Australia vs Chile

Australia is 10 times larger than Chile — 7,741,220 against 756,102 km². Australia is 1.4 times more populous than Chile — 27,614,411 against 19,859,921 people.

Side by side

Population density

Chile is 7.4 times more densely populated than Australia — 26 against 4 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• They drive on opposite sides — Australia on the left, Chile on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the Chilean peso.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and South America.

Australia

The sixth-largest country in the world and the only one that covers an entire continent. The Great Barrier Reef runs about 2,300 km and is the largest structure made by living organisms on Earth, visible from orbit. Around eighty percent of its mammals, reptiles and flowering plants exist nowhere else. Melbourne and Sydney are within roughly a hundred thousand people of each other, and which counts as the largest city depends on where the boundary is drawn.

Chile

About 4,300 km from north to south and averaging only around 177 km wide — one of the most elongated countries on Earth. The Atacama in the north is the driest non-polar desert in the world, and some weather stations there have never recorded rain. That dryness and altitude is why most of the world's large optical telescopes are built here.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.