A world of wonders

We live in a world with thousands upon thousands of unique, spectacular places. Some exist naturally, while others were created through human ingenuity. So how, then, do you boil all of those places down to a selection of just seven?

We humans have always been dividing things into neat lists and ranking them — just look at the ever-popular Internet listicle. This obsession, it turns out, goes back at least to the first few centuries, B.C., when ancient Greek tourists began to keep track of the most noteworthy structures throughout the Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Babylonian civilizations.

Knowledge of these locations was passed along through generations and eventually solidified into one official list. Arbitrarily capped at seven items, they are now known as the “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.” All but one have long since been destroyed, and all seven only existed at the same time for a brief span of about 60 years.

The list of Seven Wonders has been revisited countless times. A seven-year worldwide voting campaign that kicked off in 2000 was used to select an authoritative “new” list, winnowing down a selection of 200 worldly structures to just seven. The winners represented a span of over two-and-a-half millennia.

Other organizations have produced their own, more tightly defined thematic lists. The American Society of Civil Engineers' 1994 compilation of the seven “greatest civil engineering achievements of the 20th century” is but one example.

While such lists have tended to skew human-centric, there have been attempts to recognize the world’s most remarkable natural features, too. In 2008, in response to the New Seven Wonders list, a panel of experts decided on a list of the planet’s Seven Natural Wonders.