Yeah, money machine go brrrr is a great sign of "footprint", lets just ignore millenniums of inventions, technology and others things coming from Europe, before the US was even a colony. Texas GDP was $x millions last year, clearly larger footprint on the world :)

It's actually pretty fun and interesting the different bubbles we all live in, for better or worse.

> lets just ignore millenniums of inventions, technology and others things coming from Europe, before the US was even a colony

Those people are dead. They did great things. But it's irrelevant to their standing and influence today.

True, like how Silicon Valley should change it name, because Gordon Moore died so lets forget everything he ever did.

No place in the US has "Silicon Valley" as its formal name.

I meant the geographic footprint. I was surprised by how big Texas is, even though it is famously big.

A lot of those discoveries were actually made elsewhere ( not the majority, but an embarrassingly significant amount)

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/indians-predated-new...

https://sd2.org/bibha-chowdhuri-a-woman-of-firsts-with-no-re...

> After the war ended, Cecil Powell, a British physicist, continued the research in England using similar methods with more sensitive plates, detecting a new particle and winning him the Nobel Prize in 1950. Chowdhury and Bose’s work was acknowledged in his book, but their recognition quickly faded.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/01/hidden...

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/fibfibs.pdf

There is a much nicer visual tool that helps you visualize this: https://thetruesize.com/. (It works best on desktop)

You can place a state/country on top of another country and see the true size. Helps to make up for the improper sizing caused by map projections.

I use it to help my lovely dutch friends realize why I can't just bike to work. :)