Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjsweet | Hacker News Reader

I loved the final question in the article:

“The question now is: who will be the first to make these journeys, when, and how?”

These have the potential to become quite important journeys... with the potential for many “firsts”... and also much contention; how much did they deviate from the path, how much deviation from the path is acceptable?

So many interesting questions to ask.

View on HN

That final question struck me as odd, the next question for my mind was could the technique be generalised to a map on a torus?

Same here, that’s what I thought as well :-) I’m sure that the big documentary channels will pick this up and we’ll see both journeys in a few years. Seems to me that the land journey will be harder to complete. When you’re sailing it’s easy to keep a “straight line” without having to consider mountains, rivers, permissions, politics and any other obstacles associated with crossing land.

It won't be easy to sail in anything resembling a straight line through the Drake Passage unless your ship is very big.

Speaking of big ships, you might also want to avoid icebergs.

Yeah I was thinking about how hard it would be to stay “true” to the path as possible if a race or challenge was by wind power only. Also in competition, points could be given or taken based on the amount of deviation from the line etc.

For the land route a realistic approach would be to plot major checkpoints along the true great circle path and just navigate between those checkpoints in whatever way (preferably on land) is most feasible. That would still be interesting.

“The question now is: who will be the first to make these journeys, when, and how?”

I wouldn't volunteer for the water journey any time soon considering you're basically launching into a pirate haven.

Non stop circumnavigations have already been done.

For example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfried_Erdmann

Can you clarify this comment, how is circumnavigation relevant to this considerably different journey / path?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com