BrainStuff Classics: How Long Would It Take To Walk Around The World?

answer this question. The simplest way to think about it, though, begins with the circumference of the Earth being twenty four thousand, nine and one miles at the equator, or seventy four kilometers. Obviously, not everybody walks at the same speed, and the same person doesn't even walk at the same speed all the time. But let's assume that a reasonable figure for average adult human walking speed is through three point one miles per hour,

or about five kilometers per hour. Given these numbers, if you were able to walk in a straight line around the Earth at the equator, never stopping, maintaining a constant speed of three point one miles per hour, it would take you about eight thousand, thirty two point six hours to do it. That works out to be about three hundred and thirty four three thirty five days. It's not too bad, You've got the entire planet in less than a year. But of course, nobody could actually walk without

stopping for three thirty five days. So let's say you just stop long enough to lie down on the ground wherever you are and sleep for eight hours a night. Then you hop right back up and you resume your walk. Then it would take you about five hundred and two days. You know. An interesting side note here. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the fastest growing species of bamboo can grow up to ninety one centimeters or thirty

five inches per day. In the time it took you to make your five and two day trip around the world, this bamboo could grow seventeen thousand, five hundred and seventy inches or a thousand, four hundred and sixty four ft in.

That is going to be some long bamboo. Of course, if the bamboo itself wanted to take over the world by growing all the way around the circumference of the Earth, thus gaining a literal stranglehold on the planet at a rate of thirty five inches per day, it would take more than forty five million days, So okay, we've got

a headstart compared to bamboo, I guess. But of course, you can't just walk continuously or in a straight line all the way around the world unless you know you're some kind of holy figure who has mastered the whole

walking on water thing. There are some oceans in the way, so really you can only walk all the way around the world in an approximate kind of sense, for example, by starting at the tip of South America, heading north to Alaska, crossing somewhere over to Russia, and then traveling as far on foot as you can to some westernmost destination in Europe or Africa. Or you could fly to each continent individually and walk across them one at a time.

No matter what route you pick, you'll have to go around mountains, dense forests, killer deserts, bodies of water, and other obstacles. Typically, it makes more sense to follow roads than to try to cut straight through the wilderness. Plus you have to stop to rest and sleep and eat. So how long does it take once all of that is factored in. Well, there are actually quite a few people who have done it in one form or another.

Between nineteen ten and nineteen twenty three, a Romanian geographer named Dumitrue Dan completed a fairly exhaustive around the world walk. He traveled across every continent except Antarctica, and would walk back and forth across the decks of ships during the necessary ocean crossings. When he started in nineteen ten, Dan had three human companions and a dog with him. All

three of his human companions died during the journey. One fell while traversing a mountainous region in China, one overdosed on opium in India, and one died of some medical condition affecting his legs in Florida. The journey took thirteen years, but it wasn't just trying to go all the way around the planet once. This trip had the four globe trotters going back and forth across several continents to really

cover pretty much all of the world. Plus there was a major delay of the trip unrelated to the journey itself, caused by the outbreak of World War One in In other words, if not for World War One, Dan could have completed the journey much sooner. Then. On June twent nineteen seventy, another man named Dave Kunst set out from Washsaka, Minnesota to walk around the world. He took along his brother On and a mule named Willie. Make it yep, that's that's the mule's name. Dave and John were shot

by bandits in Afghanistan. John was killed, Dave was only injured. The journey from Wassaka and back again took him four years, three months and sixteen days, but that includes delays such as the four month period of medical recuperation Dave had after he was shot in Afghanistan, and one more. The British globe trotter Fiona Campbell received fame in the nineteen nineties after she completed a round the World walk in

several stages over the course of about eleven years. So if there were a perfect highway going straight around the equator and you never got attacked by bandits or injured or sick or detained it a border and had to quit because of exhaustion, and you really only stopped to sleep, well, well, we'll assume that there's someone driving along next to you, constantly supplying you with water and feeding you with cheeseburgers

to make up for all the calories you're burning. And we're also going to assume that when you have to go to the bathroom, you just you know, you go. It would take a little more than five hundred days, but if you look at people who actually try to do it for real, it tends to take many years and is very often interrupted. Today's episode was written by Joe McCormick and produced by Tyler Clang. The Brain Stuff

is production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. To hear more from Joe, you can tune into either of his two podcasts, Invention and Stuff to Blow your Mind. And for more on this and lots of other topics, visit our home Planet Has to Works dot com plus for more podcasts For my Heart Radio, was it the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.