About a year into COVID, when we were all at least 40% insane – and I had recently become a dad, so I was at like 65/70% – I became unaccountably obsessed with a pointless and, for almost all of history, unanswerable question:

What’s the farthest any person has been from the nearest other person?

Having not much better to do while my infant napped, I embarked on a long, spreadsheet-fueled journey of the mind to try to answer this question. I wanted to answer it not just for the present day (which, as we’ll see, is relatively easy), but for every point in human history.

Some of what follows is grim, I have to warn you. For most of human existence, if you were significantly far from all other people, you were probably about to die. But nevertheless, you’d have a chance of breaking humanity’s Loneliness Record before your impending death!

Early humanity

Back when there were only 2 humans in the world, every time they got farther from each other, both of them would simultaneously break the Loneliness Record.

However, unless you’re a Biblical literalist, it’s hard to imagine that there was ever a time when only 2 humans existed. Surely Homo sapiens emerged over the course of generations, each composed of beings that, in different ways, more or less resembled modern humans. So it makes more sense to start with the first migrations out of Africa, between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago. That’s when the distances start to get interesting.

Prehistory

As our ancestors migrated out of central Africa, they pushed into wilderness that was uninhabited by other humans. So we might think that they would have had plentiful opportunities to break the Loneliness Record.

However, we tend to travel in groups, especially when we’re going far. And you can’t break the Loneliness Record if you’re traveling in a group. Unless things go terribly wrong.

For my money, the most likely way for the Loneliness Record to have been broken during this period would be:

A group of travelers sets out.
They happen to go in a direction away from the rest of humanity.
They travel far – farther than anyone would be able to travel alone.
But then – uh oh! There’s a rockslide or something, and they all die.

In this scenario, the last of the travelers to die breaks our Record. Hooray!

Another way it could have happened is if someone got swept out to sea on a log. Since sailing ships hadn’t been invented yet, there’d be no other humans out there.

Now, you might wonder, what about camels? Once humans domesticated the camel, couldn’t they travel much farther over land? Yes! But humans didn’t figure out how to ride camels until about 3000 BC, by which point Austronesian peoples had already, for 15,000 years, been…

Sailing

Sailing ups the ante, because nobody lives in the ocean, and you can get a lot farther sailing a boat than clinging to a log. One of the same issues still confronts us, though: long distance sailing is usually done by groups, not individuals.

It seems likely that early sailors would have broken the loneliness record from time to time. Say your ship gets caught in a storm and blown 100 km off course. Then it sinks. If you’re the last survivor, you might get the dubious honor of breaking humanity’s Loneliness Record. Certainly, you could get a lot farther from other humans by sailing than by walking on land.

Once sailing started being used for trade, though, one has to imagine that the Record stopped getting broken so much. Advancements in sailing technology would bring distance gains, but they would also bring congestion. If sailing ships are frequently crossing the sea between nations, then even if you’re lucky (?) enough to be the doomed last survivor of a remote shipwreck, there’s probably another ship just over the horizon. So no Loneliness Trophy for you.

Of course, we can’t know when the Loneliness Record was broken during this period or by whom, because there’s no documentation. So let’s talk about the first era in which I was able to find any solid documentation of a person being Record-breakingly isolated.

The age of Antarctic Exploration

For some reason, people in the early 1900s thought it would be a really fun idea to trek to the South Pole. For Robert Falcon Scott, a Royal Navy officer and one of the first to make the trip, it was… not.

Scott led the Terra Nova expedition, an attempt to reach the South Pole for the first time in human history. But on January 17, 1912, when Scott’s party got to the Pole, they were devastated to find they’d been bested by the expedition of Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. Amundsen had reached the South Pole just 34 days before Scott.

If the explorers thought losing the race was bad, they were in for much worse. After a series of disasters, the entire party perished. Which is a bummer. But, on the bright side, they were 160 km from the rest of humanity when they finally succumbed to the cold. This is the first occurrence I could find of a plausible Loneliness Record-setting event with a specific distance and set of names. So congratulations to the Terra Nova expedition!

But even so, their record didn’t last long, on the historical scale. In 1934, Richard E. Byrd, an American Naval officer who had in 1926 made the first flight over the South Pole (but that’s not of interest here, since he had a co-pilot) operated a small weather station in Antarctica. The station was called Bolling Advance Base, and it was situated 196 km from the nearest inhabited location: Little America II base, on the coast.

Eventually, around August of 1934, Byrd stopped sending intelligible radio transmissions back to Little America II. A rescue party was dispatched, which found Byrd near death, suffering from frostbite and carbon monoxide poisoning. He survived to lead several more Antarctic expeditions, and for the rest of his life, he held the record (at least as far as I can tell) for Loneliest Person!

And, by the same token, Byrd had become the last person to break the Loneliness Record while staying on Earth.

The final frontier

Spacefaring really changed the scale of the Loneliness Record problem. Now our species was no longer confined to a 2-dimensional surface.

The first (human) spacefarer was Comrade Yuri Gagarin of the USSR. He took off from Baikonur Cosmodrome on April 12, 1961, and traveled in a parabolic orbit that took him 327 km above the surface of the Earth. That’s 131 km farther than Byrd’s weather station. Congratulations, Yuri Gagarin!

Gagarin got to hold this record for several years. His space mission, Vostok 1, had a higher apogee than any other of the 1-crewmember space missions (the USSR’s Vostok program and the USA’s Mercury program). And after those, we stopped sending people into space alone.

327 km is pretty far. And since the apogee of Vostok 1’s parabola was over the south Pacific, Gagarin’s distance from other humans might even have been somewhat greater. So it was eight years before the Loneliness Record was broken again. This time, though, it was utterly smashed, by an order of magnitude.

A little while after Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong descended to the lunar surface on July 24, 1969, Michael Collins (who continued orbiting the moon) reached a distance of 3592 km (the Moon’s diameter and change) from his fellow travelers.

The remaining Apollo missions

Now from here, for Apollos 12–17, things are a little fuzzier. A lot depends on the exact trajectories of the capsules, and I won’t go into it here (but corner me with a pen and a cocktail napkin some time). So I might have made a mistake here, even beyond the obvious mistake of embarking on this pointless thought experiment in the first place. But, after reviewing the numbers, I think the next Record-breaking event occurred on Apollo 15:

And the last time the Loneliness Record was broken was on the Apollo 16 mission, by Command Module pilot Ken Mattingly:

My heartfelt congratulations to Ken Mattingly, the World Champion of Loneliness!

History isn’t over… yet!

One day – assuming humanity doesn’t somehow burn itself out of existence first 😉 – somebody is gonna come for what’s Ken’s.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Arkady Bogdanov and Nadia Cherneshevsky are among the First Hundred humans to live on Mars. They regularly travel the planet’s empty surface in lighter-than-air craft. Something like that could get you a Loneliness Record.

More likely, the next Record breaker will be the last survivor of some space voyage. On Mars, you can’t get meaningfully more than 6,800 km from any other point. But if you’re on the way to Mars and life support fails, then someone gets to break Mattingly’s record by probably several orders of magnitude.

This article is off the beaten path for my blog, which is usually about incident response and site reliability engineering. I hope you’ve enjoyed this pointless endeavor as much as I enjoyed wasting my time putting it together!

This June, I had the honor of speaking at O’Reilly Velocity 2016 in Santa Clara. My topic was Troubleshooting Without Losing Common Ground, which I’ve written about and written about before that too.

I was pretty happy with my talk, especially the Star Trek: The Next Generation vignette in the middle. It was a lot of ideas to pack into a single talk, but I think a lot of people got the point. However, I did give a really unsatisfactory answer (30m46s) to the first question I received. The question was:

In the differential diagnosis steps, you listed performing tests to falsify assumptions. Are you borrowing that from medicine? In tech are we only trying to falsify assumptions, or are we sometimes trying to validate them?

I didn’t have a real answer at the time, so I spouted some bullshit and moved on. But it’s a good question, and I’ve thought more about it, and I’ve come up with two (related) answers: a common-sense answer and a pretentious philosophical answer.

The Common Sense Answer

My favorite thing about differential diagnosis is that it keeps the problem-solving effort moving. There’s always something to do. If you’re out of hypotheses, you come up with new ones. If you finish a test, you update the symptoms list. It may not always be easy to make progress, but you always have a direction to go, and everybody stays on the same page.

But when you seek to confirm your hypotheses, rather than to falsify others, it’s easy to fall victim to tunnel vision. That’s when you fixate on a single idea about what could be wrong with the system. That single idea is all you can see, as if you’re looking at it through a tunnel whose walls block everything else from view.

Tunnel vision takes that benefit of differential diagnosis – the constant presence of a path forward – and negates it. You keep running tests to try to confirm your hypothesis, but you may never prove it. You may just keep getting tests results that are consistent with what you believe, but that are also consistent with an infinite number of hypotheses you haven’t thought of.

A focus on falsification instead of verification can be seen as a guard against tunnel vision. You can’t get stuck on a single hypothesis if you’re constrained to falsify other ones. The more alternate hypotheses you manage to falsify, the more confident you get that you should be treating for the hypotheses that might still be right.

Now, of course, there are times when it’s possible to verify your hunch. If you have a highly specific test for a problem, then by all means try it. But in general it’s helpful to focus on knocking down hypotheses rather than propping them up.

The Pretentious Philosophical Answer

I just finished Karl Popper’s ridiculously influential book The Logic of Scientific Discovery. If you can stomach a dense philosophical tract, I would highly recommend it.

Karl “Choke Right On It, Logical Positivism” Popper

Published in 1959 – but based on Popper’s earlier book Logik der Forschung from 1934 – The Logic Of Scientific Discovery makes a then-controversial [now widely accepted (but not universally accepted, because philosophers make cats look like sheep, herdability-wise)] claim. I’ll paraphrase the claim like so:

Science does not produce knowledge by generalizing from individual experiences to theories. Rather, science is founded on the establishment of theories that prohibit classes of events, such that the reproducible occurrence of such events may falsify the theory.

Popper was primarily arguing against a school of thought called logical positivism, whose subscribers assert that a statement is meaningful if and only if it is empirically testable. But what matters to our understanding of differential diagnosis isn’t so much Popper’s absolutely brutal takedown of logical positivism (and damn is it brutal), as it is his arguments in favor of falsifiability as the central criterion of science.

I find one particular argument enlightening on the topic of falsification in differential diagnosis. It hinges on the concept of self-contradictory statements.

There’s an important logical precept named – a little hyperbolically – the Principle of Explosion. It asserts that any statement that contradicts itself (for example, “my eyes are brown and my eyes are not brown”) implies all possible statements. In other words: if you assume that a statement and its negation are both true, then you can deduce any other statement you like. Here’s how:

Assume that the following two statements are true:
1. “All cats are assholes”
2. “There exists at least one cat that is not an asshole”
Therefore the statement “Either all cats are assholes, or 9/11 was an inside job” (we’ll call this Statement A) is true, since the part about the asshole cats is true.
However, if the statement “there exists at least one cat that is not an asshole” is true too (which we’ve assumed it is) and 9/11 were not an inside job, then Statement A would be false, since neither of its two parts would be true.
So the only way left for Statement A to be true is for “9/11 was an inside job” to be a true statement. Therefore, 9/11 was an inside job.
Wake up, sheeple.

The Principle of Explosion is the crux of one of Popper’s most convincing arguments against the Principle of Induction as the basis for scientific knowledge.

It was assumed by many philosophers of science before Popper that science relied on some undefined Principle of Induction which allowed one to generalize from a finite list of experiences to a general rule about the universe. For example, the Principle of Induction would allow one to deduce from enough statements like “I dropped a ball and it fell” and “My friend dropped a wrench and it fell” to “When things are dropped, they fall.” But Popper argued against the existence of the Principle of Induction. In particular, he pointed out that:

If there were some way to prove a general rule by demonstrating the truth of a finite number of examples of its consequences, then we would be able to deduce anything from such a set of true statements.

Right? By the Principle of Explosion, a self-contradictory statement implies the truth of all statements. If we accepted the Principle of Induction, then the same evidence that proves “When things are dropped, they fall” would also prove “All cats are assholes and there exists at least one cat that is not an asshole,” which would prove every statement we can imagine.

So what does this have to do with falsification in differential diagnosis? Well, imagine you’ve come up with these hypotheses to explain some API slowness you’re troubleshooting:

Hypothesis Alpha: contention on the table cache is too high, so extra latency is introduced for each new table opened

Hypothesis Bravo: we’re hitting our IOPS limit on the EBS volume attached to the database server

There are many test results that would be compatible with Hypothesis Alpha. But unless you craft your tests very carefully, those same results will also be compatible with Hypothesis Bravo. Without a highly specific test for table cache contention, you can’t prove Hypothesis Alpha through a series of observations that agree with it.

What you can do, however, is try to quickly falsify Hypothesis Bravo by checking some graphs against some AWS configuration data. And if you do that, then Hypothesis Alpha is the your best remaining guess. Now you can start treating for table cache contention on the one hand, and attempting the more time-consuming process (especially if it’s correct!) of falsifying Hypothesis Alpha.

Isn’t this kind of abstract?

Haha OMG yes. It’s the most abstract. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful idea.

If it’s your job to troubleshoot problems, you know that tunnel vision is very real. If you focus on generating alternate hypotheses and falsifying them, you can resist tunnel vision’s allure.

Dan Slimmon

Tag: science

The World Record for Loneliness