This map will make you see the world completely differently

Thankfully, most of us know that the earth isn’t flat. But if it were, we’d have a much better understanding of how proportionate other countries are to each other.

It takes maps produced by the Scientific American to put a whole lot into perspective. In this case, showing Reddit users just how big Africa actually is when other countries are placed inside it without any distortion by equators and other factors like, who knows, global power structures?

It’s actually hard to spot the continent in the image, before realising it is big enough to contain China, India, the contiguous US and most of Europe combined. It is the border of each of these nations reformatted together.

You can even squeeze Japan in if you’d like. Can you believe that?

Its creator is the world’s oldest science mag – Albert Einstein even contributed to it back in the day. It was originally published in 2015, but resurfaced this week when it was posted to Reddit, under r/Coolguides.

Some of the more cynical commenters seemed to think comparing a continent to several countries wasn’t all that impressive, but we vehemently disagree.

Side by side, it tallies up as three times the amount of millions of square kilometers than the US. A measly 9.6 to Africa’s 30.4!

The Western-centric scope in which the majority of maps are produced from often neglects to proportionally represent the true sizes of each continent, and this may come as a shock to those who think of Africa as none other than a homogenous blob of a continent. Context is important!

It has been and continues to be a culturally rich and – as evidenced by the graphic – completely huge continent.

Fancy a trek from top to bottom? According to Google maps, that’ll take you over six days with no breaks.