How Long Would It Take To Walk Around The World?

Christian explains what goes into calculating how long it would take to traverse the globe on foot, and tells us about some intrepid explorers who've tried to do it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
this is Christian Sega. Have you ever wondered how long
it would take you to walk around the world, Well,
here's the facts. There are a lot of ways to
answer this question. The simplest way to think about it, though,
begins with the circumference of the Earth being twenty four thousand,

(00:26):
nine and one miles at the equator, or seventy 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 three point one miles per hour,

(00:49):
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 a 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

(01:11):
hundred and thirty four three hundred and thirty five days.
It's not too bad. You got the entire planet in
less than a year. But of course, nobody could actually
walk without stopping for three d 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

(01:32):
you resume your walk. Then it would take you about
five hundred and two days. Now an interesting side note here.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the fastest
growing species of bamboo can grow up to nine centimeters
or thirty five inches per day. In the time it
took you to make your five hundred two day trip

(01:53):
around the world, this bamboo could grow seventeen thousand, five
hundred and seventy inches or a thousand, four hundred and
sixty four feet, And 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 per day,

(02:15):
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

(02:38):
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

(02:59):
at a time. 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

(03:20):
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,

(03:42):
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

(04:04):
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

(04:26):
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 John and a mule named

(04:49):
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 Wassaca 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

(05:11):
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

(05:31):
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 you go. It

(05:52):
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. Check out the brainstuff channel on YouTube,
and for more on this and thousands of other topics,

(06:14):
visit how stuff works dot com.