Our graphic of the week is an interesting annotated satellite photo montage of city lights. This NASA graphic has circulated on Reddit. It shows that 80% of the US population lives east of the annotated yellow line. This adds credence to my long-standing advice to live west of the Mississippi River. Generally, fewer people will mean fewer problems in the event of a societal collapse.

Take a close look and note that the cluster of orange dots over western North Dakota and eastern Montana are not city lights.  Rather, those are natural gas flares in the  Bakken oilfields — a still lightly-populated and energy-exporting region. More and more gas is being captured, with each passing year, but the flares still dominate the night sky in the region. Other natural gas flares can be seen in orange in Texas and off the coast of Louisiana. – JWR

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