How to Make Friends the Hard Way and the Easy Way

Try not to treat people as things

Randall Munroe
Forge

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A stick figure wearing a football helmet, tackling another stick figure, yelling “FRIEND!!”

If you just start walking, eventually you’ll bump into someone.

This might take a while. You might be lucky and walk right into a crowd of people, but if you’re in a sparsely inhabited area, it could take weeks. If you start walking from a random location in an area containing some number of people, you can calculate the time it will take to run into someone by using the physics concept of a mean free path:

time per collision = 1 / collisions per hour = 1 / (shoulder width + average torso diameter) × speed × population density of area

Some areas certainly make encounters easier than others. Here’s the average collision interval for a few different regions:

  • Canada: 2.5 days
  • France: 2 hours
  • Delhi: 75 seconds
  • Paris: 40 seconds
  • Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta during a sold-out game: 0.6 seconds
  • The field during the game: 3 minutes

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Randall Munroe
Forge
Writer for

Creator of xkcd | NYTimes Bestselling Author of WHAT IF? and HOW TO