Its a Small World

Hello all. Who's ever felt alone? Most of you I guess. As the fantastic TV show known as scrubs states, humans aren't meant to be alone. But are we alone really? Through social networks, interpersonal connections and families we are all connected to one vast web of humanity, all 7 billion of us!

But the shocking part about this is how close you are in this web to everyone else, you are most likely only a couple of people apart from a scrap dealer in Beijing, or a banker in Vermont.

There was a massive hype about this a while back, during which it became known as the "six degrees of separation" or the idea that any two people on this planet, statistically should be able to be connected through a maximum of 6 different people.

But how accurate is this? How about we think about Twitter, if on twitter we assume that every person followed by someone has at least 50 people that the person looking does not have, then after 6 people we would arrive at 50 to the power of 6 people which is in fact 15625000000 people! Or to put in simpler terms, 15.625 Billion people!!! Which is double the number of people on Earth at this moment. Even if we settled for 45 we would still arrive at over 8 Billion, and still more than today.

Now I know what you're thinking, this is a bit far fetched, not every person has 50 people I don't know and there's no way that it could be that simple, besides this is a bit groundless so far. Well back in May of 2011 Facebook studied this phenomenon itself and what they found is pretty damn remarkable. On Facebook back in 2011 there is an average of 3.74 degrees of separation between 2 people! So not only is there solid evidence for this theory, there is solid evidence that it is in fact, decreasing and that the world is becoming more connected.

What Facebook did not account for however is that not everyone has Facebook and that people also use different means of communication. One person is increasingly likely to be signed up to different social networks and are likely to have different friends who are different types of people on these social networks. Although I could not find any research that managed to incorporate this effect, and the effect of our real life friends and family aswell, the only possible effect would be that it would further decrease the degrees of separation.

So there you all have it. Not only are we never truly alone, we are never truly disconnected, so next time you feel alone or insignificant just remember that you're most likely only a few people away from your hero, the person you might marry, the creator of pikachu and myself!

This world is full of wonders, one of them is you, and the others are a lot closer than you realise.

(also shoutout to Amy)

For any of you who are interested I'll post the link to the video I watched below, as well as a website which allows you to map degrees of separation specifically from Kevin Bacon's acting career. and as always, thanks for reading guys :)

http://9gag.com/tv/p/aM8jxR/the-science-of-six-degrees-of-separation

https://oracleofbacon.org/