Eli5 why the coastline paradox is a paradox?
In: 1301
The simplest explanation is that the term “coastline” is not very well defined, and cannot be very well defined. You can’t easily measure something that isn’t defined
There’s an ocean, there’s land, the land is constantly moving very slowly, the sea level is constantly rising and falling, and to make it a bit more complicated things are dynamic in the short term as well like waves and tides and ice. If you removed all the water, it would all be land, the low bits would be valleys and the high bits would still be mountains, there would be lots of flat bits, and people could live on most of it and walk to anywhere – so there wouldn’t be any coasts. Even with the water, the coast isn’t in a fixed place because it’s not a fixed geographical feature. You can look up [Doggerland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland) to see land that used to be land and is now water
With maps, you’re drawing imaginary lines to include or exclude things, the more detailed you draw them the more the perimeter will be for the shape. Since nobody can agree on where the coastline is, nobody can draw an accurate imaginary line, and so nobody can agree on the length of the coast
the best guess is to come up with a shared standard which works in most cases
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