(calming orchestral music)
- Hey everybody, this is Brain Stuff.
This thing happening here.
And I'm Ben, and you're
you, and let's imagine
that you and I go on a walk together.
And we're walking around,
the weather is nice,
the birds sound good, we
say "let's keep going,"
"we're having a great time."
So, we walk even further than we intended,
and we are having so much of a good time,
that you look at me and
say "hey Ben, let's dream
"big, let's walk around the world,"
and I say "of course, but
wait, how long would it take?"
How long would it actually take
someone to walk around the world?
There are a couple of
different ways we could
look at this, so let's
start with some math.
Picture the earth, imagine the earth.
It's about 24,901 miles
across at the equator.
So, if you're walking,
we have to admit that
people walk at different speeds.
So for the sake of argument, let's assume
an average of 3.1 miles per hour for the
adult human being.
With those numbers, if we never stop,
for anything, if we
never go faster or slower
than 3.1 miles per hour, if we somehow
walk in a straight line, it will take us
8,032.6 hours to walk around the world.
That's like 334, 335 days?
That's less than a year.
Go us. But that's impossible right?
For human beings, because we have to
stop constantly to do human things.
Like to sleep, to eat.
So let's play with the
numbers a little bit.
Let's say that we're still
walking in a straight line.
We're still going 3.1
miles per hour constantly,
but, once a day we're
stopping wherever we are,
and passing out for 8 hours to sleep.
This means that if we
factor in just sleep alone,
it's going to take 502 days
to walk around the planet.
It's not 330, but still
it's not a bad number.
But, 502 days, is still, the nicest thing
you can say about it is that
it's a very ambitious number.
Because, aside from super powers, no one
really can walk in a straight
line around the planet.
Stuff gets in the way.
When you really try to do it, you run
into things like mountains, and deserts,
and oh, right, oceans.
Those are tough to walk over.
So, for the people who have attempted
to walk around the world,
they've done approximations of this.
You could, maybe fly to South America,
the very tip of South
America, walk up to Alaska,
somehow get to Russia, then walk as far
as you can into western Europe,
and then maybe go to Africa.
So, for instance, maybe people can
also fly a plane to every continent,
and walk across that continent.
It's still a tough, tough adventure.
Here are some examples.
Between 1910 and 1923, a Romanian guy
with a kickass name of Dumitru Dan
got three of his friends and a dog
(high pitched bark)
To travel around the
world with him.
It took thirteen years.
Things got in the way, their journey
was somewhat circuitous at times,
and it was a dangerous adventure.
In fact, all three of his
human companions died.
One from a mountainous fall in China,
one from an opium overdose in India,
and one from a leg ailment in Florida.
It also would've taken a lot less time,
if World War I hadn't broken out.
Before we go on, I know
what everybody's thinking.
You're asking the same
question I was asking.
"What happened to the dog?"
No one knows.
Another example, in 1970 a guy named
Dave Kunst decides to
walk around the world
starting from his home in Minnesota.
It takes him about four years ,
and three months, a little bit over that.
Of that four years and three months,
four of those months were spent recovering
from an ill-fated run in
with bandits in Afghanistan
so it also affected his ultimate time.
And these are just a few examples
of people who really did try some
approximation of walking around the world.
This is what our answer ends up being.
It ends up being two things.
Number one, if you had a team of people,
surrounding you, swarming
you, throwing water
on you, feeding you all
the time, and you only
slept eight hours a
day, and you we're kinda
comfortable, which is
going when you have to go
without stopping, if you
do all that it would take
502 days to cross the planet,
if you could go in a straight line.
However, what we see
is when people actually
attempt this, it takes much, much,
much longer.
And this all makes me think,
what's the furthest you've ever walked?
Have you hiked the Appalachian Trail?
Have you walked across
the continent you live on?
I'd love to hear about it.
Let me know in the comments.
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And, as always, stay tuned
for more Brain Stuff.
