Euroamerican tech surprise: the minority that created the most modern technology

I have heard that Europe and, of course, the US - were just not that big compared to some countries of the world. Nor, for that matter, all that populous.

Today, I read about the following site at Digg.com, and decided to check it out. I was curious how various countries and continents ranked in terms of human population size.

The Hive Group - World Population Treemap

The population of the entire USA is less than 1/3 of that of India. The USA has less than 3 times the entire population of Mexico.

Not sure where they count the tens of millions of illegal immigrants as being. I would guess here. However, if enough them are migrant, the answer you get would vary wildly by time of year. I am glad I do not have to count - especially if the counting has to be done each season!

Indonesia, the place where the quakes and volcanos and tsunamis have been hitting in recent history, has 238 million people to the USA population of 293 million. Fewer, but pretty close.

Africa has more people living in it than Europe does. However, Africa has fewer people living in it than the whole population of North America and Europe combined.

The total area of Africa is about 30 million square kilometers. Add total area of North America and Europe, and you get about the same figure.

Geography always was my weakest subject but I am surprised. I had heard some of these population and landmass size figures before. Others I was completely in the dark on.

The website seems like a pretty neat visualization tool. I have seen these maps used for news reports but this is the first time I have seen it used for population and land area size. It seems like a faster way to learn things and compare things than more static tools. Glancing at figures on a piece of paper, for example - is not the same thing. Same numbers - but not really quite the same learning tool.

So, how about modern Technology? What is the History of science and technology?

Wikipedia has a page that tracks overall History of technology. Here are some highlights:

1. Innoculation - Europe
2. Telegraph - USA
3. Electricity harnessed to light cities - USA
4. Radio - Europe
5. Telephone - USA
6. Television - USA
7. X-ray machine - hard to tell but I think Europe (following lots of research in USA and Europe)
   
8. Atomic fission for energy/military - USA
9. Atomic fusion for military - USA (nobody has successfully sustained fusion for energy, yet)
   
10. Electronic computers - USA or Europe
11. Transistor - USA
12. Integrated Circuits - USA
13. Microprocessor - USA
14. Smartcard - Europe

It seems pretty disproportionate in terms of the points of origin where the technology was created. There probably is a reason for that. Simpler than the economic, social, educational, and political ones - though they are key to technology. No one could think otherwise, I imagine.

More than almost anything else, technology needs technology in order to be created. Twentieth century technology is pretty well diffused around the globe now, in the 21st century.

It will be interesting if 21st century technology that becomes commonplace will spring forth from the other continents on the globe. Certainly much earlier technology, craft, science, and medicine did.

If it does, the pace of innovation will probably pick up to such a degree to make earlier decades seem like a lull!

All those other things light the spark. But the tinder is technology itself. It takes some to make more.

We all have a lot of that now.