Have you ever just sat on a beach and looked out across the ocean and just thought to yourself, Man, if I went in a straight line from where I am now, how far would I go until I hit more land or from where you are right now, as you're watching this video, how far could you travel in a straight line on land before you run out of land?

Maybe I'm just weird, but I've been thinking lately about what's the furthest straight line.

You could move across the Earth's surface in both of these categories.

It's a little confusing to really wrap your head around this one, because we're often used to imagining the Earth in a two dimensional space like a map.

So most of the time thinking about this, you'll come up with pretty boring answers, like maybe Australia to South America.

But when we transform our thinking into a glow, but the answer is get a lot more interesting and a lot more crazy.

But before all the hate comments come pouring in, though, it's true that's no distance between two points across the Earth's surface is truly flats.

This may seem true enough on a map, but on the globe with um, or correct shape.

A line from Point A to point B more resembles an arc in empty space.

If you delete the globe in geometry, Thes arts form part of what's called a great circle, basically an imaginary circle drawn around an entire sphere.

The longest straight line across an ocean without touching any land, therefore, has to lie across an arc on one of these great circles around the earth.

But first I need to share with you some equally interesting lines between points that you probably would never imagined by simply looking at a map.

And first among those is the straight line across water connecting Italy with Venezuela.

Yes, that's right on a map.

This looks dumb, but here's how it actually works out.

In reality, you only have about a six mile stretch of shoreline around the town of Paul, me in Italy to work with here.

But if you stay within the borders of the line.

You'll eventually make it all the way to Venezuela.

You're going to just squeeze through the northern part of the Strait of Gibraltar and then just barely miss the island of Madeira before finally landing over on the other side.

But it is possible, which I guess helps explain why Venezuela is named after Venice and has so many Italians.

You can also start in Norway and sail in a straight line up and eventually arrived in Antarctica over on the other side of the world without ever touching any other land.

This seems weird, but again, here's how it actually plays out.

You have to start in a very narrow stretch of coast again on the western side of Norway and head so far north that you eventually begin heading south.

You cross between Svalbard and Greenland, just barely squeeze through the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia.

You'll just barely squeeze through again when you're passing through the Illusion Islands and a long way later across the Pacific, you'll barely skirt past Samoa, but from there on, it's a straight shot all the way over to Antarctica.

But unfortunately, it's not the part of Antarctica, which has already claimed by Norway, which is a big shame.

In my opinion.

It lands instead in the Onley part of Antarctica, which no country in the world currently claims yet.

So I feel like this is a pretty good qualification for Norway to just call dips.

Now you could probably spend forever looking at a globe and drawing lines between points, just hoping that you'll eventually discover the longest one.

But forever isn't exactly an understatement.

On a global map.

With a resolution of 1.85 kilometers, you'll encounter over 230 billion possible great circles.

The loop around it and each of these great circles consists of 21,600 individual points, which add together to form over five trillion possible points.

For you to consider.

Finding the longest possible straight line in all of that is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Or you could create a computer program to just do everything for you like these two guys did.

The algorithm that they developed to prove the longest straight line across water was nothing short of genius.

They exploited a technique that's known as a branch and bound towards cartography, and it essentially works by considering every potential solution to a problem as branches of a tree.

Rather than evaluating each solution individually, the algorithm simply checks an entire branch for the optimal solution found inside.

Every branch has a better or a worse solution to the problem, so if the algorithm detects a worse solution, it discards the entire branch.

But if it contains a better solution, it replaces it in place of the old one.

This process continued until Bam!

The computer came back with a proven longest straight line between two points of land on the earth's surface, and it's a weird one.

If you start in southern Pakistan and head south, you could eventually hit Russia without ever touching another piece of land, which looks super weird and super click baby on a map.

But here's how it actually checks out.

You begin in San Mignoni in Baluchistan, Pakistan, and head across this line.

You passed nearby Somalia, so try not to get Captain Philip along the way.

Once passed that you'll cross between Africa and Madagascar and pass through the doldrums for the first time.

If you brought a sailboat with you, you could get screwed pretty hard here because the wind can sometimes stop for weeks on end.

But hopefully you brought a motor that didn't get stolen by the pirates and you've gotten yourself through.

So now you cross the Atlantic before sliding in through the Drake passage between South America and Antarctica, which is quite possibly the most dangerous body of water in the world.

Wind speeds could get up to 80 MPH here, which helps to generate huge waves, extremely strong currents and with the added complexity of poor visibility.

Year round you may wish that you had just gotten kidnapped by the pirates back near Somalia.

The survival odds maybe higher, depending on how crappy your boat iss.

Anyway, if you get through that, you only have to sail across literally the entire Pacific Ocean and through the most empty part of the planets.

You'll be pretty nearby.

Two Point Nemo here, which is literally the furthest point away in the ocean from any land.

If you run into trouble out here, the closest other humans to you will often be the astronauts occasionally orbiting above you aboard the International Space Station.

You'll be several days, tow weeks away from any actual help that could come to you from an inhabited part of the world.

And that's even if you had the ability to signal for help.

So, like try not to do anything dumb or you'll be wishing for the pirates.

Once again.

You also have to pass back through the doldrums over on this side of the world here, so sailboats run an extra hazard of getting trapped again.

But when you finally get to the other side of the line, you'll hit land in the car Roginsky district of the Kamchatka Krai in Russia after sailing across roughly 80% of the entire Earth circumference and more importantly, achieving something that nobody before in history has ever done.

Plenty of people have circumnavigated the globe before, but that's boring compared to this.

So get out there and do your research and planning and do something great like this.

Of course, planning and research for anything takes both practice and effort.

If you're going to go on an adventure sailing in a straight line across the ocean, or if you want to study a globe to find your own weird lines to impress people at the bar with you need to understand how the planet works, as in what is the actual shape of earth?

How does the weather work or how does the earth rotates?

But all of these things are also concepts that you can learn about in brilliant physics.

Of the everyday course, Brilliant is the best place to learn complex things, such as physics, geometry or really any field of math and science.

Not only do they have all of their fabulously designed courses, they also have the goal of helping you get a little smarter every day.

A Siris of daily challenges.

So in just five minutes, while you're waiting for the bus, your coffee, your classes, start or whatever, you can challenge yourself with one of these and then if it gets your interest, each is linked to one of their full eight courses as well.

You can try brilliant and support this channel by signing up for free at a brilliant dot org's slash real life floor.

However, the 1st 200 people to go to that link will also get 20% off the annual premium subscription.

Thank you for watching, and I'll see you again next week.