1 Million People Are Missing From Earth’s Surface. Yes, Really.
Where humanity actually lives when we’re not on the surface of our own planet.
If you told a stranger, “A million people are not on Earth’s surface right now,” they’d check their pockets for pepper spray. But it’s true: at any given moment, roughly 1,000,000 humans are literally in the sky, riding inside the ~10,000–20,000 airplanes currently cruising above us.
It’s like a medium-sized city relocated to 35,000 feet and collectively asked, “Would you like ginger ale or sparkling water?”
That’s just the start of the wild geography of where humans actually are.
The Farthest We’ve Ever Been
In 1968, Apollo 8 became the first mission to orbit the Moon, and in doing so astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders set humanity’s initial record for farthest distance from Earth. That mark stood until the ill-fated Apollo 13. When an oxygen tank exploded en route, the mission flipped from exploration to survival — and in the course of swinging around the Moon on a free-return trajectory, the crew accidentally set the all-time distance record: 248,655 miles from Earth. No one has gone farther since, despite reusable rockets and billionaire space races.
There’s another, very different record: being farthest from everyone else. In 1969, during Apollo 11, Michael Collins orbited the Moon alone in the Command Module while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history on the surface. Each time Collins slipped behind the Moon, radio contact vanished entirely.
For roughly 48 minutes per orbit, Michael Collins became:
👉 The most physically isolated human in history.
Every other member of our species was on the far side of a 2,000-mile-wide rock.
The Deepest We’ve Ever Been
Going the opposite direction, filmmaker and submarine nerd James Cameron piloted the Deepsea Challenger almost 36,000 feet down into Challenger Deep — the deepest known point in the ocean and part of the Mariana Trench. That’s seven miles straight down, with pressure so intense it could pancake a car like a tortilla. It works out to 16,000 psi (pounds per square inch), or 1,100 times our normal atmospheric pressure of 14.7 psi. Check out this UCTV talk with James Cameron.
He stayed on the bottom of the Mariana Trench by himself exploring for 3 hours with his custom-designed vehicle withstanding all that pressure (as did an experimental Rolex watch attached on the outside that inspired the Rolex Deepsea Challenge watch).
A Fun Reality Check
If you plot human presence vertically, the picture looks sci-fi:
+35,000 ft: ~1,000,000 people airborne
+250 miles: A handful of astronauts on the ISS
+240,000 miles: Apollo 13’s all-time distance record
–36,000 ft: Challenger Deep’s tiny visitor log
We casually occupy a vertical spread of nearly half a million miles, and most of us barely think about it. Just a delightful reminder that the real world is already pretty weird — and occasionally, beautifully science-fictional.
Ubiquity Ventures — led by Sunil Nagaraj — is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on startups solving real-world physical problems with "software beyond the screen", often using smart hardware or machine learning.
If your startup fits this description, reach out to us.