The coastline paradox: how India's coast grew by 3,500 km

Transcript

There's something called the Coastline paradox and it's going to change the way you look at 2026. Hear me out. India's Coastline got about 3 and a half thousand kilometers longer recently and all anyone did was just measure it again. So how does the Coast get longer without moving at all? For decades the official number was about 7500 kilometers and from a measurement done around 1970. Then they measured again recently with much more detailed maps and it came out at over 11000. The Coast is exactly where it was so the only thing that changed is how closely they looked. And this is actually a famous puzzle called the Coastline paradox. If your ruler is 100 kilometers long you skip right over every bay and every rock but if your ruler is 1 kilometers long you go in and out of all of those little curves. So the number gets bigger. A British scientist ran into this while he was studying war. He wanted to know if countries with longer borders fought more wars. And he found that Spain and Portugal couldn't even agree on their own border. One said it was about 987 kilometers and the other said it was about more than 1200. It was the same border just measured with different rulers and the smaller your ruler gets the longer the coast gets because there's always a smaller curve to follow. Now think about the end of December this year. You're in bed late at night scrolling through everyone's year in review course and everybody seems to have had trips and promotions and you will feel like you probably did nothing this year. I think that's because we measure our own lives with a really big ruler. You look back and you can count maybe two or three big things but try a smaller ruler. Count every conversation where you help someone and every day you showed up when you didn't want to. That number would be enormous. So measure this year again with a smaller ruler and watch how long it gets.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.