Is there a time that there are more people awake than normal?

Factual Questions
1

The world population is not evenly distributed around the globe’s surface. This is quite obvious for me. So, therefore, there must be a time of the day that there are quite a lot of people awake. When does that happen, after all?

2

More than half of the world’s population is in East and South Asia. Based on this map, the time when most people are awake is probably when it’s daylight over the middle of Eurasia, since you would capture people being awake not only in Asia but in Europe as well.

3

Around 10AM GMT, I think. It’s 10PM in New Zealand at the same time so the vast majority of adults in Eurasia, Africa and Australasia should be awake. By my calculations that’s a hair under 6 billion people out of 7 billion. The Americas are relatively sparsely populated.

ETA: ninja’d.

4

To refine this, let’s assume people generally are awake for 16 hours, and get up near 6 AM local time and go to bed at 10 PM. (These times may be an hour or so later in industrialized countries.) When it is 6 AM in Los Angeles (-7 GMT) it will be 10 PM in Japan (+ 9 GMT). This will include almost the entire population of the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia. It excludes only Siberia, Alaska, eastern Australia, and Oceania. So I would say 11 AM GMT is when the maximum number of people will be awake.

5

However, you add more people by including the western US (GMT -7) than by adding eastern Australia (parts of which are GMT +10).

6

Am I missing something? The western US is on the other side of Australia. So you’d lose western Europe and add the mostly empty Pacific. If you move “backwards”, and add all of the Americas, you lose eastern Asia and most of the world’s population.

ETA: I just saw your method, which assumes people are awake a bit more than my method. In my world, people get a good night’s sleep, sir! :wink:

7

Yes, you’re missing that the western, waking-up edge of the “awake zone” is in the western US, which then runs eastward to Japan, where people are going to bed at about the same time. The Pacific Ocean, eastern Australia, Siberia, and Alaska are the only places where people are asleep.

Of course, the exact time will vary slightly due to different cultural influences on what time people get up and go to bed, whether it’s a work day or a weekend, whether it’s Daylight time in the Northern Hemisphere, but the answer will probably be sometime in the late morning GMT.

More than eight hours, on average? Nice world!