We Are But A Speck!

A colorful world map adorns our living room. You may have seen it in the background of some of the pictures on past blogs. Our family spends a lot of time looking at this map, dreaming of places to visit.

While staring at it, I imagined our boat making its way down the coast of the USA on our journey to see the world. Mentally tracing our progress, I began to wonder just how big we would be on this map.

Our boat is 32 feet long. The Earth's equator is 131,480,184 feet all the way around. Our boat, therefore, is 0.000024 % of the Earth's equator!

Another way to appreciate the magnitude would be to consider this: we would have to place 4 million, 108 thousand, 756 Gemini 3200 catamarans end to end to equal the distance around the Earth. That's a lot of boats!

Back to the original question, how big would we be on the map?

The map is 3 feet across, and factoring in a bit of the overlap that occurs on the map (e.g. a flat map depicting a near spherical shape with each side having some duplication of landmasses like Alaska), we are looking at about 30 inches of an equator on our map.

That means our boat, on the map, will be 0.000024% of 30 inches. Or, 0.0000072 inches!!! That is smaller than the diameter of a human hair!

Quite a small boat .... we are but a speck!