More people live inside this circle than outside it
One circle, 4,000 km in radius, centered over southern China. Everyone on Earth is on one side of this line or the other — and the inside wins.
The circle contains China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Japan, and all of Southeast Asia — 22 countries whose combined population is about 4.25 billion of the world's 8.1 billion people. It also contains some of the emptiest places on the planet: the Himalayas, the Gobi Desert, Mongolia, and a lot of open ocean. Even carrying all that emptiness, the inside still outweighs the entire rest of the world.
This is the same lesson as our nearly-empty-America map, at planetary scale: humanity isn't spread across the Earth — it's piled up, astonishingly, in one corner of one continent.
Method: countries counted as inside when their population-weighted location falls within 4,000 km of 26.6°N, 106.6°E (a version of the "Valeriepieris circle"). Populations: UN World Population Prospects 2024 estimates. Border-straddling effects roughly cancel: the circle's edge cuts off fringes of member countries (eastern Indonesia, northern Japan) but also captures fringes of non-members it clips.