I was looking at the reply to this survey map:

complainig humans don’t live in the ocean. Which lead me to the question of how large of a radius around every person you would have to color, tracing all their movements for their entire life, to color in the entire earth.

Naturally, this radius would have to be set such that the most remote point across time is just barely covered. So what would that point be, and how far away has every human been from it for all of time?

I assume this would be somewhere in antarctica, or maybe in the pacific? With a radius of surely not more than a few tens of kilometers, right? Maybe even less?

I would say let’s, since we obviously wanna count ships, also count planes and subs. But let’s not count astronauts.

Some clarifications:

  • This is all on a map, height does not matter. Walking somewhere or flying over it is the same.
  • We are talking absolutely noone has been closer than an absolute distance. If a single person has travelled there, the location is out.
  • redjard@reddthat.comOPEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I doubt there’s any island larger than a rock that noone has landed on. (For some time people even specifically sought out islands that don’t even have vegetation, to mine nitrogen). Anything larger than a km surely someone would have explored more. So points on those islands would at most be some hundreds of meters.

    Given how few islands and how much ocean there is, any island is much more interesting and thus more likely to have had someone visit than some comparable location in the ocean without an island.