The World: a Complete Portrait of Our Planet, Its Peoples, and Its Future

There is only one world. That fact, so obvious as to seem unremarkable, contains within it one of the most important truths of our time. The Earth is a single, interconnected system of land, water, atmosphere, and life, and the approximately 8.1 billion human beings who inhabit it are bound together by shared biological needs, shared atmospheric chemistry, and increasingly by shared economies, communications, and cultural exchange. To understand the world is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is a necessity for anyone who wishes to understand the age in which we live and the challenges and opportunities it presents.

This is a portrait of the world: its geography, its history, its peoples, its languages, its economies, its natural wonders, its human creations, and the organizations through which humanity has tried to manage its shared affairs. It is, of necessity, a portrait in broad strokes. The world is too large, too complex, and too diverse to be captured in any single account. But the broad strokes are worth drawing, because they reveal patterns and connections that are invisible when we focus only on individual countries or regions.

Geography of the World

The Earth is the third planet from the Sun in the solar system, orbiting at an average distance of approximately 150 million kilometers. It has a diameter of approximately 12,742 kilometers and a circumference of approximately 40,075 kilometers at the equator. Its surface area is approximately 510 million square kilometers, of which approximately 71 percent, or 361 million square kilometers, is covered by ocean.

The world's land surface, approximately 149 million square kilometers, is organized into seven continents: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia and Oceania, Europe, North America, and South America. These divisions are in some cases as much a matter of cultural convention as strict geological fact: Europe and Asia are geologically a single landmass, Eurasia, separated by a conventional rather than a natural boundary. Australia is simultaneously a country, an island, and a continent.

The world's oceans are divided into five named bodies: the Pacific, the largest by far at approximately 165 million square kilometers; the Atlantic, at approximately 106 million square kilometers; the Indian, at approximately 70 million square kilometers; the Southern, surrounding Antarctica; and the Arctic, covering the region around the North Pole. These oceans are not separate bodies but a single interconnected global ocean, with water circulating continuously between them through complex current systems.

The world's highest point is Mount Everest in the Himalayas, at 8,849 meters above sea level. The lowest point on land is the shoreline of the Dead Sea, approximately 430 meters below sea level. The deepest point in the ocean is the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, at approximately 10,935 meters below sea level.