Instead of approaching infinity, wouldn't the coastline perimeter form a sort of exponential curve towards a definite amount as the unit got smaller and more precise?
*Exactly my thoughts* Increasing the resolution DOESN'T mean the total measurement climbs to infinity. It just approaches a single number... with precision of that final atom of length, going on forever. But that doesn't make the total perimeter go to infinity. It merely makes the decimal places after it, go on forever. *So what?*
It wouldn't form an exponential curve, it would form a curve with a horizontal asymptote (a line a curve gets infinitely close to but never touches. An example would be the graph of 1/x which has a horizontal asymptote of 0. You can graph that on desmos if you want to see.). That asymptote would happen at a finite value, and that finite value is the true length of the coast. In theory, we would run into the infinity problem this video talks about if we thought the universe was continuous, but we believe** we live in a quantum world. Which means that there is a shortest length. Which means there is a finite amount of times you can use a finite length to measure a finite distance. The big problem is that he knows we live in a finite world because he talked about counting atoms in the video, so he has no excuse for saying the answer would approach infinity.
Yeah, I was sitting here thinking the same thing. Like if you use smaller measurements, it shouldn't go on longer unless like you are really bad at counting
Very good question. And the answer is not trivial. It depends on the geometrym if it converge or not. The problem is very similar to series. Adding up 1/n leads to infinity, while adding up 1/2^n leads to a finite number.
My understanding is that while an asymptote theoretically exists, you can't really quantify precision because different parts of the coastlines aren't underestimated by the same degree. If we can't standardize an x-value, we wouldn't even begin to know how far we actually are from the true asymptote.
@Coke Kebab123 Yes, unfortunately, you don't seem to be doing very much with all that space... Also OP was referring to the British Empire, which at its height in 1920 covered around 1/4 of the Earths land area and a good amount of its population. It was the largest political entity to ever exist.
dont worry, i know about a secret german plan that includes saving money on coastal structures so that when the sea levels rise, the dutch will be flooded from mainland germany and not the sea itself wir sehen uns dann unter wasser :D
This “paradox” also applies to the surface area of your lungs. That’s why we can never agree on how many football fields your lungs can cover. Also, nobody pronounces it the “cotch” snowflake. It’s always either “coke” or that other way that could be flagged by profanity filters.
@Umos you are correct, Great Britain is the Larges island in the British isles which contains the Territories of England Scotland and wales of the Sovereign state of the United Kingdom. the 2nd largest island in the British isles in the island of Ireland which contains another territory of the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland ) and the Republic of Ireland. technically even Irish people are British as it refers to the geological area not the sovereign state of the United Kingdom, so many people don't realise Great britain isnt a country but a region. the UK and GB are used interchangeably even though its completely incorrect to do so
Great Britain still have the commonwealth of nation if you know about britain's decolonisation period you'd know that Britian could have kept many lands but brittish pilitician thought it would be useless and so they just gav e them up and replace it withbritish commonwealth all members have queeen elizabetj as head of state so ueen elizabeth is ruler of a greater land than trump is
@Lucas Brinster What you asked is debatable. But in science it is known that you can't measure less than a planck lenght. That is, as I understood it at least, the point of his/her comment. Doesn't necessarily mean you can't get smaller, but you can't measure smaller, at least meaningfully.
It may resemble fractals. However, "real" fractals are infinite in nature while coastlines are not, so the only problem is the scale of measurement (as mentioned in the videos and a few others). You can find the exact length of the coastline by measure the distance between each molecule, which is not practice and of little good. You must decide the scale by determining your need, defining how long is "meaningful". For example, if NATO wants to measure the coastline to know how many fleets the Russians can have at their harbour, 10m is a reasonable number. OTOH, the Malaysians wants to know how much land they can use for harvesting sea salt, 20-30m probably makes more sense.
The idea/concept of fractals might be infinite, but any "real world example" like a snow flake has at the end of the day the same "constraint" of e.g molecules. Beside of that, why stop at molecules. Let's get on quantum level (theoretically). Maybe at some point we "find" something smaller than that. So while it is ofc not per se "Infinity", it kinda grows quite in this direction, the closer you look. So I still find it an appropriate comparison/figure to get the kind of idea
@@boldimor84 I agree. Like you said, the "direction" where things were going is the point of bringing up fractals. I just wanted to point out that the lower-constraint was what distinguish the theoretical and the physical one. Beside, don't you think the surface of the table is fractals-ish? Since the closer you look the rougher it would be, albeit much less obvious than snowflake of course. That way you can just magnify anything and shit'd go weird anyway. I'm no scientist so I'm not sure how things look like below the Planck length, but I'm sure it would not be as straightforward as mathematician has in their system.
@@vanminhle850 yes, absolutely. the whole world seems kinda "fractal-ish". who knows how many "smaller parts" we might find at some points below quarks and stuff xD. Everywhere there seems to be more and more details, the more you look :D. All of course anyways under the premise of or current physical models. because at the end, all of those things are anyways quite below what a normal human mind can see and comprehend. But i'm getting too far off the actual topic xD
@@leobaratin128 Aaah yes indeed, our famous aircraft carriers and battlecruisers stored within the core of the Alps, patiently waiting for their hour of glory when the oceans rise will become out of control...
Agreed. Problem solved. A lot of paradoxes depend on people contradicting each other. Probably some one will disagree with that statement. And I will call it a paradox.
Imagine if the rising sea levels from climate change was just a conspiracy to disguise how much water the Netherlands is displacing via their ceaseless reclaimation of land from the sea. Like, they're so good at pushing water away that the rest of the world has to pick up the slack.
@@Neion8 it's kinda the other way around. Climate change and rising sea levels are man made to keep the Dutch busy and stop them from dominating the world
2:08 If you add an infinite number of numbers that are getting smaller and smaller, you don't get infinity, per se. Pi or the Eulerian number is also an infinite series of numbers added, but its value converges to a specific number. So the coast of England would do the same thing. The exact extent of a coastline depends more on the definition of the edge and not on the chosen resolution.
Yes but this goes one step further, it’s an interesting problem because it would seem like we can make smaller and smaller measurements like with most shapes, but as we do that the answer doesn’t approach a definite value, although it may not be infinite it is useless. This is actually true for most things in nature, but man made things are usually neat enough for calculus to work.
The length of the coast of Great Britain is 1. As I failed to specify the unit, that could be one anything and is therefore technically correct (1 coastline of Great Britain)
Wouldn’t it be easier to just chose a point in the water and measure in a straighter line? And why would you include river inlets into the calculation?
One, that point in the water you propose already exists. It's called the Continental Shelf. Problem is, measuring the shoreline only works ON THE SHORE! Two, inlets, bays, and coves are features of said coastline. Excluding them would only serve to deliver inaccurate results. Asking why inlets are included is like asking why the cost of tires is included in the sale of an automobile. One is quite literally a part of the other.
I was of the same mind, I feel like none of these people understand how a freaking tape measure works. If measuring in straight lines doesn't work then why use straight lines?
Yeah, Wyoming is like a square. And why most American state borders are straight lines? I was searching exactly that and this video popped up ~_~ Any Americans who could help me?
@@randomdude9135 most American state borders are not strait lines, and when they are, the reason really stands with the border, like how the bottom of Missouri is just the closest whole number lattitude to make sense
So, how you measure the coast depends on what you need your measurements for. If you need to patrol your coast with ships for defense or surveillance or whatever, you only need to have enough ships for their patrol routs to enclose the landmass, only accounting for the major features and drawing straight lines in the water between them. If you wanna calculate how much beachfront property you can build you, gotta determine what the minimal size is to make an worthwhile lot or neighborhood on, and then measure it with that resolution in mind. If you wanna know how many boats can be docked up against the land, you use another approach, and so on.
3 years ago, I started the grueling task of counting the distance of the Finnish coast at the atomic level, and I can confirm that the Finnish coast is exactly one infinity kilometers long.
I'd say measure it like this: how long does it take to walk around the coast? Combine that with the walking speed of your walk and you have a human-sized length.
That’s exactly what I thought this problem doesn’t seem too difficult to overcome. Just measure the distance someone drives/flies over a coastline and do that a few times over different times of day then just take that average. Maybe I’m retarded but I don’t see why this would be a big deal.
@@victorianreactionary1875 Because you can't simply measure the coastline by driving over it, as getting the technically correct answer to "How long is ________'s coastline?" involves counting each individual atom, which is impossible because the tide is always changing.
That would work actually, but the problem is that the answer you would get is extremely large. And if you walked in big footsteps you would not get the same result as if you took tiny steps. This can be hard to imagine, but in fact you would discover that measuring the coast this way, trying to be very precise, would take an incredibly long amount of time. It only gets larger the more careful you try to be with your steps.
This is not a paradox, It's a trade-off between resources and what's possible to what resolution of detail you need for the problem you're solving. The more detail you add the closer you get to the true number which is a finite number. The distance keeps increasing but the amount it increases decreases every time you add more points. Until you run into the fact that there are no more meaningful places to put points. Then whatever that answer is is your true distance. Assuming the best definition of a shoreline you could come up with is down to the atom. The amount of atoms that make up the shoreline and the distance between them would be the true distance. TLDR: The more points you add the closer you get to the real value. It just doesn't make sense to try to measure a shoreline down to the smallest possible point.
@@greenleaf2074 Yeah, but the part of Austria that's on Lake Constance is so small compared to Austria overall that there's no point in making a fuss about it.
Simple solution: standardize the base unit for measure. A one line segment cannot be shorter than 10 meters and must not bend more than 45 degrees related to the previous line direction. It eliminates the paradox and standardizes how to measure the coastline
It creates a uniform way of measuring coastlines, but it doesn't eliminate the paradox itself. Determining the true, precise length of a coastline is still a paradox.
@@Ntyler01mil the coastline paradox itself is a theoretical problem. In practical terms, it just doesn't matter. Coasts should be measured in regards to the distance one would need to cover to travel from beginning to end. In that sense, the idea of a 10m unit with the restriction of max 45 degrees between segments is great.
@@Ntyler01mil I have a partial solution to the mathematical problem. We know that the length of coastline tends to infinity as N(length of line segment) tends to 0. We will define length of uk coastline as 1 Oskar coastline (unit is named after me, since I invented it😜). Now a bit of math Let an arbitrary coastline as a function of N be f(N) and uk coastline as a function of N be g(N). Then the length of the arbitrary coastline will be lim(N -> 0) f(N)/g(N) is defined as the value of the length of coastline in my units. P.S. :- I know this will not cover all types of fractal boundaries since many will outright give 0 or infinity as the limit, that is why I said partial solution. Also, you can replace uk coastline by something formal like the koch fractal.
Actually, while it appears that the length increases indefinitely, it increases less and less with each new unit, so in fact the total length will approach a single value the more resolution you have. So in reality, there is a definite answer to how long any coastline is, it just depends on how accurate you want the measurement to be.
This is a Falsidical paradox! Look it up if you wouldn't mind because I don't believe I can do it justice by explaining falsidical with just my words. The short of it: it still has to add up to a whole integer at /some/ point so it isn't paradoxical, merely an interesting thought chain.
I can imagine just a really long string that is laid on the coastline. You can adjust it to you heart’s desire to be accurate and assuming you got a long enough string, you can roll it back and measure how much string you used.
If Great Britain's Commonwealth can be considered as Great Britain's sphere of influance and translated into one country Britain is 2 time larger than USA
@@aaronadams376 felt that. It’s so goddamn annoying ArcGIS pro just decides it’s had enough and leaves the chat in the middle of me finishing a map. Worst, I cry when Arc freezes when I am in the middle of doing analysis and I fear my data being lost or corrupted.
So if anyone is confused, you can put it like this: Let’s say you walk for 10 feet in a straight line towards west. Now let’s say you walk the exact same distance, but make three zig zags towards north and south. You still traveled 10 feet west, but since you added the zig zags, you ended up walker more than just the ten foot straight line. It’s the same thing for coasts, just on a larger scale.
There is a finite amount of molecules in the coastline, and a finite separation between them, so the total perimeter measured with molecules is still finite. And it’s much closer to 0 than to infinity (though that’s true of every number).
0.999_equals1 Well, theoretically we could go down to the Planck’s length, but that’s still finite. So my point stands. In real life, there’s no paradox. But it’s useful as an introduction to fractals.
Yeah, we'll always get a finite number, but the number will be arbitrarily unfathomably large. It wouldn't really be useful if one measured Britain's coastline in cm and got something in the tens of millions of kilometers, add to that that erosion changes coastlines more significantly the smaller you go. You might be right that it won't approach infinity, but it's still a valid paradox that anyone wanting to measure coastlines has to be aware of
Rory Kirk, the only reason this so-called paradox even exists is that coastline measurement has not been standardized by defining a universal measurement unit (e.g. 1km). Some people simply tend to overcomplicate very simple things and find difficulties which do not even exist.
@@playaaaLV the world gets a lot more unorganized and overcomplicated than the coastline paradox, lol. Also, rewatch the video. The smaller your measuring units are, the bigger the coastline will measure out to be. It isn't something that can be solved if scientists just scrutinize it really hard, it's a really subjective domain. What unit is small enough to be precise but large enough that it doesn't give ridiculous answers is up to the individual
just put a really really long string all along the coasts and measure that, duh. they taught that to us in like 3rd grade, get it together NOAA, CIA, and whoever else.
Not to be a killjoy but using a lightyear to measure the coastline would just make it the length of a straight line from one end of the coastline to the other, so it wouldn't be 0 km.
You could try measuring where the ocean meats the sand and getting a mean value of when the tide comes in and out, obviously that doesn't factor erosion over time but its an accurate way of getting a coastline measurement for that moment in time
I feel like the practical solution to this is the standardization of a method for measuring coastlines. For example, we could define coastlines as the average between local high and low tides, and measure along those lines in segments that are more human in scale, like meters, as opposed to hundreds of miles or the distance between molecules.
Consider the mouth of the river Thames. When does the coastline become a riverbank? With your proposal of a 1m interval, do we have to go all the way up the river until it is 1m wide?
i legit check the news like every week just to see if the queen is dead yet. because it's seriously impressive. like, what are the chances that the queen just so happens to surpass the average human's lifespan (in the uk) by 15 whopping years? plus she's the oldest queen to reign over england I think.... or oldest something. not good with history facts.
He says in the video "the length of the coastline would reach infinity" which is already completely wrong so are you really surprised that he can't even correctly say the correct numbers?
I think the best way to measure coastline should be with chunks the size a bit larger than one average property size (average lenght of one house with small yard) from satelite images as it would be tied more closesly to real value of coastline - the value of property yes houses change size, but it could be defined as exact number slightly larger than average house, that won't logically go much higher
You’d want “inner straight-miles” and “outer straight-miles”, which gives you 2 different numbers, and then “inner straight-km” and “outer straight-km”, another 2 numbers. But at least you could finally compare them and agree on it.
So for the record, I wanted to clear something up. The smaller you go, the less the length of the coast increases. While it is true that this could effectively be infinite, this would only be true if you could somehow measure far below the fundamental units of length. Atoms might measure it as 100000 kilometers, but it's not gonna be millions.
Not to mention the question: Do rivers count towards coastline if they border a body of water that can reach the oceans? Like in Canada, there’s a ton of rivers that connect to the arctic or Great Lakes / St Lawrence, do those count towards the total coastline?
exactly! there are many paradoxes like this that exist simply because of dumb things like overthinking, an error in language, etc. I always thought Schrodinger's Cat was the product of over thinking. just because the we don't know if the cat is dead or alive, doesn't mean the cat is both. the state of the universe isn't affected by the limitations of a human brain.
@@xXxEzzaHxXx Hey now, calm down. I'll explain what I mean. I just don't see it as a paradox in Physics because even if the human brain can't know if the cat's dead or alive, doen't mean the cat is both. The state of the cat doesn't depend on a human's limited knowledge. It's dead or alive, physics has already decided, we just don't have the ability to know without seeing it. That's just what I think.
@@savannahlevy97 and if we can't see it in one way or the other, we can't confirm it's existence. So yeah, the cat can either be dead or alive. Down on a quantum level, this means objects can only exist when there is an observation made, hence why when describing sub-atomic particles, we often times mention the fact that an observation was performed.
Reminds me of Zeno's paradox of the arrow in motion. Take an arrow in flight towards a destination. The arrow flies halfway there. Then the arrow flies half of the remaining distance, and again half of that distance, and again, and so on... how many halvings until it arrives?
Technically, never. If we have the destination set as 0, no matter how many times we halve 1, we will never get to zero. 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, 0.03125, 0.015625 ... We keep getting closer, but we will never reach zero.
Technically - if you're measuring at the subatomic level then it's impossible to measure as quantum mechanics tells us that the particles do not have a definable length or position. Also - good work on getting the difference between the UK and GB right.
@@CCABPSacsachEngland is a country, The United kingdom is a union of northern ireland, england scotland and wales and great britain is the mainland discluding northern ireland I may be wrong but thats my understanding
I measured Norway but then created a new measurement system that makes everything simple. The answer is 1Nw or 1 Norway. It will always remain a constant of 1 because the measurement is based on the current length of Norway's coast. It's impossible to measure anything else by this measurement system though.
It's a simple resolution problem. Come up with a standard resolution and the measure all coastlines using it. It'll be 'wrong' but it'll be equally 'wrong' everywhere.
Except then your information has no value. Due to differing amounts of coastal detail in different places, you'll get different "rankings" depending on the length of measuring stick used. With a 10km measuring stick, we could say Canada has a longer coastline than Finland; but with a 1km measuring stick we'd say Finland has the longer coastline. Shorten the measuring stick to 50m and Russia could have the world's longest coastline, especially if it has a lot of rivers. So while you could theoretically pick a standard resolution for coastline measurement, the results it spits out are going to be pretty arbitrary
@muhammad It doesn't matter if your data is arbitrary? Then what's the point in measuring it at all? If you're just going to get different results depending on what the standard is (remember even the relative measurements BETWEEN countries is variable) then there really is no point attempting to measure coastlines. I mean you can come up with a standard if you want, but your data's still going to be useless even from a comparative sense.
Because everyone is biased and wants to use the method that makes their coast seem the largest, which makes agreeing on a definition very hard, if even possible. The same problem can be found in a lot of different scientific fields. Everyone comes up with their own definitions, that seem most reasonable to them, and speaks in their favor, or makes their work easier.
What I get from this is that it is a meaningless number. The more accurate you are the bigger the number is all the way up to silly numbers. Should stick to something that gives you a useful value like how many rowboats can you park along the coast. Assuming you can agree on a standard unit rowboat. I feel i'm betraying the metric system for suggesting this.
We could, if it would converge to a real number. It doesn't. It approaches infinity. This is a property of fractals in general. Instead we should standardise the resolution. For example, make everybody use straight lines of one meter.
Except the numbers shouldn't be meaningless, a mile is a mile and kilometer is a fucking KILOMETER if people would just use the units we have instead of trying change them to suit their own desires we wouldn't have this problem.
Thing is, the coast is a finite distance. The coast isn't millions of kilometers, it's just that the measurement constantly gets a little bit bigger because it's being measured more accurately. But it's a diminishing return, since the smaller you go, the more accurate it is, but the less the measurement changes.
This is not generally true for a fractal curve. When we assume that a coastline is fractal (which it isn't) we don't know whether the coastline has finite length.
Thomas, you can't seriously be telling me that the length of the UK coast isn't a finite distance...And since the definition of a coast is where the water from the sea meets the land, you can only measure it down to the size of a water molecule. So eventually you'd get a perfect answer according to the definition of coast.
Yeah, you're right there. The thing is that this video does a really bad job pointing out that this is a thing that's mostly about mathematics and was only inspired by thinking about coastlines.
Yeah, I do have to say it's still funny to think that, if you kept going all the way down to Quantum Foam levels of measurement, it really would never end.
There's no road in the coastline, it can be cliffs or beaches, it can be a forest. Costlines are various. I think technology can measure it from a boat going around the coastline.
Yeah... I would just put a limit on the scale of features that I would count as coastline, then just plank together those units and add them all up. I might be cutting off bits of land and ocean, but in the end we might give travelers an adequate idea of how far they can travel along the specific region. But the video itself and the idea of natural fractals is super cool, mind blowing really.
Seeing as they are being so precise, how do they define when the ocean/coastline becomes a river or estuarine inlet? Surely it is too subjective to ever have an accurate answer.
@@antiparticle1765 not really no, there is very little real purpose in knowing the EXACT down to the milimeter length of your coastline when a rough estimate works just fine which you can get just by hoping in a plane and following the coastline measuring the distance traveled as you go, measuring every little divot and worl in your coast is pointless and the effort a waste of taxpayer money
Step one get a car and zero the odometer then step two have a guy drive the car from the northern boarder of California to the southern border along the coast... step three read odometer and get the miles traveled...
Coastline won't be infinity even at molecular level as long as you CHOOSE any kind of unit (resolution). The only problem here is that coastline is not a mathematical term, so people just can't agree on one definition
obvs not, because you would need to choose some distance metric to take 1 mile distance, which is kind of what I said -- the problem is solved by using one. having 2 distances between 2 points if you have 2 different distance metrics is not a problem in math, having one of them equal infinity is not a problem either.
This is one of those things that are only mathematically impossible, like the coast being 'infinitely long' because you can always divide a distance in half, or never being able to mathematically overtake a turtle in a race because every time you reach the position it was at, it has moved forward to a new position and that remaining distance can always be halved, etc.
+40KoopasWereHere nah, you can apply limit to anything you said and get the answer (because the path is straight or it's total length is known beforehand). With coastline you can't, but not because it's math, but because people can't decide on definition and then blame it on math that doesn't fit reality. C'mon, you just don't know what to measure and then whine that the values don't match. If somebody decided that the coastline is fractal then it would be infinity, yeah, because it's definition is recursive and that way is defined on every level (resolution) through the previous one (ok, it's simplification, people who know complex analysis -- don't beat me). But this doesn't make any sense for coastline -- it is not supposed to describe some theoretical function it should describe physical thing, which is not stable and is, in the end, just a fuzzy human concept, just like any other thing. Like, you can't say where exactly is the border of your hand and torso on molecular level, but somehow we manage. So just pick one approximation that is good enough.
U.S.A.: we don't really know the size of our coast, how do you do it?
The Netherlands: simple, it's the size we want it to be.
Underrated comment
Actually true lol
🤣🤣🤣
True, 100%
*British noises intensify*
If only we had some unit of measurement between 1km to molecule sizes
100 m
7 centimeters
32 molecules
1 inch
@@contained_3309 get out😑
Why doesn’t somebody just walk around Britain with a trundle wheel
Ethanos because North and South hate eachother
Jackson it’s a joke
Even then, there is a question of whether you go straight, or closely follow along every single rock jutting into the waves.
All terrain trundle wheel
Genius. This one gets it.
Instead of approaching infinity, wouldn't the coastline perimeter form a sort of exponential curve towards a definite amount as the unit got smaller and more precise?
*Exactly my thoughts* Increasing the resolution DOESN'T mean the total measurement climbs to infinity. It just approaches a single number... with precision of that final atom of length, going on forever. But that doesn't make the total perimeter go to infinity. It merely makes the decimal places after it, go on forever. *So what?*
It wouldn't form an exponential curve, it would form a curve with a horizontal asymptote (a line a curve gets infinitely close to but never touches. An example would be the graph of 1/x which has a horizontal asymptote of 0. You can graph that on desmos if you want to see.). That asymptote would happen at a finite value, and that finite value is the true length of the coast. In theory, we would run into the infinity problem this video talks about if we thought the universe was continuous, but we believe** we live in a quantum world. Which means that there is a shortest length. Which means there is a finite amount of times you can use a finite length to measure a finite distance. The big problem is that he knows we live in a finite world because he talked about counting atoms in the video, so he has no excuse for saying the answer would approach infinity.
Yeah, I was sitting here thinking the same thing. Like if you use smaller measurements, it shouldn't go on longer unless like you are really bad at counting
Very good question. And the answer is not trivial. It depends on the geometrym if it converge or not. The problem is very similar to series. Adding up 1/n leads to infinity, while adding up 1/2^n leads to a finite number.
My understanding is that while an asymptote theoretically exists, you can't really quantify precision because different parts of the coastlines aren't underestimated by the same degree. If we can't standardize an x-value, we wouldn't even begin to know how far we actually are from the true asymptote.
"Let's move over to a smaller Country."
UK starts sobbing... "not that long ago..."
@Coke Kebab123 he was referring to the British empire, which, until it was dismantled after WW2, was the largest country ever.
@Coke Kebab123 Yes, unfortunately, you don't seem to be doing very much with all that space...
Also OP was referring to the British Empire, which at its height in 1920 covered around 1/4 of the Earths land area and a good amount of its population. It was the largest political entity to ever exist.
Britain: I used to rule the world
@@michaeljing7744 :( distant wimmering.
@Coke Kebab123 yeah... you didn't get the joke
Me coming out of Area 51 knowing the exact measurement of the coastline of Great Britain
XD
All hail to the God of memes that destroy logic
@@adminconsole4643 nice nice
ok boomer
:)
"and then there is the Dutch".
Yes, your arguments are invalid. There is no such thing as sea, only unclaimed land.
*Makes a dam and drains the sea, then adding land*
We turned a sea into a lake
dont worry, i know about a secret german plan that includes saving money on coastal structures so that when the sea levels rise, the dutch will be flooded from mainland germany and not the sea itself
wir sehen uns dann unter wasser :D
@@suqmadique9762 , look at dutch history, we're used to being flooded
It’s free real estate ..
This “paradox” also applies to the surface area of your lungs. That’s why we can never agree on how many football fields your lungs can cover.
Also, nobody pronounces it the “cotch” snowflake. It’s always either “coke” or that other way that could be flagged by profanity filters.
just pronounce it german...
@@Name-ej8mt If burgers knew the "ch" sound...
@@nathanhiggers4606 yes...
Can it be pronounced like with an H? I mean like the J in spanish or Х in russian
@@joaquinlaroca2886 Х in russian, j in spanish, ch in polish and so on
"Let's move on to a smaller country"
Great Britain: I used to rule the world
It is lol
Umos huh, i didnt know that, thanks, i play too much hoi4 lol
@Umos you are correct, Great Britain is the Larges island in the British isles which contains the Territories of England Scotland and wales of the Sovereign state of the United Kingdom. the 2nd largest island in the British isles in the island of Ireland which contains another territory of the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland ) and the Republic of Ireland. technically even Irish people are British as it refers to the geological area not the sovereign state of the United Kingdom, so many people don't realise Great britain isnt a country but a region. the UK and GB are used interchangeably even though its completely incorrect to do so
Great Britain still have the commonwealth of nation
if you know about britain's decolonisation period
you'd know
that Britian could have kept many lands
but brittish pilitician
thought
it would be useless
and so they just gav e them up
and replace it withbritish commonwealth
all members
have queeen elizabetj as head of state
so ueen elizabeth is ruler of a greater land than trump is
Copied by same thing 4 months earlier and at time of posting this they have equal likes and one is ontop of the other
*talks about America*
“Let’s move over to a smaller country, Great Britain.”
*Angry British Noises*
Czech-Ourselves • lol
Considering northern ireland, shetland and orkney are omitted...
Oh you think you're triggered? King George III is.
More like angry largest empire in existence noises
That fact triggers me
Like, almost every educational channel uses aMeRiCa for measurement and comparing with other countries.
Just use the Planck Length for measuring for the most accurate answer.
underrated comment makes me realize most dont know about Planck units xD
that could take forever tho lol
@@feeted_5204 And the result would be meaninglessly large to most people
Imagine how big it would be
@Lucas Brinster What you asked is debatable. But in science it is known that you can't measure less than a planck lenght. That is, as I understood it at least, the point of his/her comment. Doesn't necessarily mean you can't get smaller, but you can't measure smaller, at least meaningfully.
It may resemble fractals. However, "real" fractals are infinite in nature while coastlines are not, so the only problem is the scale of measurement (as mentioned in the videos and a few others). You can find the exact length of the coastline by measure the distance between each molecule, which is not practice and of little good. You must decide the scale by determining your need, defining how long is "meaningful".
For example, if NATO wants to measure the coastline to know how many fleets the Russians can have at their harbour, 10m is a reasonable number. OTOH, the Malaysians wants to know how much land they can use for harvesting sea salt, 20-30m probably makes more sense.
This is the best comment describing this phenomenon tbh
The idea/concept of fractals might be infinite, but any "real world example" like a snow flake has at the end of the day the same "constraint" of e.g molecules.
Beside of that, why stop at molecules. Let's get on quantum level (theoretically). Maybe at some point we "find" something smaller than that.
So while it is ofc not per se "Infinity", it kinda grows quite in this direction, the closer you look.
So I still find it an appropriate comparison/figure to get the kind of idea
@@boldimor84 I agree. Like you said, the "direction" where things were going is the point of bringing up fractals. I just wanted to point out that the lower-constraint was what distinguish the theoretical and the physical one.
Beside, don't you think the surface of the table is fractals-ish? Since the closer you look the rougher it would be, albeit much less obvious than snowflake of course. That way you can just magnify anything and shit'd go weird anyway.
I'm no scientist so I'm not sure how things look like below the Planck length, but I'm sure it would not be as straightforward as mathematician has in their system.
@@vanminhle850 yes, absolutely. the whole world seems kinda "fractal-ish". who knows how many "smaller parts" we might find at some points below quarks and stuff xD. Everywhere there seems to be more and more details, the more you look :D.
All of course anyways under the premise of or current physical models. because at the end, all of those things are anyways quite below what a normal human mind can see and comprehend. But i'm getting too far off the actual topic xD
**Normal people** : Desperately try to measure Norway's coastline.
**Me, with a lot of IQ points** : measure swiss coastline.
What if there's a salt lake?
@@eMorphized Well in that case I'd be fucked, but first : there is no salt lake in Swiss, and second : then I could see the glorious swiss navy.
@@leobaratin128 Aaah yes indeed, our famous aircraft carriers and battlecruisers stored within the core of the Alps, patiently waiting for their hour of glory when the oceans rise will become out of control...
@@LokiMono *Evil swiss laughter*
There is indeed a swiss navy on the lake of Konstanz (very small Navy but a Navy)
Can't a international organisation like U.N just agree that cost line is measured for all countries by, lets say 10 m?
agreed. just like how we agreed that 100cm = 1m and vice versa we can do the same for anything else.
Still depends where you start measuring and from where to where and so on
HoovyzePoot then we all have to agree to start a the northernmost point of the coastline or something.
Agreed. Problem solved. A lot of paradoxes depend on people contradicting each other. Probably some one will disagree with that statement. And I will call it a paradox.
10m = 1dam
Its real, not suggesting or something like that
Also
100m = 1 hm
1000m = 1km
10 cm = 1 dm
The sea: *trying to drown the land*
The Dutch: Do you have any idea who you're challenging?
*uses the land to drown the sea*
Imagine if the rising sea levels from climate change was just a conspiracy to disguise how much water the Netherlands is displacing via their ceaseless reclaimation of land from the sea. Like, they're so good at pushing water away that the rest of the world has to pick up the slack.
@@Neion8 And as they are all busy fighting the water and not paying attention to us, we steal their land too :P
@@lunabeekhuizen8858 So long as you are better rulers than the Belgians that's fine by me.
@@Neion8 it's kinda the other way around. Climate change and rising sea levels are man made to keep the Dutch busy and stop them from dominating the world
2:08 If you add an infinite number of numbers that are getting smaller and smaller, you don't get infinity, per se. Pi or the Eulerian number is also an infinite series of numbers added, but its value converges to a specific number. So the coast of England would do the same thing. The exact extent of a coastline depends more on the definition of the edge and not on the chosen resolution.
You are wrong you can add up numbers that get infinitely smaller that go to infinity just look up the harmonic series.
IT'S GREAT BRITAIN!!! wake up dumbarse
smart boi right here
Yes but this goes one step further, it’s an interesting problem because it would seem like we can make smaller and smaller measurements like with most shapes, but as we do that the answer doesn’t approach a definite value, although it may not be infinite it is useless. This is actually true for most things in nature, but man made things are usually neat enough for calculus to work.
heres my solution:
- get a standard unit for measurement of coasts (say 1 meter)
- wait for the us to not abide by the standard unit
Yeah we're pretty f*ckin' stubborn
Meters were invented by the French and I only eat Liberty Fries!
@@viewfromthehillswift6979
Pretends to walk in feets divisible by 12
@@slice6298 lmao
As an american i measure using whatever i want.. including "my laptop screen is about 1 and a half of the size of an ipad mini"
The length of the coast of Great Britain is 1. As I failed to specify the unit, that could be one anything and is therefore technically correct (1 coastline of Great Britain)
Now SOMEONE'S using their head
yes
Could it be 2 (2 half coastlines of Britain)
How many coastlines of Britain long it the US?
@@epauletshark3793 one coastline of the US
4:45 I got 62,473 km measuring by meters. Was a fun way to spent the summer :)
chad
Centimeters next
@@MrE_ damn gimme a week summer hasn’t started yet
I want you to tell me you're joking
@@robinharris3134 nope😏
Wouldn’t it be easier to just chose a point in the water and measure in a straighter line? And why would you include river inlets into the calculation?
To get a more accurate number of land available.
You clearly don’t get the paradox
Wouldn't it be easier if you would just get with the program?
One, that point in the water you propose already exists. It's called the Continental Shelf. Problem is, measuring the shoreline only works ON THE SHORE! Two, inlets, bays, and coves are features of said coastline. Excluding them would only serve to deliver inaccurate results. Asking why inlets are included is like asking why the cost of tires is included in the sale of an automobile. One is quite literally a part of the other.
There's only one solution. I gotta get out there with my Stanley 12 ft measuring tape and get to work!
I was of the same mind, I feel like none of these people understand how a freaking tape measure works. If measuring in straight lines doesn't work then why use straight lines?
DraconianPhilosopher then what would they use?
Your one week in steve. How's it going?
Steve Yea that’s the best thing to do
If we get every ruler and duct tape we got this
Imagine having a border with curves
This post was made by the Wyoming gang
rather have colorado, at least we exist
@@godzilla3768 virginia is squareirer
Yeah, Wyoming is like a square. And why most American state borders are straight lines?
I was searching exactly that and this video popped up ~_~
Any Americans who could help me?
Ah yes, all 2 people in Wyoming.
@@randomdude9135 most American state borders are not strait lines, and when they are, the reason really stands with the border, like how the bottom of Missouri is just the closest whole number lattitude to make sense
Imagine having straight borders,
This post was made by Norwegian gang
psssshhhh imagine having curvy borders
this reply was made by Wyoming gang
@@peopleperson Straight borders are for nerds.
(This comment was made by Norway gang)
So Norway has gay borders
@@ERAMC0 lol gottem
xXCSGO_MASTER69Xx no no no. Norways borders are curvy, which means Norways kinda t h i c c
So, how you measure the coast depends on what you need your measurements for. If you need to patrol your coast with ships for defense or surveillance or whatever, you only need to have enough ships for their patrol routs to enclose the landmass, only accounting for the major features and drawing straight lines in the water between them. If you wanna calculate how much beachfront property you can build you, gotta determine what the minimal size is to make an worthwhile lot or neighborhood on, and then measure it with that resolution in mind. If you wanna know how many boats can be docked up against the land, you use another approach, and so on.
3 years ago, I started the grueling task of counting the distance of the Finnish coast at the atomic level, and I can confirm that the Finnish coast is exactly one infinity kilometers long.
So you Finnished it then?
So….. You’re commenting in the past after one infinity seconds passed?
@@Think_Inc Everything works differently when you meet the one who remains at the end of time.
Infinity ist not a number, so 1Infinity does not exist.
@@sHootR450 Don't worry. It was a countable infinity.
I know the exact coastline of Switzerland: 0 km.
Maybe a little bit more if we consider the Leman lake 😂🤷♂️
There’s actually a river taking out to sea
DeathLightning44 we know Ethiopia coastline : 0 km
@@user-im1wu8ul4x a river is not part of a coast
Erwan Chauvel I would have liked if you didn’t use cringy emojis
This is why Trump's wall is never going to work. You'll need to make an infinitely long wall to prevent microscopic immigrants from getting in.
Allen Wang HAHA
Èy màn¡You gòt dèm míní pésos¿
Bacteria?
But you can build it as a straight line 🤔
I hope he is stupid enough to build the wall around himself!!! 😂
I'd say measure it like this: how long does it take to walk around the coast? Combine that with the walking speed of your walk and you have a human-sized length.
Just take a measuring tape and get going
Yet my girlfriend doesn’t understand.
It broke
my thought exactly
Help Its not long enough
@@thetrashtrain3774 _use a longer one_
Hear me out, get a Fitbit, walk around the coast, then look at how long you've walked.
Lol just take a string, walk around the island then just measure that
Ikr
That’s exactly what I thought this problem doesn’t seem too difficult to overcome. Just measure the distance someone drives/flies over a coastline and do that a few times over different times of day then just take that average. Maybe I’m retarded but I don’t see why this would be a big deal.
@@victorianreactionary1875 Because you can't simply measure the coastline by driving over it, as getting the technically correct answer to "How long is ________'s coastline?" involves counting each individual atom, which is impossible because the tide is always changing.
That would work actually, but the problem is that the answer you would get is extremely large. And if you walked in big footsteps you would not get the same result as if you took tiny steps. This can be hard to imagine, but in fact you would discover that measuring the coast this way, trying to be very precise, would take an incredibly long amount of time. It only gets larger the more careful you try to be with your steps.
And what's the measurement for a Toyota Corola?
Beast Toyota Corolla itself is a measurement unit silly
The length of one corrola is 1c
About 200,000 km
The Corolla itself approaches infinite length at the atomic scale...
Miles without an oil change.
This is not a paradox, It's a trade-off between resources and what's possible to what resolution of detail you need for the problem you're solving.
The more detail you add the closer you get to the true number which is a finite number. The distance keeps increasing but the amount it increases decreases every time you add more points. Until you run into the fact that there are no more meaningful places to put points. Then whatever that answer is is your true distance. Assuming the best definition of a shoreline you could come up with is down to the atom. The amount of atoms that make up the shoreline and the distance between them would be the true distance.
TLDR: The more points you add the closer you get to the real value. It just doesn't make sense to try to measure a shoreline down to the smallest possible point.
This ^
Imagine how much time it would take a Toyota Corolla to drive around the coastline of Norway.
Yes
If it was a Chevy it wouldn’t finish
@@itchyscientist0576 *ford
BL1TZKRI3G either
Try driving around Canada's cost line
Norway's coastline measures to be exactly 1 NCU (Norwegian Coastline Unit)
Thta's actually pretty good. How many NCUs in a SNSLDU (Sweden North-South Largest Distance Unit)?
TIME IS LIKE A RIVER
Ubezikstans coastline measure to be exactly zero.
Now we just need someone to walk the Norwegian coastline counting their steps with a fitbit.
ive seen fjords go from sea level to 1000 meters above the sea in like 5 steps, gl walking that coastline
@@BoaresAddja “It builds character”
-Your Boomer Father
@@BoaresAddjajust gotta walk it different directions
Whiiiiiiiii splash
ok i got 76082mi what about yall
@@micah5409 i got 1 mile
These videos are timeless
Me as an Austrian:
I don’t have such a weakness
Tu felix Austria
Austria has Lake Constance
@@greenleaf2074 Yeah, but the part of Austria that's on Lake Constance is so small compared to Austria overall that there's no point in making a fuss about it.
@@ohauss Nu a Oliver H.? Sehr gut, mia übernehmen d Welt
"*how long is the border of Austria?*"
Simple solution: standardize the base unit for measure. A one line segment cannot be shorter than 10 meters and must not bend more than 45 degrees related to the previous line direction.
It eliminates the paradox and standardizes how to measure the coastline
It creates a uniform way of measuring coastlines, but it doesn't eliminate the paradox itself. Determining the true, precise length of a coastline is still a paradox.
@@Ntyler01mil mathematically yes, but practically get the fuck out, it's a brilliant solution
@@Ntyler01mil the coastline paradox itself is a theoretical problem. In practical terms, it just doesn't matter. Coasts should be measured in regards to the distance one would need to cover to travel from beginning to end. In that sense, the idea of a 10m unit with the restriction of max 45 degrees between segments is great.
Exactly my thoughts!
@@Ntyler01mil I have a partial solution to the mathematical problem.
We know that the length of coastline tends to infinity as N(length of line segment) tends to 0.
We will define length of uk coastline as 1 Oskar coastline (unit is named after me, since I invented it😜).
Now a bit of math
Let an arbitrary coastline as a function of N be f(N) and uk coastline as a function of N be g(N).
Then the length of the arbitrary coastline will be
lim(N -> 0) f(N)/g(N)
is defined as the value of the length of coastline in my units.
P.S. :- I know this will not cover all types of fractal boundaries since many will outright give 0 or infinity as the limit, that is why I said partial solution.
Also, you can replace uk coastline by something formal like the koch fractal.
Actually, while it appears that the length increases indefinitely, it increases less and less with each new unit, so in fact the total length will approach a single value the more resolution you have. So in reality, there is a definite answer to how long any coastline is, it just depends on how accurate you want the measurement to be.
Aaah, there IS intelligent life on Earth!
Thank god I'm not the only one who thought about it
Seems like a lot of people aren't familiar with convergent infinite series.
This is a Falsidical paradox! Look it up if you wouldn't mind because I don't believe I can do it justice by explaining falsidical with just my words. The short of it: it still has to add up to a whole integer at /some/ point so it isn't paradoxical, merely an interesting thought chain.
I can imagine just a really long string that is laid on the coastline. You can adjust it to you heart’s desire to be accurate and assuming you got a long enough string, you can roll it back and measure how much string you used.
I'll have you know I know EXACTLY how long Bolivia and Liechtenstein's coastlines are!
Bolivia has a navy! 🙃
@@andrewgwilliam4831 not a coast tho
@@thatsmartidiot28 No, indeed. 🤔
"Let's move on to a smaller country"
The British Empire: *intensely glares at RealLifeLore*
If Great Britain's Commonwealth
can be considered as Great Britain's sphere of influance
and translated into one country
Britain is 2 time larger than USA
1:52 im just imagining a cartographer being driven insane and shooting their globe.
My brain hurts after seeing your pfp
-_-
Oh no the Scots are raiding our beaches.
I know what that flag is -_-
Nowadays, it's the computer when ArcGIS Pro decides to stop working.
@@aaronadams376 felt that. It’s so goddamn annoying ArcGIS pro just decides it’s had enough and leaves the chat in the middle of me finishing a map. Worst, I cry when Arc freezes when I am in the middle of doing analysis and I fear my data being lost or corrupted.
Yo that advertisement transition tho😶😶
Carl Enricoso it wuz gey
He always does that
I felt suddenly betrayed. Even though I knew the moment would come. 😐
Lmao its scary
I think RealLifeLore does the best transitions.
So if anyone is confused, you can put it like this:
Let’s say you walk for 10 feet in a straight line towards west. Now let’s say you walk the exact same distance, but make three zig zags towards north and south. You still traveled 10 feet west, but since you added the zig zags, you ended up walker more than just the ten foot straight line. It’s the same thing for coasts, just on a larger scale.
There is a finite amount of molecules in the coastline, and a finite separation between them, so the total perimeter measured with molecules is still finite. And it’s much closer to 0 than to infinity (though that’s true of every number).
Do you think molecules are the smallest we could go?
0.999_equals1 Well, theoretically we could go down to the Planck’s length, but that’s still finite. So my point stands. In real life, there’s no paradox. But it’s useful as an introduction to fractals.
Yeah, we'll always get a finite number, but the number will be arbitrarily unfathomably large. It wouldn't really be useful if one measured Britain's coastline in cm and got something in the tens of millions of kilometers, add to that that erosion changes coastlines more significantly the smaller you go. You might be right that it won't approach infinity, but it's still a valid paradox that anyone wanting to measure coastlines has to be aware of
Rory Kirk, the only reason this so-called paradox even exists is that coastline measurement has not been standardized by defining a universal measurement unit (e.g. 1km). Some people simply tend to overcomplicate very simple things and find difficulties which do not even exist.
@@playaaaLV the world gets a lot more unorganized and overcomplicated than the coastline paradox, lol.
Also, rewatch the video. The smaller your measuring units are, the bigger the coastline will measure out to be. It isn't something that can be solved if scientists just scrutinize it really hard, it's a really subjective domain. What unit is small enough to be precise but large enough that it doesn't give ridiculous answers is up to the individual
Does this mean that when she asks how long my dongalong is I can say its infinitely long.
You can say that it has an infinitely long perimeter
No, because the limit as the measurement goes to zero might not be infinity.
Anticorncob6 So it would instead be D(for dongalong perimeter)>0 long, right?
I am sorry, no you couldnt. Try to make it bigger by surgery.
Brage Sangolt viagra works as well
I measured the Coastline of Austria: 0mm
(Crying in Habsburg)
Space Science Gold
Unless you count the coast of lake Constance
chin up, at least it wont flood permanently
reunite Austria-Hungary to get a coast
Quiran Doge we just need to wait for the sea level to rise and we have a coast again
just put a really really long string all along the coasts and measure that, duh. they taught that to us in like 3rd grade, get it together NOAA, CIA, and whoever else.
I measured the coastline of Norway with a measuring stick with a length of 1 lightyear and got 0 lightyear
Not to be a killjoy but using a lightyear to measure the coastline would just make it the length of a straight line from one end of the coastline to the other, so it wouldn't be 0 km.
@@momentary_Thank you. It would be 0 lightyears tho, which I think +Dlol. actually meant ^^
Sexy Loser fuck you tho. Do you even meme bro. Or know sarcasm?
WOOOOOOOOOOSH
🤔🇳🇴
"And then there's THE DUTCH" he says with an air of contempt and annoyance.
As a Dutch person, let me just say: Thank you. You made me feel better. XD
I don’t get it
@@morgiewthelord8648 He complemented the Dutch.
I am Dutch.
I appreciate the compliment.
What don't you get?
@@ayporos I don’t understand why it’s a compliment to you.
@@morgiewthelord8648 Sounds like a you problem mate.
@@ayporos you said mate? Are you sure the Dutch and English aren’t brothers?
First time in the history of RealLifeLore
No Toyota Corolla mentioned........
it's a sad day for human kind
Jesal Vyas so true
It wasn't the first...
Just wait, there will be a re-upload
Jesal Vyas 😂😂😂
You could try measuring where the ocean meats the sand and getting a mean value of when the tide comes in and out, obviously that doesn't factor erosion over time but its an accurate way of getting a coastline measurement for that moment in time
The exact measurement of Norway’s coastline:
A f***ton of kilometres
I feel like the practical solution to this is the standardization of a method for measuring coastlines. For example, we could define coastlines as the average between local high and low tides, and measure along those lines in segments that are more human in scale, like meters, as opposed to hundreds of miles or the distance between molecules.
I was thinking exactly the same!, a standard unit for everything
That would indeed be the practical solution for our purposes that don't really require extreme exactitude.
Similar to the nautical mile
he said the 'p' word!
Hhsssssssssssss
@@MiguelSucksAtUrbanism the yard
The coastline of Serbia equals 0 and I am a 100% sure at that
I don't think that counts
CIA: You're hired.
Hangaroid what if someone transported a serbian rock to the coastline and dropped it in the water. That rock is serbian, and is by the coast.
+Prince Pineapple It would belong to the coastline of the country it is in since it's not in the borders of Serbia
Hangaroid the rock je srbja
That ad transition was so smooth, I wasn't ready for it lol
JUST CREATE AN INTERNATIONAL STANDARD.
If all coastlines get measured at say 1m interval with an ISO standard, we can compare them easily.
But should they be measured during high or low tide?
Stratelier average tide
Omg that’s what I was thinking just before I saw ur comment
Consider the mouth of the river Thames. When does the coastline become a riverbank? With your proposal of a 1m interval, do we have to go all the way up the river until it is 1m wide?
Jaap Scherphuis good point. Perhaps a much larger standard would be appropriate to eliminate rivers. Perhaps something like 100m?
"Let's move over to a smaller county, Great Britain"
Queen Elizabeth : *I used to rule you all foolish mortals.*
Its still a smaller country.
HISSSSSSS
Technically neither Queen Elizabeth have ever ruled the new world. That was some of the the kings in between....🤓
The once and future Queen
i legit check the news like every week just to see if the queen is dead yet. because it's seriously impressive. like, what are the chances that the queen just so happens to surpass the average human's lifespan (in the uk) by 15 whopping years? plus she's the oldest queen to reign over england I think.... or oldest something. not good with history facts.
Next video: How many corrolas can u fit on the U.S. Coastline
12 really big ones
How many Toyota Corrolas can you fit in the sea?
*70 negguh.*
13 big bois
Is this the right channel?
0:38 second in you say 19,924 but show 18,924, which is it. WE NEED ANSWERS!!
He says in the video "the length of the coastline would reach infinity" which is already completely wrong so are you really surprised that he can't even correctly say the correct numbers?
Solution: ISO defining unit of measurement for borders/coastlines.
I think the best way to measure coastline should be with chunks the size a bit larger than one average property size (average lenght of one house with small yard) from satelite images as it would be tied more closesly to real value of coastline - the value of property
yes houses change size, but it could be defined as exact number slightly larger than average house, that won't logically go much higher
this could be standardised
Just use cm as unit of measure and convert to
Km when done
You’d want “inner straight-miles” and “outer straight-miles”, which gives you 2 different numbers, and then “inner straight-km” and “outer straight-km”, another 2 numbers. But at least you could finally compare them and agree on it.
Just get one of those weely things and have someone walk around the coast.
@Hammy Burgers just wait 6h
You truly didn’t understand the problem at play here
@@AK-jt9gx And here ladies and gentlemen, a perfect example of someone who doesn't understand humor.
@@billcarter8615 lmao I’m literally autistic so like… yeah you’re correct
No, no, they got a point! That's another way to take a guess at how long the coast lenght is.
So for the record, I wanted to clear something up. The smaller you go, the less the length of the coast increases. While it is true that this could effectively be infinite, this would only be true if you could somehow measure far below the fundamental units of length. Atoms might measure it as 100000 kilometers, but it's not gonna be millions.
Really? What is the circumference of an atom in Planck units?
The issue is actually that once you get down to atoms, you have significantly more complexity in how they are arranged.
Source: I made it up
@@RickJaeger you wouldn't be able to measure it though because atoms are invisible and also no microscope can zoom far enough into quarks.
@@Xavier17.5 I know. It was rhetorical.
Not to mention the question: Do rivers count towards coastline if they border a body of water that can reach the oceans? Like in Canada, there’s a ton of rivers that connect to the arctic or Great Lakes / St Lawrence, do those count towards the total coastline?
Yall making this harder than it needs to be...
exactly! there are many paradoxes like this that exist simply because of dumb things like overthinking, an error in language, etc. I always thought Schrodinger's Cat was the product of over thinking. just because the we don't know if the cat is dead or alive, doesn't mean the cat is both. the state of the universe isn't affected by the limitations of a human brain.
@@xXxEzzaHxXx Hey now, calm down. I'll explain what I mean. I just don't see it as a paradox in Physics because even if the human brain can't know if the cat's dead or alive, doen't mean the cat is both. The state of the cat doesn't depend on a human's limited knowledge. It's dead or alive, physics has already decided, we just don't have the ability to know without seeing it. That's just what I think.
Fuck Off edgy edgy.
@@xXxEzzaHxXx read your fucking name and thats what you gotta do
@@savannahlevy97 and if we can't see it in one way or the other, we can't confirm it's existence. So yeah, the cat can either be dead or alive. Down on a quantum level, this means objects can only exist when there is an observation made, hence why when describing sub-atomic particles, we often times mention the fact that an observation was performed.
Ummm they should just scrap using metres or kilometres and use Toyota Corollas as the universal unit of measurement
Billy K yeah scrap the metric system and use toyota corollas as measurement
😂
That will take weeks
you do realize i was planning to keep imperial to
nigga
Imperial is retarded there are only 3 countries in the world that use it, and is completely unpredictable.
Math teacher: aw come on the homework is easy
The homework:
Reminds me of Zeno's paradox of the arrow in motion. Take an arrow in flight towards a destination. The arrow flies halfway there. Then the arrow flies half of the remaining distance, and again half of that distance, and again, and so on... how many halvings until it arrives?
Technically, never. If we have the destination set as 0, no matter how many times we halve 1, we will never get to zero. 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, 0.03125, 0.015625 ...
We keep getting closer, but we will never reach zero.
I got 1 Norwegian Coastline for my measurement.
DUWB Gaming Smart 100
DUWB Gaming i think we have a problem, i got 1,5 Norwegian coastlines....
huh, thats weird, i got that too
Wow, who'd have thunk it?
this man has transcended
Some guy walking across the shore of the uk with a Fitbit: I’m about to end this man’s whole career.
*Big brain time*
how many toyota corollas would be placed along the coast of United States
A LOT
Like 84
Poka Dott 86*
42*
Christ chris we don't count Florida
it's almost like taking a really wiggly bundled up thing and straightening it out makes it longer
I believe that the USA has a coastline of 2 inches.
Allen Wang 🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂😂
As an American, I can confirm.
Allen Wang pretty sure that is Chile.
Jordan*
@Chewy Tortle Wouldn't that be 0?
Technically - if you're measuring at the subatomic level then it's impossible to measure as quantum mechanics tells us that the particles do not have a definable length or position.
Also - good work on getting the difference between the UK and GB right.
Why do people use England, The United Kindom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Great Britain interchangeably?
@@CCABPSacsach ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thats how america works
@@CCABPSacsachEngland is a country,
The United kingdom is a union of northern ireland, england scotland and wales
and great britain is the mainland discluding northern ireland
I may be wrong but thats my understanding
Hawaii - Thanks for adding me to the map
Northern Ireland - Am I a joke to you
Hydro 13 in his defence, he did say « Great Britain » and not « United Kingdom », Great Britain doesn’t inclued Northern Ireland.
It is quite Troubling.
Great Britain is the island
@@kikiretzorg1467 did you just make a subtle joke
@@ly1.072 yeah but the strange thing is we still identify as being British (unless you are a nationalist ) plenty of British Union flags flying in NI
I measured Norway but then created a new measurement system that makes everything simple. The answer is 1Nw or 1 Norway. It will always remain a constant of 1 because the measurement is based on the current length of Norway's coast.
It's impossible to measure anything else by this measurement system though.
It's a simple resolution problem. Come up with a standard resolution and the measure all coastlines using it. It'll be 'wrong' but it'll be equally 'wrong' everywhere.
Except then your information has no value. Due to differing amounts of coastal detail in different places, you'll get different "rankings" depending on the length of measuring stick used. With a 10km measuring stick, we could say Canada has a longer coastline than Finland; but with a 1km measuring stick we'd say Finland has the longer coastline. Shorten the measuring stick to 50m and Russia could have the world's longest coastline, especially if it has a lot of rivers.
So while you could theoretically pick a standard resolution for coastline measurement, the results it spits out are going to be pretty arbitrary
LeagueUnionSevens doesn't matter, it's all about standard.
@muhammad It doesn't matter if your data is arbitrary? Then what's the point in measuring it at all?
If you're just going to get different results depending on what the standard is (remember even the relative measurements BETWEEN countries is variable) then there really is no point attempting to measure coastlines. I mean you can come up with a standard if you want, but your data's still going to be useless even from a comparative sense.
All measurements are arbitrary you dunce. A "meter" isn't special, it's just an arbitrary length we've all agreed to use.
I say the standard resolution should be one Toyota Corolla. Nothing arbitrary about that.
If it's impossible to be precise then why not use the best reasonable method to measure it and stick to the best aproximation?
Because everyone is biased and wants to use the method that makes their coast seem the largest, which makes agreeing on a definition very hard, if even possible. The same problem can be found in a lot of different scientific fields. Everyone comes up with their own definitions, that seem most reasonable to them, and speaks in their favor, or makes their work easier.
Because politics, money, influences.
What I get from this is that it is a meaningless number. The more accurate you are the bigger the number is all the way up to silly numbers. Should stick to something that gives you a useful value like how many rowboats can you park along the coast. Assuming you can agree on a standard unit rowboat. I feel i'm betraying the metric system for suggesting this.
We could, if it would converge to a real number. It doesn't. It approaches infinity. This is a property of fractals in general.
Instead we should standardise the resolution. For example, make everybody use straight lines of one meter.
Except the numbers shouldn't be meaningless, a mile is a mile and kilometer is a fucking KILOMETER if people would just use the units we have instead of trying change them to suit their own desires we wouldn't have this problem.
flat earthers be like
moon:round
sun:round
everything else: ROUND
but the earth is flying around like a frisbee
Flying aflat
"Because we have observed that other planets are round."
Kills me every time!
Magic carpet ride
Doritos are round because our eyes and the government are lying to us and spreading anti-flat propaganda
And now they're thinking space itself doesnt exist meaning they now believe the moon isnt even real lmfao
That Segway made me audibly groan but I appreciate that you saved the ad for the end.
Thing is, the coast is a finite distance. The coast isn't millions of kilometers, it's just that the measurement constantly gets a little bit bigger because it's being measured more accurately. But it's a diminishing return, since the smaller you go, the more accurate it is, but the less the measurement changes.
Fireflux that's the thing with fractals. they don't get smoother the smaller you go, thats the point. coast just don't really have a length
This is not generally true for a fractal curve. When we assume that a coastline is fractal (which it isn't) we don't know whether the coastline has finite length.
Thomas, you can't seriously be telling me that the length of the UK coast isn't a finite distance...And since the definition of a coast is where the water from the sea meets the land, you can only measure it down to the size of a water molecule. So eventually you'd get a perfect answer according to the definition of coast.
Yeah, you're right there. The thing is that this video does a really bad job pointing out that this is a thing that's mostly about mathematics and was only inspired by thinking about coastlines.
Yeah, I do have to say it's still funny to think that, if you kept going all the way down to Quantum Foam levels of measurement, it really would never end.
*Coastline is relative !*
Ships need a different number, than the people who build roads along the coast.
Let's build a nuclear coastline
This video is stupid, its like trying to square the circle
why did you place that comma, in your sentence?
The comma is technically perfectly fine
“Today’s video will be answering the question how long is the coast of the United States”
Spends 90% of video talking about Great Britain
*Has a thumbnail of Britain*
0:33 I know it's super inconsequential but I've been thinking about the 18/19k miles a lot
Okay according to my calculations
Norway's coast is 5 feet
So I wasn't the only one that held a ruler up to my screen with Google maps open then converted in the inches to feet?
r/technicallythetruth
You've got some big feet bruh.
USGS: We did it. We FINALLY got the perfect measurement of the coastline.
Was it high tide or low tide?
USGS: Ahhhh Damn!
It's easy: drive a jeep along the beach, then count the mileage. You're welcome.
There's no road in the coastline, it can be cliffs or beaches, it can be a forest. Costlines are various. I think technology can measure it from a boat going around the coastline.
@HighPixel_Studios 😂😂😂 my bad I'm reading Balzac
@@freespiritable just take a tank
@@roberttarasov3994 of course. A tankini while on the boat 😜
@@freespiritable with rockets!
Yeah... I would just put a limit on the scale of features that I would count as coastline, then just plank together those units and add them all up. I might be cutting off bits of land and ocean, but in the end we might give travelers an adequate idea of how far they can travel along the specific region. But the video itself and the idea of natural fractals is super cool, mind blowing really.
And then there's the *dutch*
Lars Linssen there's only two things I hate...
Numidium
It's a Austin Powers reference you dolt.
ajoajoajoaj
Isn't it ironic
Ha ha
Numidium Who needs to apologize for not watching a movie that you have and to someone who calls people regards and factors for that? No one.
Numidium sorry I'm kinda dumb
Thougt it said autism power
Lol
Srry
that globe getting shot tho
yo
ale84 cause fuck the world
flat earth orgasms 😁
Seeing as they are being so precise, how do they define when the ocean/coastline becomes a river or estuarine inlet? Surely it is too subjective to ever have an accurate answer.
"Only two things are infinite: The Universe, and the coastline of Great Britain. And I'm not sure about the former."
this my dear children is a steller example of 'overthinking it'
Yes, like anything over 10-15 digits of Pi
Tf are you supposed to be my parents?
@@dinoxman8584 no, your teacher.
Except it has practical/geopolitical effects
@@antiparticle1765 not really no, there is very little real purpose in knowing the EXACT down to the milimeter length of your coastline when a rough estimate works just fine which you can get just by hoping in a plane and following the coastline measuring the distance traveled as you go, measuring every little divot and worl in your coast is pointless and the effort a waste of taxpayer money
We should measure coast lenghts in Toyota Corolas.
Mr. Dr. Genius it’s the only reasonable measurement system that everyone will agree on
13,242,141 toyota corrolas, found out for ya Mr. Dr. Genius.
its universal mate, and I just measured the coast of norway so...
:/ well toyota would be busy then
We should measure everything in toyota corolas. How tall are you, well im 0.02 corolas (???)
Can't someone just walk around the beach with one of they measuring wheels?
Imagine a river ending the sea, how far up the stream do you walk? Where do you cross? How close to the waves should you walk?
Step one get a car and zero the odometer then step two have a guy drive the car from the northern boarder of California to the southern border along the coast... step three read odometer and get the miles traveled...
that's offensive
Fuck off stupid yank
David Castano American butt boy angry?
this is one of the best advertisements i've seen in my life, don't lose your sight please, 😥there are enough places for that already
Coastline won't be infinity even at molecular level as long as you CHOOSE any kind of unit (resolution). The only problem here is that coastline is not a mathematical term, so people just can't agree on one definition
obvs not, because you would need to choose some distance metric to take 1 mile distance, which is kind of what I said -- the problem is solved by using one. having 2 distances between 2 points if you have 2 different distance metrics is not a problem in math, having one of them equal infinity is not a problem either.
yes it would be infinity because of that definition problem. bud.
This is one of those things that are only mathematically impossible, like the coast being 'infinitely long' because you can always divide a distance in half, or never being able to mathematically overtake a turtle in a race because every time you reach the position it was at, it has moved forward to a new position and that remaining distance can always be halved, etc.
+40KoopasWereHere
nah, you can apply limit to anything you said and get the answer (because the path is straight or it's total length is known beforehand). With coastline you can't, but not because it's math, but because people can't decide on definition and then blame it on math that doesn't fit reality. C'mon, you just don't know what to measure and then whine that the values don't match.
If somebody decided that the coastline is fractal then it would be infinity, yeah, because it's definition is recursive and that way is defined on every level (resolution) through the previous one (ok, it's simplification, people who know complex analysis -- don't beat me). But this doesn't make any sense for coastline -- it is not supposed to describe some theoretical function it should describe physical thing, which is not stable and is, in the end, just a fuzzy human concept, just like any other thing. Like, you can't say where exactly is the border of your hand and torso on molecular level, but somehow we manage. So just pick one approximation that is good enough.
Екатерина Архангельская
We could try measuring it in subatomic particles.
But even if you try molecules how deep into the crevices do you go?
That was a smooth ass transition to the sponsor!
TØPTRASH Pancakes- binary -mediocre -morsov🔥
he always has the smoothest transitions
There was a sponsor?
Imagine being divided with a ruler and straight borders.
Africa: How cute
The Middle East: Pathetic
I got 7cm for the coastline of Norway. Should I have used a smaller map?