Name: What If We Built a Road Around the World?
Uploaded: 2018-10-28T04:19:47.000Z
Duration: 7 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The world seems like it's becoming a smaller and smaller place

Travel times between the Earth's continents have never been shorter

But one thing you still can't do is drive around the entire world.

but wouldn't it be great if instead if you could go on a road trip

Is it actually possible to build a global highway system

that would connect all of the world's continents?

To begin exploring the answers to these two questions,

To discuss the current problems that would face a

SAM: So, how connected is the current road system?

So there are basically four distinct major road systems on Earth.

The one spanning Europe, Asia, and Africa.

These three continents are all connected by land.

So, it makes sense that they're all connected by road.

It's impossible to cross from Africa to Asia fully on land

This is the canal that make the trip from Europe to Asia

The only physical connect between the two continents is

therefore; the three bridges spanning the canal.

so it still counts as one big road system.

But there's not much more to say about it,

other than if you go a little bit this way,

The Americas are technically not connected because of

But that's not a problem because of multiple bridges spanning the narrow waterway.

Not a single road crosses this desolate swamp land spanning over the Panama-Colombia border.

The area is overrun with paramilitary forces and drug lords.

There's just not enough demand to make braving the

marshy and dangerous area to build a road worth it.

So, that's why North America and South America have

two completely separate unconnected road systems.

REALLIFELORE: So, to recap, these 4 areas all have preexisting

road networks but none of them connect with one another.

So, how can we fix that and live in a world where you

can drive from New York to London and back again?

Let's imagine that this global highway would originate in

the southern most city in the world with a population over 100,000 people.

The current highway system from Cape Town to Kinshasa,

is fine and would take 51 hours to complete the whole drive.

But once in Kinshasa, our first problem arises:

There is currently no bridge over the Congo River

So, the only current way across is by a ferry.

we need to build a bridge across which would cost around

the drive from Brazzaville to Eddalya in Morrocco

can continue just fine with existing highways.

The total driving time all of Africa so far stands at 7 days and 6 hours.

But here we encounter one of the largest problems to our global highway:

Luckily, at this point though, the sea separates Morrocco from Spain

But it's not the length that's the problem,

Which is up to 900 meters [2952.76 feet] deep at some parts.

It would be a gigantic engineering challenge to construct.

And the estimated cost is somewhere around $24 billion.

But let's assume that it's built and you're now across from Africa,

You can now drive all the way from this town to the other side of Eurasia

in Magadan, Russia on currently existing highways.

And that drive alone would take 7 days and 11 hours.

When combined with your trip from Cape Town,

the total drive form there to Magadan would take 14 days and 17 hours to complete.