An Eerie, Dark Look at North Korea

Here's a photograph of the Korean peninsula captured by NASA's International Space Station, the gigantic NASA satellite recently given White House funding to extend its life until at least 2024. See the bright lit-up land on the left? That's China, and the bright land mass on the right-hand side is South Korea. And the dark, scary center? That entire land mass is North Korea, lit up only by its capital, Pyongyang. Shudder.

Needless to say, North Korea uses a lot less light than South Korea. According to NASA, South Korea uses 10,162 kilowatt hours of power consumption per person, whereas North Korea uses... 739. And that's far from all that's dark about North Korea: a recent UN report, clocking in at nearly 400 pages, chronicled the country's horrific human-rights abuses and compared the situation under Kim Jong-un's rule to Nazi Germany.

As NASA points out: "The darkened land appears as if it were a patch of water joining the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan." And Pyongyang looks more like an island than the capital of an extensive land mass — one that has a population of more than three million people.

Because press freedoms inside reclusive North Korea are so incredibly limited, it's difficult to know much of what's going on inside of North Korea, but there's little doubt it's as terrifying as it looks.

Image: NASA