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.
  • MyFriendGodzilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    2 天前

    Its got to be the South Pole. no humans got there until 1911. For an area where no human has ever been at all, walk 100 kilometers in any direction away from the south pole. 😆

    • Redjard@reddthat.comOPEnglish
      3·
      2 天前

      Can’t be that simple. There have been multiple teams now, if they came from say 4 orthogonal directions that would already push this point out multiple hundred km. Even if they all took the same route, there is now the “Amundsen-Scott Station” there, directly on the south pole, with regular flights. Even tourist flights.

      Surely those flights have taken various routes to the station and covered antarctica in a fairly dense mesh of lines of longitude.

      Edit:
      Rough numbers: according to wikipedia “Between October and February, there are several flights per week of U.S. Air Force […]”. So let’s call that 50 flights a year for 40 years, 2000 flights.
      Now, if those had all flown fanned out, which realistically ofc they wouldn’t have, that would put them only 3km apart even at the coastline 1000km from the south pole.

      Also a different note, surely there must have been various surveys flown all across antarctica.

      • thenextguy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        2 天前

        I think you should refine your question. Do you mean the point where most or any humans have stayed away from. Or something like an average population density map? Or something else?

        • Redjard@reddthat.comOPEnglish
          21·
          2 天前

          The point noone has ever been near to. For the greatest possible definition of near where there still is such a point.

          For example, say humans have been within 10km of every point of earth, except one random location 500km from the south pole, where even by plane noone has been closer than 10.001km when viewed top-down, so on a map.

            • Redjard@reddthat.comOPEnglish
              11·
              2 天前

              I’ll take best guesses. It’s hard to answer, you can always pile in more data.

              Ideally one could collect some candidate ideas, like “random point inland of antarctica”, “random point within a few thousand km of point nemo”, … then maybe do some estimates of how many people have crossed those areas, and how randomly, and then estimate the expected largest gap with that amount of paths and that area statistically.

              For example with 2 thousand flights straight through the south pole from random directions, over the disk 500km in radius from the south pole, I would expect very loosely a gap of 10km to randomly be left somewhere on the border of that disk, so there would be a point 500km from the south pole, that noone has been within 10km of ever.

    • Redjard@reddthat.comOPEnglish
      2·
      2 天前

      Surely because it is famous, some people have travelled there. So of it was the point originally, it would then have moved away and is now at a balance, not too far away that the area is more frequented, but not too close so it just happens to not be near any of the paths people took to get to point nemo or back.

    • Redjard@reddthat.comOPEnglish
      1·
      2 天前

      I was thinking on a map, so height doesn’t matter. Walking somewhere is the same as flying over it.

  • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
    1·
    2 天前

    Hard to say. Probably one of the poles of inaccessibility or point nemo, as noted. But I would also consider shipping lanes bringing sailors nearby.

    Human history is so long that real global travel is very, very recent, so I don’t think you need to consider “well first horses then ships then cars then planes” because it all happened fairly quickly.

    If you wanted a true answer, you could probably take a human migration map by era. Because the recent global travel would have such a comparatively light weight, the thought experiment math suggests it’s one of those points mentioned.

    • Redjard@reddthat.comOPEnglish
      21·
      2 天前

      By population, most humans lived after the bronze age collapse, and like 20%+ after the industrial revolution. We estimate only a bit over 100 billion humans in total.

      So really I think you can ignore anything pre-industrial without too much loss. Anything preindustrial humans got to, nowadays many more can get to, so those areas would be densely covered.

      But really since a single person can ruin a point, you also need to consider all weird stuff.

      Point Nemo, people could have gotten to more frequently since maybe 500 years ago with better ships. To consider would be roughly were sail ships would sail, snd where they could end up with any number of accidents. Then the same for steam ships, and modern container ships.
      Weirdnesses would be survey ships for example. Anyone mapping the ocean floor, or looking for resources to mine, will very strategically cover an entire area with lines maybe 10-20km appart. The same happens with survey planes.

      And who knows where a nuclesr sub might cross the pacific between various start and end-points.

      Finally there is the worst nightmare, explorers.
      Your guess for the point: remote hard to get to location.
      Consequence: Point becomes famous, 50 people will risk their life to ship themselves to the south pole, the tallest mountain in antarctica, or point nemo.
      So anything that has a name and is known to be remote is probably out.

    • Redjard@reddthat.comOPEnglish
      1·
      2 天前

      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.