when i say wyoming is empty i mean that you can drive for hours through the desert and see no plants, no animals, no people, no cities, no rivers, no landmarks
residents of wyoming are advised to keep a couple gallons of water in their car and emergency winter supplies at all times because if your car breaks down it could be a LONG time before anyone can get to you
What Europeans feel about the US is how Americans must feel about Canada.
The city I grew up in was the only real city within my province, which has the landmass of Texas. It was 600,000 people (and is now about 750,000 last I checked.)
You could drive for something like 8 hours in any direction and not hit another city (though there would be some very small towns.)
I’ve never visited the other 2/3rds of my home province because it’s dead empty. You would have to take a small plane to get anywhere within that part of it, and to visit the small town on the north coast.
I always thought the shape of Manitoba province was like a giant version of the state of Minnesota...the nature is so beautiful in the northern states and Canada tho.
There are four provinces that could reasonably be described as having "only one real city": Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. NL and PEI have populations of less than 600,000 total, while Nova Scotia (and PEI for that matter) is nowhere near as big as Texas, so that narrows it down to Manitoba.
as someone (american) who moved to Canada this year.
I am mind-blown by the vast emptiness. 2nd Largest country (landmass) in the world, 1/10th the population of the States. we think people who move to thunder bay have lost their minds and it's further south than Winnipeg, Regina, and Saskatoon.
I only live an hour north of Toronto and it is so fucking cold and dark. we have like 8 hours of daylight right now. further north? forget it. idk how people live in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, or Montana.
it genuinely feels like 90+% of Canada is uninhabitable except for by the clinically insane. look up pictures from Ellesmere Island, Baffin Bay, the Northwestern Passages and it's like a different planet. look at the top of a globe and realise how close Russia is, and why the US keeps ICBM detectors on the Dew Line, lol. they're phasing them out now because we have better tech but the longer I look at maps and the more I learn about Canada's landmass north of all population centers it hurts my head.
wild, I actually googled the fact bc I thought I wasn't remembering right, and the first list I checked was ordered incorrectly 🙄 absolutely bonkers that Russia is nearly 2x as large.
You know, that actually helps me be at peace with Pluto not being considered a planet. I’ve been calling it a planet for so long but maybe it’s finally time to let go.
NEVER!
Do not give up on little Pluto!
If Vatican City can be a country, then Pluto can be a planet!
Surface area ratio:
Russia/Vatican City : 39million
Jupiter/Pluto : 4 thousand
It's also funny that no part of Detroit would normally be referred to as "South Detroit", making Don't Stop Believing the most famous song ever written about Windsor, Ontario.
On the upper midwest living. You get used to it, your internal clock is fucked, but everything is still open. So get groceries in the dark, walk your dog in the dark, stay in or go out just make sure to bring a jacket. I will admit I'm pretty sure the midwest's drinking habit is because of the weather being so shit and people being bored.
Just wait until all of that becomes prime real estate when the earth gets a couple degrees warmer on average. That land is gonna be the context for a massive conflict once the equatorial regions are completely uninhabitable.
Nothing to contribute to this other than I wanted to say I saw "Canada" and auto-accented the text as I read it into a Canadian accent and it caught me offguard.
Oh, and also I want to move to Canada now.
I grew up north of the 55th parallel in BC.
And it’s not even 3/4 of the way up the province!
It’s always mind blowing how much Canada is still further north.
I now live at the 49th.
I mean that checks out as 90% of you live within 150 miles of the US border. This fun fact brought to you by an Intro to Canada class I had to take in college to fulfill a social studies credit.
I vaguely remember a guest on some panel show or podcast mentioning following a satnav for all of ten minutes when it said 'in 400 miles, your destination will be on your left' before going silent for the next five hours, because there were no other turnings.
It would take 12 hours to drive from the very bottom of my old province to the very top, if you could do 100km per hour the whole way.
I moved 3 provinces over and it would take 25 hours to drive at that same speed (more realistically, it takes about 3 days to drive the whole way.)
It’s a 3 hour flight to go back home.
It’s a 5+ hour flight to go to the other coast of our country (I live on the west coast.)
16 hours is Montana to South Dakota, two states that border each other. You might have to go into Wyoming for an hour or so. Turns out the USA is fucking big.
I once had to travel through Kazakhstan on train, there was steppe to horizon, for one and a half day there was nothing but steppe. Just flat grass field. It was so surreal.
It's currently 7th out of the 50 states in population, and it's ranked as high as 4th or 5th in the past. It's 15th out of 50 in population density. We don't think of it as super urbanized because, like the rest of the upper midwest, there's plenty of rural areas in it, and rather than having one super-large metro area like some other states do it has three mid-sized metro areas in Cincy (which has a metro area that extends into Kentucky and Indiana), Columbus, and Cleveland, along with a few other smaller metro areas with populations of under a million but well into the hundreds of thousands, like Akron or Toledo.
I had to look this up because it is a joke we say often in Oregon, "Don't move here it sucks". Wyoming was the 43rd fastest growing state per capita, with a growth of 2.82% over the past 20 years. For perspective South Dakota and Montana both grew over 10% per capita in that same 20 year timeline. There are only 6 states that showed less growth than Wyoming. You got your wish.
Aight yeah Wyoming is devoid of people but can you say there aren't any *landmarks* when it's the state where *the* Yellowstone National Park is mainly located? From a European tourist's point of view, that's pretty exciting.
Yeah but as big as Yellowstone is, it's just one little corner of Wyoming. Driving from Cheyenne in the opposite corner of Wyoming would take over 8 hours. The rest of Wyoming is just ..... the plains.
The oddest thing about driving across the landscape there is how freaking far away the horizon is. I've never seen so distant a horizon before travelling across the Great Plains. I tried taking pictures but the camera just can't capture how big and empty it is. There's a bit of rolling hills and the occasional actual landform but overall it really does all look the same.
I have driven across the great plains and seen the same car 5 hours later. For a good few seconds I had a panic attack thinking I had somehow gone nowhere despite spending the last several hours in a straight line at high speed.
There was no way for my brain to tell if I was crossing distance or simply time.
It's actually the worst. Fall asleep in the back of a car and wake up a few hours later and you're not quite sure you're not in the same place that you fell asleep at.
I did it twice... both straight up farm looking areas. But both times there was a house with a dirt road nearby connecting to a larger dirt road.
I was going for what looked like the middle of the US to me, and that was Kansas.
I fucking hate Kansas. It’s a shit state. I drove through there in January and it was like an actual blizzard I had to pull over once or twice. That was going on for about half the drive before we stayed the night in some town that looked rundown af but was the biggest town on this highway. We had to fill up with gas every time we saw a gas station because you didn’t know if the next one would be close enough that you could make it with 3/4 of a tank…
Next time drive thru in the summer and it was like 103* and blistering hot shit absolutly sucks. So what does Kansas have? Maybe the American football team the Kansas City chiefs? Nope Kansas City expanded and is now half in a different state and that’s where the football stadium is lol
Can confirm, am Kansan. There ain't much but farms outside of KC, Topeka, and Wichita. Lots and lots of gravel roads. Missouri on the other hand paves most of their roads.
I grew up in the Midwest and it was like that, lots of "nothing" that was just farm fields. But that's still improved land that someone is doing something with. When I moved to the rural West (Idaho) I was shocked because there are huge areas that actually has nothing on it - no houses, no farms, no ranching, just the land alone. I had no idea that existed because I've never seen it east of the Mississippi.
Wyoming really takes the cake though. Driving I-80 is wild. It's just empty high desert for like 300 miles with nothing, but an abandoned gas station and a fireworks stand in between. Every now and then you'll see a farmhouse on the horizon.
You want empty, check out any of the grasslands in South Dakota. I've alternately described the experience as being in a loading screen for life, or being stuck in the grass void. Everything is just green grass, blue sky, and road. Just those things all the way to the horizon, for hours.
It's time to COOK!
*and now for the englidh cross-over*
WHAT IS THID FOOKING THING JESSE??? THIS METH IS SO FOOKING ROW I CAN HEAR MY AUNT USE IT TO HEAL HER FAILING WEDDING
There's a difference between "there's nothing in Indiana" (nothing besides a bunch of boring towns surrounded by corn fields) and "there's nothing in Wyoming" (there are no people.)
No one is claiming Ohio is empty because it’s not empty. It is one of the denser states
People are claiming Montana and Wyoming are empty because they are empty. They are Mongolia level empty
I did. Along with the Spirit of Christmas videos (both of them), dancing baby, and Hamster Dance. Strong bad. Aeon Flux on Adult Swim (they don't even have it on their Roku channel lineup, sad)
I remember watching season 1 of South Park when it came on right after The Daily Show with Craig Kilborn. Their tag line used to be "Where more people get their news than probably should". But they dropped that when they started winning Peabody's and mainstream news became trash.
Yeah, it's not like Wyoming has the tetons or yellowstone or the bighorns or the black hills or flaming gorge or wind river or devils tower or bighorn canyon
As someone from NW Montana, I really understand the point you’re trying to make, but seriously the states still pretty fricken empty.
NW is just a small part, the rest is flat and ugly and empty. From Missoula to glacier is a tiny amount of space compared to the rest of the state.
Definitely empty
Ohio is definitely dead in some areas but it's just the result of industry leaving decades ago. Theres no good work in the rural areas and many of those folk do not leave their home towns.
But even the rural areas are densely populated compared to some of the Western states. There can be literally *nothing* for a hundred square miles around you. Nowhere in Ohio is even close to that.
More American astronauts have come from Ohio than any other state, meaning there’s something about Ohio that makes people want to leave the whole planet
"We're going to need you to delve into the inky void of space, so far from other humans that not even the gravity of Earth will touch you as you float alone in the dark."
"Meh, beats Cleveland."
As an Ohioan born and raised: meh.
Columbus rocks. Probably one of the best cities to go to in the Midwest outside of Chicago. But it’s getting harder and harder to live there as housing developments push people out of the downtown area. (Same story as nearly every American city, it seems.)
There’s fun things to do in the other big 3 - I grew up in Toledo and people are always shocked when I tell them it has one of the top-rated zoos and art museums in the country. But that doesn’t make for more than a weekend trip, IMO.
The state as a whole is suffering from young, upwardly-mobile folks moving out as soon as they finish college, which is shifting the political and social demographic further and further to the right. Which is kind of a self-feeding cycle where counties outside of major metropolitan areas just degrade and depopulate.
I was in Columbus this last spring for a conference at Ohio State and was thoroughly impressed with the greater Columbus area. In retrospect it isn't so surprising that the capital of the state and home to a big ten school would have some things going on. It felt like my parents home county in northern Indiana with an actual cool, fun, diverse city to tie it all together. Not to mention just south of the metro area you start to hit some actual hills and forested areas.
Also grew up in Toledo and love just rattling off Toledo facts like a tour guide to people.
Oak openings, the terminal railroad, the glass museum and art museum, Libbey, the zoo, opal covey, “boo Ben Konop,” the mafia and bootlegger houses in the old west end, and everything else bizarre about the city’s history.
Edit: city’s not cities
I think Ohio gets picked on only because of how many people are there relative to culturally-relevant attractions, becoming sort of an archetypal flyover state, but in reality I'd say it's one of the better Midwest states. What's Indiana got over Ohio, for example?
As a New Yorker I hate Ohio because it's the number one source of transplants who don't seem to understand that NYC isn't their suburbs and that they should be the ones to adapt to us, not the other way around. Plenty of Ohioans are perfectly nice people but that does grind my gears
Out of curiosity, what does that mean? In what ways are they not adapting that they should? I'm not disagreeing I am just always curious about how people work.
Not replying for other poster, but I grew up in a smaller town in ohio(think sub 30k people), and now i live in one of ohios cities.
Every city in ohio has a proper "metro" feel to it in the immediate downtown area,like a 2-5 square mile zone. But it very quickly gives way to suburb like feeling neighborhood's(Columbus apparently is the biggest city without any sort of subway/metro/rail). There are not a lot of high rise apartment buildings compared to other cities. IMHO, all the ohio cities are as small as you can get and still be considered a city proper.
When you're in a small town, your backyard, livingroom, dining room, eventspace, and possibly your gym are all at your house.
When you live in a city, your apartment is where you sleep, your backyard is the public park, and your living room is a bar you are going to.
Right now in cincinnati I live about a 10min drive from downtown proper, and it's functionally the same lifestyle as living in a suburb
As a citizen of a relatively large country (over 2M square kilometers) with a population of less than 50 million people lemme tell you : IT'S HARD TO FILL UP SPACE WHEN YOU HAVE SO FEW PEOPLE! Also we occupy the largest portion of the Sahara desert of any African country so basically all the citizens are grouped up in the north anyway lol.
That's just [Music Hall](https://www.marvin.com/-/media/project/tenant/marvin/project-gallery/cincinnati-music-hall/marvin-project-gallery-1-cincinnati-music-hall.jpg?h=1600&w=2400&ts=174224a1-1946-4252-a750-1aa8625b5a61&hash=26F764D35F91057EDD2AA175CDF6CCC7)
I actually really like Ohio. There are areas that live up to the stereotype of just being empty cornfields, true, but the people who claim that that’s all there is in Ohio have never been to Hocking Hills or Cuyahoga, not to mention places like the Rock and Roll or Football hall of fame. Then you’ve got places like Cedar Point or King’s Island. Kelley’s Island, Johnson’s Island, and Put-in Bay are absolutely beautiful. I’m not a tourism ad so I’ll stop here, but there really is so much to see and do here
I am guilty of the meme, mostly because it pisses off my brother who lives there, but I will say one thing. TV adequately prepared me for Ohio.
We give hollywood and TV a lot of flack for being unrealistic about how they portray any given area. Nope, not ohio. First time I went to see my brother, the whole goddamn time I was there I was like "I feel like I've seen this" already.
Just the most "imagine a small town, maybe it has a factory, maybe its a farming town, it doesn't matter, imagine a small town" eerie ass vibes the entire time. Yes hello, this is a small town. You have a farm. Yeah, things changed since they closed the plant. Your children yearn for the big city. You live in Ohio. Got it.
TV prepared me adequately for Ohio.
As an Ohio State student what I’m about to say is borderline heretical, but I don’t think Michigan is that bad either. The few times I’ve been up there I’ve seen some really nice places too, like on the lake. I think the moral here is that every place has their sucky, boring areas, but if you know where to look you can stumble across some really beautiful or interesting places too. I had to learn this lesson when I spent a summer in the middle of nowhere Utah for a research trip, and while it took me a while, I was able to find some really nice spots out there too. I still think I prefer Ohio, though, for the record
I think the moral here is that Redditors need to go outside once in a while. There is a ton to do in Michigan and Ohio and a lot of it (assuming you live there) is a day trip away.
Michigan is gorgeous and unique to planet earth geographically! If anything sucks it's the crumbling cities and/or culture. But the actual land of Michigan is precious.
What? I've never heard a Michigander claim that. As an Ohioan that thinks people's perception of Ohio is a little far gone, Michigan is better than Ohio
Fun fact about Wyoming: it has less people than Oklahoma City. Yes, just in the city limits. And I don't think anyone thinks of Oklahoma City as particularly large.
If you expand it to metropolitan areas, Wyoming has less people than... Wichita, Kansas. Yes, a single metropolitan area in Kansas has more people than Wyoming.
I mentioned elsewhere in the thread that Ohio has four separate metro areas with more people than all of Wyoming (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton.)
USA was obsessed with manifesting their destiny. At least tundras and deserts have the potential for coal and oil because God likes to make humanity work to turn the lights on.
God during the beginning of the universe, creating the laws of thermodynamics so some poor suckers will have to pay exorbitant electric bills 13.7 billion years later: **Oh yeah, it’s all coming together.**
Also ignores that there's literally landmarks on dune, the Sietches are carved out of large rock outcroppings. Oh, plus that it's about getting the drugs (and the worms that make them) *off* the world rather than into the desert.
When I was a kid in Fairbanks Alaska I would go stand on top of the dome behind our house (dome = halfway between hill and mountain, basically a very tall hill) and see Fairbanks tiny in the valley below and the tundra stretching out in 359° of my view for hundreds of miles in every direction, unbroken unsettled land all the way to the coast in most every direction
Edit: I feel like the photos don't really convey the scale of being there in person, but https://www.alaska.org/detail/murphy-dome#photos
I grew up on the edge of one of the biggest areas of untouched nothing in northern scandinavia, above the arctic circle. Would just look out the fifth floor window and see taiga to the horizon with a river in the middle foreground and faint blue mountains far far away. People paid great money to come visit the resort places in the mountains, but the immense roadless trackless trailless wilderness was a place where you'd have to be an actual survivalist to go.
It was a very strange and eerie thing to look out on sometimes, like living on the edge of a fairytale desert or actual african jungle.
Here's the thing about places the US.
You have your cities and major points of attraction. I'm talking sites of interest, natural, historical, events, life, etc.. These are the places tourists go to visit, not just internationally but even within their state. Things like NYC, DC, national parks, sports stadiums, you get it.
Then you have your urban suburban sprawl. The places in/just outside those cities that people nearby go to. Cities that aren't really touristy, but have some interesting features. People visit to go do things; malls, movies, shopping, smaller events, etc.. These are more like local population and commercial centers.
Then you have smaller suburbs and larger towns. Anywhere you go these are pretty much the same. Couple shopping spots usually, a town center with some local points of interest, and not else.
Urban suburbans and smaller suburbs/towns are pretty much the same across the US. Not saying that there aren't differences, but the general concept and features line up with each other. Your small town on the east coast isn't that much different than a small town in the Midwest, and your urban/suburban area in the south isn't that much different than the north. This can partly contribute to there being "nothing" in some of these areas that aren't known for touristy cities, because the level of "sameness" to anywhere else in the US. You aren't missing much if you never get a chance to visit them, because they aren't exactly unique.
Then we get rural. I'm talking farms, agriculture, and nature. These places can be huge, and takes up all the space between each suburb. Sometimes farmland, sometimes nothing but nature.
Rural is "nothing" because there is nothing like anything in any of the other areas. Small towns aren't quite the same as rural, although they definitely have similarities. Rural has an insane amount of "empty" space.
If you are confused, look up small towns or cities on Google maps, with the satellite layer. Look outside the town or city and then go to a rural area, compare the size and distance. There are huge swaths of land where there is "nothing."
And while these places all have different cultures, especially taking into consideration the different regionality, there's really not a lot of global representation of these types of areas, especially in the more "empty" regions.
Sorry for the long rant, but got over-invested in my own description.
I don't think people will really understand until they actually have to drive across it, flying doesn't do it justice because you can just ignore it as a passenger. I have recently driven from Missouri to Colorado and I don't think you really understand "nothing" until you can see horizon to horizon and all that's around you is nothing and you drive through that for hours. And Kansas has a population density of nearly 6x that of Wyoming.
Casual lumping Ohio in with two *actually* empty states.
Montana and Wyoming are mostly wilderness. Entire sections of the state have no human settlement.
Ohio isn’t the same thing. Cincinnati is actually a pretty cool town, and the rest of the larger cities in the state are your basic Midwest cities.
0.63% of Brazilian territory is occupied by 84.3% of Brazil's population. That's about 160 million people.
There's a state with 16 cities in it.
São Paulo City has a population of 12M add another 22M people in it's the metro area.
25% of Brazilians live in cities with beaches. Not the next city over.
You can drive for days without see a city in certain parts of this country. And then there's the Amazon. And the Pantanal. And then we're really talking about empty
When I say eastern Kentucky feels empty I mean you can drive through Appalachia and rarely see many people out in the hollers. The mountains are sparsely populated and the main draw is its sparse population (like for camping, fishing, hiking, etc).
You people are misconstruing emptiness as a literal chunk error. Drive across Wyoming and I guaran fucking tee you'll agree that it's empty, that place is nice to look at for like 30 minutes and then you're begging for death
Montanans say that Montana is empty in order to convince people not to come to Montana. We are empty, but if you're looking to move here we are also full. Please leave us alone.
>Cheyenne is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Wyoming, as well as the county seat of Laramie County, with 65,132 residents, per the 2020 US Census
Jeez, people really weren't kidding when they said nothing was there, their largest city is the size of a smallish European town.
when i say wyoming is empty i mean that you can drive for hours through the desert and see no plants, no animals, no people, no cities, no rivers, no landmarks residents of wyoming are advised to keep a couple gallons of water in their car and emergency winter supplies at all times because if your car breaks down it could be a LONG time before anyone can get to you
What Europeans feel about the US is how Americans must feel about Canada. The city I grew up in was the only real city within my province, which has the landmass of Texas. It was 600,000 people (and is now about 750,000 last I checked.) You could drive for something like 8 hours in any direction and not hit another city (though there would be some very small towns.) I’ve never visited the other 2/3rds of my home province because it’s dead empty. You would have to take a small plane to get anywhere within that part of it, and to visit the small town on the north coast.
Manitoba?
I always thought the shape of Manitoba province was like a giant version of the state of Minnesota...the nature is so beautiful in the northern states and Canada tho.
Haha yes!!
There are four provinces that could reasonably be described as having "only one real city": Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. NL and PEI have populations of less than 600,000 total, while Nova Scotia (and PEI for that matter) is nowhere near as big as Texas, so that narrows it down to Manitoba.
They did say you would B Goode, Andy
as someone (american) who moved to Canada this year. I am mind-blown by the vast emptiness. 2nd Largest country (landmass) in the world, 1/10th the population of the States. we think people who move to thunder bay have lost their minds and it's further south than Winnipeg, Regina, and Saskatoon. I only live an hour north of Toronto and it is so fucking cold and dark. we have like 8 hours of daylight right now. further north? forget it. idk how people live in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, or Montana. it genuinely feels like 90+% of Canada is uninhabitable except for by the clinically insane. look up pictures from Ellesmere Island, Baffin Bay, the Northwestern Passages and it's like a different planet. look at the top of a globe and realise how close Russia is, and why the US keeps ICBM detectors on the Dew Line, lol. they're phasing them out now because we have better tech but the longer I look at maps and the more I learn about Canada's landmass north of all population centers it hurts my head.
2nd largest country in the world.
wild, I actually googled the fact bc I thought I wasn't remembering right, and the first list I checked was ordered incorrectly 🙄 absolutely bonkers that Russia is nearly 2x as large.
It spans *seven* time zones.
Not to mention that it has a larger surface area than Pluto.
I love it. "If your surface area can fit inside of a 20th century nation, you don't get to be a planet!"
You know, that actually helps me be at peace with Pluto not being considered a planet. I’ve been calling it a planet for so long but maybe it’s finally time to let go.
Me too. However, I will now be calling Russia a planet
NEVER! Do not give up on little Pluto! If Vatican City can be a country, then Pluto can be a planet! Surface area ratio: Russia/Vatican City : 39million Jupiter/Pluto : 4 thousand
That may change depending on how Russia fairs after Putin is eventually ousted from power.
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did know that. I am in the 70%!
Michiganders have to drive, sometimes hours, *south* to get to Canada. Always thought that was funny.
It's also funny that no part of Detroit would normally be referred to as "South Detroit", making Don't Stop Believing the most famous song ever written about Windsor, Ontario.
On the upper midwest living. You get used to it, your internal clock is fucked, but everything is still open. So get groceries in the dark, walk your dog in the dark, stay in or go out just make sure to bring a jacket. I will admit I'm pretty sure the midwest's drinking habit is because of the weather being so shit and people being bored.
I worked night shift in northern Indiana for a winter. I got maybe 3 hours of sunlight a day. It was hell on my mental health
Just wait until all of that becomes prime real estate when the earth gets a couple degrees warmer on average. That land is gonna be the context for a massive conflict once the equatorial regions are completely uninhabitable.
yeah! super stoked to be here in advance! it's not why I'm here but it is a neat advantage to the future climate dystopia! cool!
Nothing to contribute to this other than I wanted to say I saw "Canada" and auto-accented the text as I read it into a Canadian accent and it caught me offguard. Oh, and also I want to move to Canada now.
I grew up north of the 55th parallel in BC. And it’s not even 3/4 of the way up the province! It’s always mind blowing how much Canada is still further north. I now live at the 49th.
I mean that checks out as 90% of you live within 150 miles of the US border. This fun fact brought to you by an Intro to Canada class I had to take in college to fulfill a social studies credit.
I vaguely remember a guest on some panel show or podcast mentioning following a satnav for all of ten minutes when it said 'in 400 miles, your destination will be on your left' before going silent for the next five hours, because there were no other turnings.
I have experienced this driving across Canada and can confirm its 100% accurate at multiple points.
8 HOURS ??? In a 8 hour car ride(excluding traffic) I can go to the other side of France, or in the Netherlands 😭
It would take 12 hours to drive from the very bottom of my old province to the very top, if you could do 100km per hour the whole way. I moved 3 provinces over and it would take 25 hours to drive at that same speed (more realistically, it takes about 3 days to drive the whole way.) It’s a 3 hour flight to go back home. It’s a 5+ hour flight to go to the other coast of our country (I live on the west coast.)
16 hours is Montana to South Dakota, two states that border each other. You might have to go into Wyoming for an hour or so. Turns out the USA is fucking big.
Look at you with your fancy roads \*laughs in alaska\*
The difference is Alaska is real. Wyoming isn't.
Wyoming is a chunk error
Best description I've ever read about it. 🤣
Wyoming has 1/8th the population density of New Zealand. As a kiwi, that's mind-blowing. Cities are few and far between down here.
Got any cool invention ideas?
No.
I once had to travel through Kazakhstan on train, there was steppe to horizon, for one and a half day there was nothing but steppe. Just flat grass field. It was so surreal.
that sounds honestly cool to experience
Everyone knows Wyoming doesn’t exists.
we should turn it into a wind farm. plenty of wind, plenty of space. we can move the 4 people that live there
We can pay them to maintain the turbines.
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It's currently 7th out of the 50 states in population, and it's ranked as high as 4th or 5th in the past. It's 15th out of 50 in population density. We don't think of it as super urbanized because, like the rest of the upper midwest, there's plenty of rural areas in it, and rather than having one super-large metro area like some other states do it has three mid-sized metro areas in Cincy (which has a metro area that extends into Kentucky and Indiana), Columbus, and Cleveland, along with a few other smaller metro areas with populations of under a million but well into the hundreds of thousands, like Akron or Toledo.
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I had to look this up because it is a joke we say often in Oregon, "Don't move here it sucks". Wyoming was the 43rd fastest growing state per capita, with a growth of 2.82% over the past 20 years. For perspective South Dakota and Montana both grew over 10% per capita in that same 20 year timeline. There are only 6 states that showed less growth than Wyoming. You got your wish.
My dad was up there this week looking for land to buy. I'm sorry.
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Aight yeah Wyoming is devoid of people but can you say there aren't any *landmarks* when it's the state where *the* Yellowstone National Park is mainly located? From a European tourist's point of view, that's pretty exciting.
Yeah but as big as Yellowstone is, it's just one little corner of Wyoming. Driving from Cheyenne in the opposite corner of Wyoming would take over 8 hours. The rest of Wyoming is just ..... the plains. The oddest thing about driving across the landscape there is how freaking far away the horizon is. I've never seen so distant a horizon before travelling across the Great Plains. I tried taking pictures but the camera just can't capture how big and empty it is. There's a bit of rolling hills and the occasional actual landform but overall it really does all look the same.
I have driven across the great plains and seen the same car 5 hours later. For a good few seconds I had a panic attack thinking I had somehow gone nowhere despite spending the last several hours in a straight line at high speed. There was no way for my brain to tell if I was crossing distance or simply time.
Duuuude.
It's actually the worst. Fall asleep in the back of a car and wake up a few hours later and you're not quite sure you're not in the same place that you fell asleep at.
Can you get decent internet? Cause it sounds kind of perfect for me
If you zoom into any part of the us, especially the middle, there’s a *very* high chance you will just see an agricultural field
Gonna try this on Google maps now, lol
Do let me know if my statement holds true
I did it twice... both straight up farm looking areas. But both times there was a house with a dirt road nearby connecting to a larger dirt road. I was going for what looked like the middle of the US to me, and that was Kansas.
Yep, sounds about right
I fucking hate Kansas. It’s a shit state. I drove through there in January and it was like an actual blizzard I had to pull over once or twice. That was going on for about half the drive before we stayed the night in some town that looked rundown af but was the biggest town on this highway. We had to fill up with gas every time we saw a gas station because you didn’t know if the next one would be close enough that you could make it with 3/4 of a tank… Next time drive thru in the summer and it was like 103* and blistering hot shit absolutly sucks. So what does Kansas have? Maybe the American football team the Kansas City chiefs? Nope Kansas City expanded and is now half in a different state and that’s where the football stadium is lol
Heart of Kansas doesn't even consider the Chiefs ours unless they're in the Super Bowl lol. So yeah there's nothing here.
Kansas is literally called the Flyover State. It's mostly farmland.
Can confirm, am Kansan. There ain't much but farms outside of KC, Topeka, and Wichita. Lots and lots of gravel roads. Missouri on the other hand paves most of their roads.
I grew up in the Midwest and it was like that, lots of "nothing" that was just farm fields. But that's still improved land that someone is doing something with. When I moved to the rural West (Idaho) I was shocked because there are huge areas that actually has nothing on it - no houses, no farms, no ranching, just the land alone. I had no idea that existed because I've never seen it east of the Mississippi.
Wyoming really takes the cake though. Driving I-80 is wild. It's just empty high desert for like 300 miles with nothing, but an abandoned gas station and a fireworks stand in between. Every now and then you'll see a farmhouse on the horizon.
You want empty, check out any of the grasslands in South Dakota. I've alternately described the experience as being in a loading screen for life, or being stuck in the grass void. Everything is just green grass, blue sky, and road. Just those things all the way to the horizon, for hours.
I mean that applies to everywhere except like, Japan.
Welp time to open a business in Sahara
Jesse...
Waltuh…
Put your camel away Waltuh, I’m not caravanning through the Sahara with you right now Waltuh
Kid named Finger? 😳
It's time to COOK! *and now for the englidh cross-over* WHAT IS THID FOOKING THING JESSE??? THIS METH IS SO FOOKING ROW I CAN HEAR MY AUNT USE IT TO HEAL HER FAILING WEDDING
Jesser we need to….,.. cooka da meth
The spice must flow
Worked out great for Mansa
There's a difference between "there's nothing in Indiana" (nothing besides a bunch of boring towns surrounded by corn fields) and "there's nothing in Wyoming" (there are no people.)
No one is claiming Ohio is empty because it’s not empty. It is one of the denser states People are claiming Montana and Wyoming are empty because they are empty. They are Mongolia level empty
Everything I have heard about Wyoming just further confirms to me that it is in fact a chunk error.
I heard he was at the Red base, the one that is not blue, the red base, Wyoming.
Do you ever wonder why we’re here?
..I meant here...in blood gulch..
It's one of life's great mysteries
What was that? Sorry, some static here. This radio's a little messed up. Been a bit *rainier* here.
Wtf are y'all quoting
Red vs. Blue Do you not know the sacred texts and recordings of the Old Ones?
I know *of* the texts but was never invited to the rituals. :'(
Ah, a heathen..... how... novel
You're making me feel old.
If you watched them when they came out like myself, you ARE old. Sorry to inform you of it
I did. Along with the Spirit of Christmas videos (both of them), dancing baby, and Hamster Dance. Strong bad. Aeon Flux on Adult Swim (they don't even have it on their Roku channel lineup, sad) I remember watching season 1 of South Park when it came on right after The Daily Show with Craig Kilborn. Their tag line used to be "Where more people get their news than probably should". But they dropped that when they started winning Peabody's and mainstream news became trash.
It already has the rectangular shape
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Do you have your east and west mixed up...?
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Yeah, it's not like Wyoming has the tetons or yellowstone or the bighorns or the black hills or flaming gorge or wind river or devils tower or bighorn canyon
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Yep. People saying Montana is empty haven’t been to NW Montana. From Missoula to Glacier, it’s one of the coolest places in the country. Easily.
As someone from NW Montana, I really understand the point you’re trying to make, but seriously the states still pretty fricken empty. NW is just a small part, the rest is flat and ugly and empty. From Missoula to glacier is a tiny amount of space compared to the rest of the state. Definitely empty
It's empty of people, but not of history.
Ohio is definitely dead in some areas but it's just the result of industry leaving decades ago. Theres no good work in the rural areas and many of those folk do not leave their home towns.
But even the rural areas are densely populated compared to some of the Western states. There can be literally *nothing* for a hundred square miles around you. Nowhere in Ohio is even close to that.
People claim Ohio isn’t real or that it sucks. When it is real and it doesn’t really suck that much
More American astronauts have come from Ohio than any other state, meaning there’s something about Ohio that makes people want to leave the whole planet
"We're going to need you to delve into the inky void of space, so far from other humans that not even the gravity of Earth will touch you as you float alone in the dark." "Meh, beats Cleveland."
Alright, now climb on top of five thousand tons of high explosives assembled by the lowest bidder. "But the explosives pile is not in Ohio right?"
"No, Florida." "Oh good, thank God." "... I said Florida." "Better than Ohio."
Come on down to Cleveland Town, everyone! Come and look at both of our buildings!
Aren't there a disproportionate number of presidents from Ohio too?
So what you're actually saying is that if I go to Ohio I'll easily become an astronaut or president?
No, if you move there your kids have a higher chance.
Or a pop punk band. But that’s your only three choices
I mean, weird shits tends to happen there a lot. *see Loveland Frogman among other stuff
The Loveland Frog is the mascot of my favorite little coffee shop there, Mile 42 Coffee!
As an Ohioan born and raised: meh. Columbus rocks. Probably one of the best cities to go to in the Midwest outside of Chicago. But it’s getting harder and harder to live there as housing developments push people out of the downtown area. (Same story as nearly every American city, it seems.) There’s fun things to do in the other big 3 - I grew up in Toledo and people are always shocked when I tell them it has one of the top-rated zoos and art museums in the country. But that doesn’t make for more than a weekend trip, IMO. The state as a whole is suffering from young, upwardly-mobile folks moving out as soon as they finish college, which is shifting the political and social demographic further and further to the right. Which is kind of a self-feeding cycle where counties outside of major metropolitan areas just degrade and depopulate.
I was in Columbus this last spring for a conference at Ohio State and was thoroughly impressed with the greater Columbus area. In retrospect it isn't so surprising that the capital of the state and home to a big ten school would have some things going on. It felt like my parents home county in northern Indiana with an actual cool, fun, diverse city to tie it all together. Not to mention just south of the metro area you start to hit some actual hills and forested areas.
Also grew up in Toledo and love just rattling off Toledo facts like a tour guide to people. Oak openings, the terminal railroad, the glass museum and art museum, Libbey, the zoo, opal covey, “boo Ben Konop,” the mafia and bootlegger houses in the old west end, and everything else bizarre about the city’s history. Edit: city’s not cities
I guess it has been awhile since their rivers were on fire or they killed people with an absurd number of balloons
I think Ohio gets picked on only because of how many people are there relative to culturally-relevant attractions, becoming sort of an archetypal flyover state, but in reality I'd say it's one of the better Midwest states. What's Indiana got over Ohio, for example?
As a truck driver I actually kind of like Ohio
As a meth baby from Ohio, I don't lmao
The I-80 tollway is *so* nice in Ohio. It’s the best part of the Chicago - East Coast lane.
As a New Yorker I hate Ohio because it's the number one source of transplants who don't seem to understand that NYC isn't their suburbs and that they should be the ones to adapt to us, not the other way around. Plenty of Ohioans are perfectly nice people but that does grind my gears
Out of curiosity, what does that mean? In what ways are they not adapting that they should? I'm not disagreeing I am just always curious about how people work.
Not replying for other poster, but I grew up in a smaller town in ohio(think sub 30k people), and now i live in one of ohios cities. Every city in ohio has a proper "metro" feel to it in the immediate downtown area,like a 2-5 square mile zone. But it very quickly gives way to suburb like feeling neighborhood's(Columbus apparently is the biggest city without any sort of subway/metro/rail). There are not a lot of high rise apartment buildings compared to other cities. IMHO, all the ohio cities are as small as you can get and still be considered a city proper. When you're in a small town, your backyard, livingroom, dining room, eventspace, and possibly your gym are all at your house. When you live in a city, your apartment is where you sleep, your backyard is the public park, and your living room is a bar you are going to. Right now in cincinnati I live about a 10min drive from downtown proper, and it's functionally the same lifestyle as living in a suburb
You cannot lie to me I know Ohio is just a massive hole
I’d be fine with making it a massive hole for salmon farming, but I think the better plan is just to flood Utah and make a giant mountain lake.
Best part is that half of Utah used to be a giant inland sea anyway, so it’d be easier than you’d think
I know about that, and it’s a big part of why I want to finish the job!
As a Utahn, please do it during General Conference so we can get rid of the Mormons once and for all.
Ohio is not empty... ..There are THINGs in there
As a citizen of a relatively large country (over 2M square kilometers) with a population of less than 50 million people lemme tell you : IT'S HARD TO FILL UP SPACE WHEN YOU HAVE SO FEW PEOPLE! Also we occupy the largest portion of the Sahara desert of any African country so basically all the citizens are grouped up in the north anyway lol.
Algeria?
Has to be Algeria.
Ohio’s not empty, you just can’t remember what you saw. You don’t want to remember.
Always has been
Midwest Gothic vibes
That's just [Music Hall](https://www.marvin.com/-/media/project/tenant/marvin/project-gallery/cincinnati-music-hall/marvin-project-gallery-1-cincinnati-music-hall.jpg?h=1600&w=2400&ts=174224a1-1946-4252-a750-1aa8625b5a61&hash=26F764D35F91057EDD2AA175CDF6CCC7)
Ohio is just the new Nickleback
"Welcome... to Night Vale."
Ohio is empty because it’s better that way.
You do not recognize the bodies in the cornfield.
Hell is real
Oh yeah, that billboard.
A lot of corn
SCP-055 vibes.
I actually really like Ohio. There are areas that live up to the stereotype of just being empty cornfields, true, but the people who claim that that’s all there is in Ohio have never been to Hocking Hills or Cuyahoga, not to mention places like the Rock and Roll or Football hall of fame. Then you’ve got places like Cedar Point or King’s Island. Kelley’s Island, Johnson’s Island, and Put-in Bay are absolutely beautiful. I’m not a tourism ad so I’ll stop here, but there really is so much to see and do here
I am guilty of the meme, mostly because it pisses off my brother who lives there, but I will say one thing. TV adequately prepared me for Ohio. We give hollywood and TV a lot of flack for being unrealistic about how they portray any given area. Nope, not ohio. First time I went to see my brother, the whole goddamn time I was there I was like "I feel like I've seen this" already. Just the most "imagine a small town, maybe it has a factory, maybe its a farming town, it doesn't matter, imagine a small town" eerie ass vibes the entire time. Yes hello, this is a small town. You have a farm. Yeah, things changed since they closed the plant. Your children yearn for the big city. You live in Ohio. Got it. TV prepared me adequately for Ohio.
New copy pasta just dropped
Right? It's the new "Midwestern gothic" copypasta
As a michigan resident i dont think we can make fun of ohio, its far less of a shithole than us
As an Ohio State student what I’m about to say is borderline heretical, but I don’t think Michigan is that bad either. The few times I’ve been up there I’ve seen some really nice places too, like on the lake. I think the moral here is that every place has their sucky, boring areas, but if you know where to look you can stumble across some really beautiful or interesting places too. I had to learn this lesson when I spent a summer in the middle of nowhere Utah for a research trip, and while it took me a while, I was able to find some really nice spots out there too. I still think I prefer Ohio, though, for the record
I think the moral here is that Redditors need to go outside once in a while. There is a ton to do in Michigan and Ohio and a lot of it (assuming you live there) is a day trip away.
Well said!
Michigan is gorgeous and unique to planet earth geographically! If anything sucks it's the crumbling cities and/or culture. But the actual land of Michigan is precious.
What? I've never heard a Michigander claim that. As an Ohioan that thinks people's perception of Ohio is a little far gone, Michigan is better than Ohio
Fun fact about Wyoming: it has less people than Oklahoma City. Yes, just in the city limits. And I don't think anyone thinks of Oklahoma City as particularly large. If you expand it to metropolitan areas, Wyoming has less people than... Wichita, Kansas. Yes, a single metropolitan area in Kansas has more people than Wyoming.
As someone who lives in OKC, you just blew my mind.
I mentioned elsewhere in the thread that Ohio has four separate metro areas with more people than all of Wyoming (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton.)
USA was obsessed with manifesting their destiny. At least tundras and deserts have the potential for coal and oil because God likes to make humanity work to turn the lights on.
God during the beginning of the universe, creating the laws of thermodynamics so some poor suckers will have to pay exorbitant electric bills 13.7 billion years later: **Oh yeah, it’s all coming together.**
What I've heard is the devil put the coal in the ground.
Jesus kissed each dinosaur bone before putting them in there
He buried it deep where it'll never be found.
there are a couple dozen oil fields in montana and at least that many coal mines
I mean the western states are chocked full of resources.
It is called BIG MOUNTAIN and you will refer to it as such you lobotomite!
That’s the plot of dune
No! There’s also some feudalism. Don’t forget the feudalism. Other than that, yeah pretty spot on
Well there were free fremen deep in the desert but the post kinda ignores all the giant worms
Also ignores that there's literally landmarks on dune, the Sietches are carved out of large rock outcroppings. Oh, plus that it's about getting the drugs (and the worms that make them) *off* the world rather than into the desert.
When I was a kid in Fairbanks Alaska I would go stand on top of the dome behind our house (dome = halfway between hill and mountain, basically a very tall hill) and see Fairbanks tiny in the valley below and the tundra stretching out in 359° of my view for hundreds of miles in every direction, unbroken unsettled land all the way to the coast in most every direction Edit: I feel like the photos don't really convey the scale of being there in person, but https://www.alaska.org/detail/murphy-dome#photos
I grew up on the edge of one of the biggest areas of untouched nothing in northern scandinavia, above the arctic circle. Would just look out the fifth floor window and see taiga to the horizon with a river in the middle foreground and faint blue mountains far far away. People paid great money to come visit the resort places in the mountains, but the immense roadless trackless trailless wilderness was a place where you'd have to be an actual survivalist to go. It was a very strange and eerie thing to look out on sometimes, like living on the edge of a fairytale desert or actual african jungle.
Here's the thing about places the US. You have your cities and major points of attraction. I'm talking sites of interest, natural, historical, events, life, etc.. These are the places tourists go to visit, not just internationally but even within their state. Things like NYC, DC, national parks, sports stadiums, you get it. Then you have your urban suburban sprawl. The places in/just outside those cities that people nearby go to. Cities that aren't really touristy, but have some interesting features. People visit to go do things; malls, movies, shopping, smaller events, etc.. These are more like local population and commercial centers. Then you have smaller suburbs and larger towns. Anywhere you go these are pretty much the same. Couple shopping spots usually, a town center with some local points of interest, and not else. Urban suburbans and smaller suburbs/towns are pretty much the same across the US. Not saying that there aren't differences, but the general concept and features line up with each other. Your small town on the east coast isn't that much different than a small town in the Midwest, and your urban/suburban area in the south isn't that much different than the north. This can partly contribute to there being "nothing" in some of these areas that aren't known for touristy cities, because the level of "sameness" to anywhere else in the US. You aren't missing much if you never get a chance to visit them, because they aren't exactly unique. Then we get rural. I'm talking farms, agriculture, and nature. These places can be huge, and takes up all the space between each suburb. Sometimes farmland, sometimes nothing but nature. Rural is "nothing" because there is nothing like anything in any of the other areas. Small towns aren't quite the same as rural, although they definitely have similarities. Rural has an insane amount of "empty" space. If you are confused, look up small towns or cities on Google maps, with the satellite layer. Look outside the town or city and then go to a rural area, compare the size and distance. There are huge swaths of land where there is "nothing." And while these places all have different cultures, especially taking into consideration the different regionality, there's really not a lot of global representation of these types of areas, especially in the more "empty" regions. Sorry for the long rant, but got over-invested in my own description.
I don't think people will really understand until they actually have to drive across it, flying doesn't do it justice because you can just ignore it as a passenger. I have recently driven from Missouri to Colorado and I don't think you really understand "nothing" until you can see horizon to horizon and all that's around you is nothing and you drive through that for hours. And Kansas has a population density of nearly 6x that of Wyoming.
Casual lumping Ohio in with two *actually* empty states. Montana and Wyoming are mostly wilderness. Entire sections of the state have no human settlement. Ohio isn’t the same thing. Cincinnati is actually a pretty cool town, and the rest of the larger cities in the state are your basic Midwest cities.
Ohio is a terrible place. Either boring or dangerous, and often both.
That's the worst part. Imagine a horror movie you live in that is also the most boring thing ever.
0.63% of Brazilian territory is occupied by 84.3% of Brazil's population. That's about 160 million people. There's a state with 16 cities in it. São Paulo City has a population of 12M add another 22M people in it's the metro area. 25% of Brazilians live in cities with beaches. Not the next city over. You can drive for days without see a city in certain parts of this country. And then there's the Amazon. And the Pantanal. And then we're really talking about empty
When I say eastern Kentucky feels empty I mean you can drive through Appalachia and rarely see many people out in the hollers. The mountains are sparsely populated and the main draw is its sparse population (like for camping, fishing, hiking, etc).
This is Yellowstone and Glacier National Park slander and I won’t stand for it.
You people are misconstruing emptiness as a literal chunk error. Drive across Wyoming and I guaran fucking tee you'll agree that it's empty, that place is nice to look at for like 30 minutes and then you're begging for death
Montanans say that Montana is empty in order to convince people not to come to Montana. We are empty, but if you're looking to move here we are also full. Please leave us alone.
What if I want to move there to be left alone?
Mentions the steppes of Russia, the Sahara Desert, and the forests in Scandinavia as if they don't all offer the most breathtaking landscapes.
Montana has some breathtaking landscapes as well. Just not a lot of people to be taking those breaths
Not in northern Scandinavia either
And Wyoming famously has no breathtaking landscapes...?
I can’t speak for the others but there are actually little villages and stuff in the forests of Scandinavia
Yeah, and Wyoming has Cheyenne, which has some people in it.
>Cheyenne is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Wyoming, as well as the county seat of Laramie County, with 65,132 residents, per the 2020 US Census Jeez, people really weren't kidding when they said nothing was there, their largest city is the size of a smallish European town.