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, and the Phillipines *are the only countries that you can tunnel through to hit another land mass. All others lead to water.
No, some of the ones you weren't surprised by also lead to water. That isn't conditional based on you learning something today.
Fair enough, I'll add it to the title -- thanks for the correction
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