Why Nobody Knows the World’s Longest River 

That needs to be common knowledge

It says here that... Experts couldn't find the true source of the Nile. Hah, classic Hammond

Real question is which one of them was the first to claim it..

The comment I was always looking for

@@lukesheffield1378 May, he dipped his finger in it first. Although Clarkson might have been the first to dip something else.

Lol

Tr

he literally made the same exact video 3 years ago

Why couldn’t the Africans living there find the source? Why did Europeans have to do it?

@@grandtheftavocado Was there a motivation for them to do so?

Aussie mate

Elementary school: The Nile River is the world's longest river! RealLifeLore: Are you sure about that mate? Me: Yeah....since I'm not currently in a mental institution....I'm sure. ¬_¬

@@West_Kagle

sure what I learned in middle school Nile is longest and Amazon is largest even when a nerd ask about Amazon tributary and say Amazon look longer geography teacher discuss same things that real life lore mentioned where want to start and end and the funny thing that was 25 years ago for me and still no one agrees

US elementary school* the world is way bigger than just one country's school system :P

The lake shouldn't even be included either because it's a lake and therefore not the river. It's merely the source of it but not where it starts. It should be measured from the mouth and triviaries don't make sense to include either if we refer to them as entirely differently named rivers. I don't get why this is complex either lol

@@lunaloveless7234 The fact that a part of the river has a different name doesn't mean its not the same river. That is a horrible argument. There are streets in my city that change names randomly, but the street still goes in the same directions and has the same number of lanes. It doesn't become a different street just because the name changes. Excluding a portion of a river just because some people decided to call it something else makes no sense. You pretty much just displayed why it's complex in your own inability to see the flaws in your own statement.

@@bh_quicksilver251 lets say your streetruns thru a park and is a diff name on the other side, diff # on houses. It would not be the same street. U cant take a tributary river that runs into lake victoria and make it count as the Nile. The nile starts at the mouth of the lake. The lake is lake victoria not the nile river. Anyway u calculate it: the Amazon wins.

The ONLY thing that makes sence is to add the longest tributary rivers to it. Why are you comparing rivers to streets, its not the same. The whole point of measuring river lengths is to know the distance the water travels across the land. It's RETARDED to cut the measurement short just because certain parts of the river were discovered by different people at different time and therefore are named differently. Naming has nothing to do with actual geography of earth, naming different parts of a water stream differently doesn't fucking change it's length.

Thank you, this is exactly what I thought as well. Going in the middle results in theoretical infinity, but going with practical route (it has practical use because it's what you'd want to approach with a boat if you wanted to travel the shortest possible distance) results in a non-arbitrary, finite length.

The three types of measurement: The Metric, The Imperial, *and the Toyota Corolla*

I don’t think RLL has done Toyota Corolla references for a while now but should bring them back

@@Chrono_topher lol

how about football fields

"2,176 Toyota Corollas, in fact..."

Ngl the Brits use Lake Victoria coastline as part of Nile River is pure cheating

😂

lol

Things are heating up in the Potamology community

Me too

Yeah, that seems pretty easy, but which tributary do I start first? For an instance, take the Nile, do I follow the While Nile or the Blue Nile? Or, or, or, do I start from Alexandria (mouth of the Nile) and then reach Khartoum (where the Nile divides into Blue and White) and then add both the White Nile and Blue Nile distances to the distance from Alexandria to Khartoum??? Huh, pretty sick.

@@mk_57 I think OP is more pointing out that a simple river with curves and no tributaries can still be accurately measured without measuring with small straight lines, which makes the infinity argument in this video factually incorrect.

what about the waterfalls?

Step 4: Pay the boat owner by the hour.

It be great if there was such a thing as an odometer that worked on a boat. Some boats may have a speedometer and possibly an instrument to measure hours of engine use, but I've never seen an odometer that worked on water. These days we use a GPS to measure distance travelled on water; before - in the olden days before GPS was readily available - we used maps and made our best guess. I'd love to have a mechanical way to measure boating distance 🙂

. LMMFAO 😂

😀😀😀....

Only by a couple of seconds but yes. Captain Slow managed to outpace the feeble Orangutan and the Midget

ah, a man of Culture! Great to see you here

A true man of science

he literally made the same exact video 3 years ago

Giggity

Such a wise words man Perfectly going to implement it in my life

I’m just a mexican stoner trying to make it out the hood by doing storytimes & reaction videos

Its not about how long it is, its about how prosperous is that civilization on its banks

HAAHHAHAHA

But there is. Did you not pay attention? Using centimeters allows you to follow the river and always be centered in the river, using kilometers sometimes allows you to be in the river, sometimes jumping over land because it can only be so curved and still measured accurately. Using a different scale greatly changes how long a river is as well as makes way for the country border paradox the narrator also mentioned. Theoretically this problem becomes more and more of an issue the smaller your scale is / despite a smaller scale being more closely accurate.

@@TJ-im5kp, plus, where is the center. Do you measure it down to 100 meters, 50, 10, 1? What is 1 meter is too much? Let's try a centimeter, a millimeter, or a nanometer

The only problem with this is that for practical purposes, measuring the shortest distance possible would be misleading for boats that have to travel the river and want to know the distance they have to travel.

@@Doublemonk0506 What? That doesn't matter because meters are universally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second. A centimeter, milimeter, or nanometer's definitions are derived from the definition of a meter. You will get the same result regardless of metric.

That part annoyed me as well. All that using a shorter measurement does is increase the accuracy of the measurement. It’s basic calculus. As you use an infinitesimally small unit of measurement, the length of the river absolutely does NOT go to infinity. It goes toward a limit, which would be the distance of the river. That part of this video was incredibly inaccurate. The longest river is very easy to calculate. Just use the longest path from source to delta. It doesn’t matter the nomenclature of the river. If the river split and rejoins, use the longest of the splits.

Yeah, the pronunciation of Itasca made me cringe a bit.

Fellow Minnesotan! I was about to comment the same thing here!

nobody cares

Yeah this video loses a lot of credit for this argument. The measurement will converge to a specific value, aka, the correct value.

Just a guess off the top of my head, but I'd say linear algebra could help you find the equation of the line the river makes in slope intercept form, and then you could use good ole fashioned calculus to find the length of the curve.

What he said is the literal description of a line integral too

I looked in the comments specifically to see if anybody else picked up on this

*Decreasing the fractal size increases the length of the river logarithmicly, not to infinity. Once you reduce your measuring size to "continuous", using euler's number will find the true maximum size.* The reason why countries dont have continuous measurement of their coastline is that it's impossible to achieve practically.

😂😂😂

As long as it isn't the metric system

"How many Texas's does it take to measure a cell margin of the sun?"

Or you could use Texas Also what’s the plural form of Texas?

@@therealspeedwagon1451 my guess would be Texes

I was thinking the same thing. If a little peninsula of land sticks out two feet on the coast, and you had to follow the coast, you would walk right two feet and then left two feet. But if you're cruising down the center of the river, you just float past it. I would think a realistic measurement is just go in a boat that stays more or less centered between coastlines.

If you measure a river by going exactly in the middle (which can also be wildly subjective), it's basically just taking a position based on two shorelines, which actually ends up being infinite just like the two shorelines are. "More or less centered" is not a valid option, because then you'd be arbitrarily deciding what is centered enough and what is not. However, there is a much more sensible way of measuring a river. Just ignore where the middle would be, and instead imagine that you are driving a boat that's infinitely small and has an infinitely small turning radius. Then just take the shortest possible route with that boat along what you think is the longest possible version of the river, and you get a finite distance that would IMO be a fair way to measure a river. Yeah, it would cut some corners a bit compared to just going in the middle, but it's actually a non-arbitrary way of getting a finite length, and it's even realistic, being based on what you'd want to realistically do if you wanted to go along the river as fast as possible. You of course can't do this to a shoreline without arbitrary measurement choices.

Yeah. That bugged me. Coasts do have that problem, somewhat. It still doesn't get to infinity, but it does get kind of fractal (does the surface of a fjord count? If so do the inlets in the rock of the fjord, the holes in those, the cracks, the ridges in the rock?). River length is a vaguely similar problem, but it doesn't reduce that much since it is a fluid that is a ultimately all the same

The problem is that the length series does not converge for fractals.

@@jolez_4869 Rivers are not actually fractals tho despite what this video implies.

That statement by RLL was infinitely stupid. Just because something is measured using infinitesimally small units does not make it infinitely long.

I aswell don't really buy the fractal argument either. The problem is that the definition of length for rivers is way too vague for any actual measurement to have a precision of more than around, I don't know, say, 10^1-10^2 meters even if some idealized models of rivers were fractals. But if you do have a mathematical fractal, calculus is not going to help you. That was my point.

I took a double take at that and watched it again to see if I misunderstood, was so confused. Edit: On a second thought, I believe it might be just explained very poorly in the video and there might be some merit to the point. But it is confusing, and don't know why he really mentioned it so narrowly Edit: The fractal thing only makes sense if you are going to measure length of river coast. I don't think that is very applicable here, as you would want to measure length along some points on the river even if you do 'hacks' like the River Victoria one. So, one a 3rd thought, yeah, not suitable here imho

Exactly. Like fuck, apparently all they have to do to make the Nile longer is have it swerve back and forth around a lake for 1000km 🤷‍♂️

I wouldn't count the curve. Just draw the straight line.

Measure the average flow of water. There.

Lol

@@The360MlgNoscoper but average across what? If you deposit into an ocean, there’s still water flow

no. For any finite measuring unit, the more fractally bent the river is, the longer it will be.

It should be, “Eye-Task-Ah”

Instant rage.

Fellow Minnesotan here looking for this comment. We share the pain.

sameeee

SAME.

I love rivers man. They're like natural magical roads through the wilderness where you can float and explore until you are fatigued and eventually drown surrounded by piranhas... Sorry, just felt funny to write it like that :D

I love artificial rivers in particular

@@ValkyRiver Where is there an artificial river? Thunder River at Six Flags? lol

@@ChristelVinot There are many around the world if you search for them (Unfortunately Libya’s got destroyed)

@@ValkyRiver oh, you're talking about canals. yeah... canals are ok I guess... if that's your thing.

Same

if measured by tributaries i wonder how big is the missipi river

Must have been a damned long piece of string, or a really short river.

And that's why no one wanted to become a geologist.

It can be also tricky, as large rivers are quite wide. You can go with your string always in the middle, try to follow one side or try to follow the biggest flow. I am pretty sure the results would not be identical

I’m pretty sure he meant a string on a map and cut off the excess

@@paragn667 you would still need an infinitely long string to measure the river with complete accuracy.

Also, none of the two actually lies on a single country

​@Wurfenkopf It's weird how the countries at the end of each river claim it

Yeah... I find it dumb to just count Lake Victoria as "part" of the Nile.

There's nothing that prevents Lake Victoria from not being counted as a part of a river... There's a justifiable it is just an unusually broad part of the Nile river.

@@shambhav9534 Then why not count the grest lakes as part of the St Lawrence ? Edit : thanks to BeingTheHunt for pointing out that the great lakes are included in the technical lenght if the St Lawrence. Also I personnally still find it an odd practice

@@meneither3834 Good idea.

@@meneither3834 mainly because "rivers" are a human concept which has no bearing on reallity. If most people believe that the great lakes are part of the st.lawrence river then they will become that. I agree that there should be a consistent way of measuring lakes and rivers but at the end of the day its all semantics and no one cares that much about what the lenght of rivers are

Well there's a viral video of a conservative lady, complaining about an*l being taught to kids or something like that, maybe that why.

Funny question, but there is a serious answer.

Because from a seafaring viewpoint this is where you enter the river...and despite some of the "actresses " named here, most people have stuff enter in the mouth. Lmao

Because that’s where it opens up to the ocean? The rivers and continents are the bodies. Plus, throughout history sailors would travel the seas and enter rivers from the mouth. You can’t have a rectum and no mouth!

@@geoffreygriffin3015 Exactly!

Yes! And as a matter of fact the length difference as a function of resolution doesn't really explode with the river problem like it does with the coastline problem. It makes more sense to count the path's length than to wave it away-a water molecule has to travel that distance after all.

while that’s fair I also think using that measurement makes numbers too large for a human to intuitively grasp how large the number is

yeah, and I'm not sure but I feel like the fractal effect wouldn't be as strong in this situation, rivers generally flow in lazy curves so I would imagine you wouldn't have huge differences in distance using a 1-10 m range of step sizes. To me the intuitive way to measure a river would be the shortest (length) path a water molecule could take from a source to the ocean maybe modelled by some kind of smooth curve rather than discreet steps.

This is what I was thinking. I don't believe the fractal bullshit has anything to do with this. Just measure it from the center.

That's as solid a piece of logic as I've recently seen on the internet. Cheers!

Well, they'll end up cutting the South American continent in two if they keep digging the amazon

@@kiambotebbonikay Fuck it. Southern South America

@@exciton9861 hell yeah

@@exciton9861 northern south america aproves

Tldr

Rule's clear: own the mouth, own the river. hahahaha

@@sohopedeco I'm not so sure about that. Especially given the dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia, which in a way used to also involve the British, on the Nile river.

@@aes1373 The dispute STILL involves the British considering that the true mouth of the nile could very well be near Gibralter where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic. James May made a very valid statement with the Nile.

@@chdreturns But why is the british even involved in African disputes?

@@nutte24 is this even a question? lol

Fun fact: France is the size of New Mexico

@@NunyaMcBusiness RealLifeLore : *laughs in more evil

I was about to mention the same thing, can't wait for the all mistakes we made video lmao

|-O-| |-o-| |-o-|

Thank you!!! I thought this was the case.

Yea like a fish swimming around in the water. Stupid.

Well thought. That adjusts to the definition of distance, which independently of the ruler of measurement, states that it's the minimum path between two points.

Usually how it works

I got a notification for a video like 3 days after it got released

Don't read my name,,,,,-,,,,, /_

Perfectly said!

It's just geopolitics penis measurement contest.

@@FiredAndIced Yeah, you can just say the Nile is the longest river and that's it, it ends there.

Adding the tributary made sense not the part where they changed the traditional mouth.

@@guppy719 I mean, if they're gonna measure the Nile down the shoreline of the Lake Victoria instead of directly down the center point, measuring the Amazon to its farthest mouth is fair game to me.

The Brazilian team was very biased The nile is undisputedly the longest

@@Desfighter1 did you watch the video...?

@@tiovon8209 same, like, the exact same shoreline fractal paradox is going to apply if you measure it like that, therefore approaching infinity with small enough units. like why would you do that

waterfalls

@@mysheetz8964 lmao

And also stronger current will speed it up or slow it down

Yeah but where on the river? if you do it on one side of the river, the result would be wastly different from the other

well boat can get stuck so.

thank you for putting it into words, this video is just clickbait.

What you're saying seems to contradict itself. The banks of the river are a fractal just like a coastline. Therefore, it follows that the centerline, which is the centerpoint between the banks, would also be a fractal. The centerline of the river is inextricably tied to the geometry of the river's banks.

@@LimitedWard by that logic everything is a fractal and there would be no way to actually measure anything, if u wanna measure a river its a lot easier than the lunacy in this video

@@LimitedWard the center-line is not based on the lenght of the bank but on two points from each bank and even if the bank were to be fractal (which is nor really th case) the bank is still a mostly continuous line and so is the center line for all but at most a finite set of point. hence there is a finit lenght of the centerline Beside if the length was infinite, what about the flow ? what about the volume of water in the system ? is there infinite amount of water in each river flowing at infinite speed ? Or does a drop joining the river never make it to the ocean (finite speed + inifinite length)

@@rainman1242 Exactly. When you have arbitrary points, you would need an infinite amount of points to measure the centerline.

Exactly, .. and I never understood the problem with measuring country borders. I figured they'd converge to some length eventually.

Pulling a string from one end to the other end should be a perhaps hard but true measure of the length…

Not all sequences have well defined limits at infinity. For example, the Koch snowflake has an infinite perimeter (but a finite area), and that informs the issues with country borders. That being said however, the fractal justification is also insufficient to claim that a river is infinitely long.

@@neerajkrishnang3916 if by country borders you mean coastlines, then yes they are truly much worse than rivers to measure unlike the rivers here, what he said about their lengths extending to infinity if you go down small enough actually turns into reality thanks to nature It follows a concept similar to how long all your blood vessels are. If you put them all together in a line you would get a distance longer than the earth to the moon (or several times that?).

It’s called countable infinities. No matter how small of a unit of measurement the length still slightly changes, even by the billionth of an inch.

I know. The dot for the Lake was also on the border with Canada.

I 100% did a spit take

It was nails on a chalk board when I heard. I commented as well.

Minnesotans unite! Jk I'm from Fargo but close enough

I know right? lol

the THAD "largest desert enjoyer" "Bro even though its cold, the antarctic is the largest desert on earth"

No

Only cultured people know why his car is important to this

Wouldn’t it get longer the more the river changes direction? So the straighter the river then the less it gets affected by making the measurements smaller?

Outro Tuga? Outro João!? Acho que já sabes o que tem de ser dito... PORTUGAL CARALHO

@@joaosantos5503 eu sou do Brasil

@@varella4255 😢😭😢 Não faz mal hahaha Abraço dos teus irmãos portugueses 💪💙💪

I think he meant to say North America. Either that or he doesn’t know that the Missouri is longer because it’s constantly overshadowed by the Mississippi.

Amazon: i'm literally down here

because the shoreline, like fractals, become more defined as the unit decreases. If it's small enough you'll be measuring the distance between atom to atom on the shoreline, which for mathematics sake, we can say the L does go towards infinity.

Think about it like this...if you divide into atomic scale units to cover the size of a river, you would have an "infinite" number of atoms covering the length... Since the atomic scale is very small, but it is still a feasible number, you would get very small number x infinite = infinite... That was the ELI5 of the thing, I'm pretty sure Fractal Theory and Limit theory can give you a more precise explanation but I don't really remember my Calculus classes hahahahha

@@fabioapd Wrong. It's finite. You'd rather eat your cheeseburger than find it out though.

Read the Gleick and Mandelbrot books for the shoreline problem. But that doesn’t really apply here.

@@ImTHECarlos98 But there aren't infinite atoms in the world. Wouldn't it be like that problem of 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 and so on where it eventually approaches one, and the river coastline approaches a concrete number?

haha, already happening if u read the comments, sort by newest first

Why not? Are we not still applying the same basic idea of fractal dimensions? That idea has been applied to something as small as a snowflake.

You use the phrase "nearing infinity" to say that a number is so big, that there's no way for a human to really understand just how big it is. It is mathematically wrong to say that, that is true, but it wasn't meant to be mathematical, just a phrase to help a bit visualising. An example would be to say that there are "infinite" ways to mix a game of cards, although the number of possible ways is 10^52 and thus finite. And I don't get what you mean by "doesn't work in this case" since it does. You can go into molecular measures and have a "nearly infinite" length, both in measuring the lengths of a river and a coastline. And what you also talked about: If you use infinetly small measures, meaning infinitely smaller than molecular measures although that would be physically impossible from our current knowledge, it would be, in fact, infinetly long. Without wanting to offend you, not really anything you said made sense.

Have you heard about rivers? They have 2 coast lines

@@drbruley8045 the point is that a coastline has an edge, which can be fractal-like, because it doesn't have to be a smooth function (might be getting the terminology wrong, I am used to saying that in a different language). On the other hand, when we measure a river, we use a smooth function, which has natural parametrization, aka well-defined length, that doesn't depend on resolution.

@@user-te7rf8ik7z I don't see how the video is wrong for pointing out that some people have said we could measure rivers the same way. Eventually the video does cover a lot of different ways we have measured the world's longest rivers. If anything, the video is more informative for including more info.

RLL is incorrectly applying the shoreline problem to the river length. A river does, indeed, have a definable minimum length with an infinitesimal rule.

@@twinprimeable glad someone pointed that out.

The point is that the shoreline paradox makes measuring rivers hard to quantitate, which in turn makes them hard to compare. It's really not that hard to understand.

@@mechanomics2649 Found this paragraph on wikipedia on the coastline paradox: The problem is fundamentally different from the measurement of other, simpler edges. It is possible, for example, to accurately measure the length of a straight, idealized metal bar by using a measurement device to determine that the length is less than a certain amount and greater than another amount-that is, to measure it within a certain degree of uncertainty. The more accurate the measurement device, the closer results will be to the true length of the edge. When measuring a coastline, however, the closer measurement does not result in an increase in accuracy-the measurement only increases in length; unlike with the metal bar, there is no way to obtain a maximum value for the length of the coastline. I didn't realize that convergence was not a thing when dealing with fractals, and since coastlines behave like fractals, a more precise measurement device will not actually lead to a more accurate measure of it's true length.

why can't they just use a boat that measures how much km they have moved ( like a normal car i mean ) and try to sail as close to the middle as possible....

I hate to pick on kids for my example, but since I have a young child, I know where I'm coming from: Step 1: Ask a five-year old to draw a rectangle. No rulers, straight-edges, etc., just draw it. Perfect lines--no, of course not. Even most adults not in art/architecture/engineering professions would have SOME deviation in the sides of a rectangle. Fair enough, though, you could still reasonably measure it around through simple mathematics of some of the curvature of the lines. Step 2: Ask a two-year-old to trace his/her hand on a piece of paper. At the end just have him/her connect across the points where you stop tracing at the wrist bones. THAT'S how the Earth REALLY is! Try measuring the length around of THAT! That's where deviation comes into play in measurement.

@@thetrainmon use a gps map with a scale of 1mm=10km or something, put a rope and try to always follow the middle of the river. The length of the rope is the length or the river. No deviation, maybe 0.01% longer or shorter :)

Can also be a short "i" sound, like the i in him. The second syllable is stressed.

pretty sure that pronunciation is highly anglicized already

@@TCharlieA I’ve heard it said the other way but I suppose there could be another Itasca or that person was pronouncing it incorrectly too.

None of that Matters as the names are anglicized corruptions of the proper native indigenous names.

@@enriquegarcia2790 Besides saying that I heard it pronounced the other way and admitting that whoever pronounced it that way initially probably said it wrong, this is not a corruption of a Native word. As per Wikipedia: "The Ojibwe name for "Lake Itasca" is Omashkoozo-zaaga'igan (Elk Lake); this was changed by Henry Schoolcraft to "Itasca", coined from a combination of the Latin words veritas caput ("true head [of the Mississippi]"). It is one of several examples of pseudo-Indian place names created by Schoolcraft."

And the Amazon is connected to the Atlantic Ocean I still don't think either should count

@@TinyLordCthulhu Well they didn't mention anything about that so I wouldn't put my money on it.

@@TinyLordCthulhu The Atlantic doesn't have a mouth, the Mediterranean does (at Gibralter). As such the nile & any other river flowing into the Mediterranean is longer than the shAmazon.

@@chdreturns Legit nobody count seas as part of a river but ok

Well at the end the longest was the actual Amazon after BOTH rivers used the longest possible measurements they could. And honestly considering the fact the Amazon holds over 20% of the non salt water in the world. Ummm I'd just go with the much larger river. It doesn't matter what Ocean/Sea the river is connected to.

burn it jk, it is all in Brazil hands...

@@enasosa1612 f

@@enasosa1612 yeah thats why we are fucked The Brazillian government just abandoned the amazon rainforest

How about the mosquito?

@@thevoidwalkerbr that's not entirely true.

I believe he's made a video on the coastline paradox