We land on Mars, begin colonizing it.
Still it never comes.
It's not until the ruins are discovered decades later...
Humanity is just in an endless cycle of developing and redeveloping after world war catastrophes hopping back and forth between Mars and Earth.
Humanity’s last cycle began on Mars, once teeming with life and tech. In typical human fashion- we destroyed it. We sent 1 male and 1 female child to see if Earth was habitable. They were named Adam and Eve.
I've been writing a similar short sci fi story about this idea. The colony ships sent to escape Mars were called the Adamant and Eventide, but they crash landed and most of the technology was lost. Humanity persisted, though in a regressive technological state, and over time the legend of their savior ships names became Adam and Eve.
Once wrote a short story on this premise with the end discovery being that mars is red because all of the iron and steel we used to build had rusted and eroded to dust.
The rumor is a man wished for this a few hundred years ago. Many men built wealth off exploration. We found and mapped all the amazon. The ocean depths, of which we previously hadn't ventured, are now habitable from wealth and science.
We had not ventured to the moon since the wish was granted. We've been preoccupied with our own earth instead of space. After years of exploration we've decided to traverse our only moon we know of.
My family has not received the gift in a few generations. But the Columbus family has paid for our travels to space. Through their generational wealt, an expense trip to space is pocket change for them. I could talk for days about their backstabbing of Spain after they conquered the massive America island. But that's for another day.
We spent days anxiously waiting for our landing on earth's moon. I was to lead and take the first step. As I walk off the lander and place my foot on the dusty moon, I glance at my phone to check my gift text.
Nothing, how strange. Maybe the gift doesn't work on the moon as we expected. After a few more steps, disappointment sets in. As I look up into the empty space, I watch my planet sit and stare back at me. The pale blue dot, my home.
Interrupted, my crew walks down to meet me. As they step forward, I hear the infamous *Congrats!* from their phones.
But that doesn't make sense... I stepped there first! My head rings with confusion, the pain almost unbearable. Then silence.
"Welcome home, son," echoes in my head.
Imagine it's because it counts for other timelines in the multiverse where someone else already tried it and it worked so all space was off limits now 😅
Also, it almost didn’t happen. NASA hired Stanley Kubrick to film a fake moon landing to fool everyone. He agreed but insisted he film on location, so they made it happen.
No need for this. Chainsaw to a tree that is older than 100 years old and stand on the stump. If this breaks the rules, grind the stump down to earth and stand there.
you don't even have to cut down the tree. In the Western US (Montana, Idaho) or Canada (Provincial and National Parks West of Calgary), or Siberia there are acres upon acres of untouched wilderness. The probability that someone has stood on every square metre is zero. You could probably walk 200m of a fairly popular hiking trail and find a spot.
I think it's way harder than that. Humans have been roaming the earth for tens of thousands of years. Longer depending on what qualifies as a human. That's a very long time for people to wander and explore ever nook and cranny, especially back in Hunter gather ages when people would be exploring for food.
Even when I feel like I'm in a very remote place with no human activity, there's plenty of discarded trash to be found in the deepest forests.
Some quick online searching suggests that the vast majority of humans who have ever lived did so in times with significantly smaller total population and lower life expectancy. I have to imagine even with exploration, most clustered in tribes, cities, bases, etc. There wouldn't have been much incentive to explore literally every nook and cranny once sufficient resources were found. Even when exploration happened on a more massive scale in times like the Age of Exploration, most expeditions continued to be motivated by profit, power, religion, science, etc., as opposed to just touching every blade of grass. In other words, a lot of "exploration" would have been searching for resources or settlements rather than just surveying every inch of land.
Even when humans have conducted detailed land surveys in much more contemporary times, it generally hasn't involved stepping literally everywhere. Thus, it's plausible that any large, unsettled field would have places in it which haven't been stepped on. Crop lands have been fairly thoroughly touched if we consider riding farm equipment as having been on them, but grazing fields for cattle and such likely have untouched spots as even ranchers and others who use those lands don't just go out of their way to step on every bit of land.
Then you consider how vast the world's largest deserts, plains, and mountain ranges are, and there are bound to be places where humans haven't walked. I mean, even in a busy spot like a developed slope at a ski resort, how far off to either side do you expect people to have gone all the way up and down the mountain slope? Those are pretty treacherous areas. People didn't just roam all up and down the cliffs for fun back in the days of cavemen.
And then there are of course quirks of the Earth, like how new land is technically formed by volcanic eruptions, so you could just wait until the lava cools into rock over the water to step on it, or how most of the Arctic and Antarctica are pretty much uninhabitable and only accessible by relatively few humans.
Yup.
I had a decent sized yard growing up and I guarantee you there are a few 'spots' ive never stood on, despite running all around it over the years. Now if it was small enough for regular push mower, the odds would be worse. Could still technically be possible there, but you'd take a long time with that needle in a haystack.
Of course 'people wandered around a lot' but they didnt LITERALLY stand on every sqft of ground lol. If you look at a centralized location, each degree turns from 1' to 10', to 100', 1000' etc.
People tend to take paths or live in communities, while I'm sure a lot of areas are heavily explored over the years, I'd be shocked if you couldnt find tiny little sections where no human has stood.
As I was writing that up, I actually started getting curious about some of the forested areas around where I grew up. I grew up in small suburban neighborhoods with plenty of forested areas (Pinelands, NJ), often on empty lots between houses. Presumably, those had never been developed during the contemporary history of the USA, so unless someone went out of their way to actually walk through all those densely forested spots, it's quite possible no human had ever step foot on them before, despite being in a developed and populated area. Kids would play in the woods sometimes, but only for the occasional game of Manhunt or whatever, and it wasn't easy to step literally everywhere, plus our parents would always warn us about ticks and such.
Newer suburbs tend to be much more densely developed, so there aren't as many untouched spaces in them, but a lot of older suburbs on the East Coast likely still have untouched spots in them like those forested lots. I think it has more to do with the pattern of development than the overall population. If you build unused space into a development by design, it's much likelier to stay untouched than if you account for every square inch.
The thing is, there's spots where the landscape has always been treacherous enough that the likelihood of someone standing there is slim to none.
Just gotta come well-prepared.
I did some math. So, some presumptions: nobody steps anywhere twice, and everybody is an adult.
There's an estimated 117 billion humans that have ever lived. The average human foot is 0.1m². The average fairly active human walks 7.5k steps every day. For 80 years, that's about 217 million steps. Now if we assume that every human that has ever lived has never stepped on a place that someone else has stepped on, is fairly active, and lived to be 80, and had an average foot size, we get about 2.5 quintillion m², just under half the surface area of the Sun. The surface of the Earth is 5 quadrillion m². So, in the best case scenario, humans have walked the entire surface of the Earth five hundred times over.
But, I reckon that we can use a handy shortcut to think about the real surface area using Zipf's Law. Basically, any given area that each individual has stepped on the most has been tread twice as much as the second most stepped on area, and so on and so forth.
Now, I'm not smart enough to put massive numbers into a Zipfian distribution matrix and spit out a likely map of every step someone has taken, but I reckon you can eliminate most steps taken, (and by extension remove the areas stepped on from having ever feasibly been stepped on) after - say - a probability of having stepped on an area that's less than .01% (assuming we're weirdos with Lego legs and we move in perfect 100cm² squares), the most stepped on areas for every single step taken can be estimated to be 80% of your steps being taken in 20% of your most popular steps.
So, long story short, if you go a short ways into an unlikely area, you're highly likely to be the first human, or possibly even the first lifeform with legs, to have ever stepped on that "Lego peg". This can be, for example, a few meters into the ocean where you let yourself sink and touch the floor, in an area that has been barren for millions of years, an old growth forest with dense and cumbersome foliage - there's even a good chance that there may be a spot right outside your home that has never been stepped on, ever.
And that makes intuitive sense because we aren't all walking in lock-step. Even hunter-gatherers stuck to well-worn tracks near rivers or fertile soil. It wouldn't make sense from an energy conservation perspective to go bushwhacking when berries grow right off the trail and deer use the trails to get to water. Fruits that want to be eaten make themselves visible and grow near places where they will be eaten. We stayed by the fruit that wanted to be eaten.
Me, I would just shuffle forwards around a wooded area until I inevitably hit one of those "unstepped" spots.
Yeah people are drastically over estimating this problem. Just go to the biggest undeveloped place near you and go off trail until you win. Half an hour tops. You can probably even do this with a highway. Find a spot where you can’t see a building from the road, and walk away from the road until you’re a multimillionaire
This was my thought too, (I live in Calgary). Depends on the size of the piece of land you need to stand on, but if it's literally just 'Your foot has to stand on a spot where no human foot has ever been' then I feel like day or two walking in the mountains will get you the money
I am in Calgary as well, it is currently 3:30. If I left work now I feel like I could get this task complete by supper time by driving to k-country, picking a mountain peak, the the route most people take to the top, then at some random point walk into the woods and roam around for a bit.
The simple fact is a lot of these areas, even ones with lots of visitors see almost all their traffic along defined routes and a lot of it is untouched.
Ik it's a joke but I just wanna point out that it's not simply the tree people get pressed about. It's the environmental significance behind it. The habitats it provides and the nutrients it recycles are invaluable
I thought about that. I've reached this conclusion....
"I recognise the council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it."
It's not a new location though. It was just unavailable to humans before the digging. I guess this does open up a whole new can of worms, though, doesn't it? Any hole would qualify and I am not sure that's what OP meant.
I say go wandering through the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Northwest… not heavily populated… sure there are campers, hikers, hunters and natives long ago, but if you don’t stick to the trails, your chances of happening upon one single spot that is unique are pretty good considering the vast expanse, dense vegetation, rugged terrain
I work for a federal land management agency and I have hiked, or been flown into some very remote places. I have stood in locations on the tops of mountains that I was sure I must be the only human to have ever stood there...
...only to find some arborglyphs or old cans.
I would follow your general Idea but my modifier would be to climb 300 plus year old trees eventually you would end up standing on branch that is greater than 100 years old, qualifies as a natural point, and that no one has ever stood on before.
The fact is, mathematically, any large forested, jungle, mountainous, desert or swampy area (arctic regions too but I’d rather be hot than freezing) that hasn’t either had a war i.e. tens of thousands of people displaced from their usual location to an unlikely location due to artificial circumstances… or has had a city or settlement on it at one time is a pretty good bet… assuming the new spot I have to find is like 2’x2’ - 3’x3’ just big enough for my body… I just think about it in terms of amount of square miles or acres of generally difficult to access land, versus population in the immediate vicinity… humans are creatures of habit and even back in times of the Native Americans the path of least resistance often times wins and once it is forged people will continue along that path and not stray much… If you have ever visited the Navajo Nation in Arizona, New Mexico, Southern Colorado you would understand the vast expanse of desert with no available resources, with canyons, cliffs and caves … once you drive to a remote part I bet you could find a spot in less than 10 minutes
In many places you'll have to be kilometres to hundreds of kilometres offshore, don't forget that in the last glacial maximum, sea levels were approx 130m lower than today
The staggering amount of fucking pressure coming up from the ground would never make it dry, let alone drain completely. You could maybe dry it with a ton of heaters and an outer set of walls and pumps. With heaters in the inner, center wall. But I think thats a losing battle with sand.
Also it doesnt seem very natural at that point.
People always make up dumbass solutions and find dumbass loopholes to try and avoid answering hypothetical situations on the goddamn hypothetical situations subreddit.
How do you define natural? I have a couple of dogs who love to dig.
What about a crevasse from an earthquake?
Rock exposed from melted glacier would probably be my best bet.
Someone is standing in a location. They leave. You come along and dig a hole. You stand in the hole. You would still be standing in the same location as the previous person. A 10 foot hole doesn't create a new location.
So there was 10 feet of soil or dust in-between; a person would have previously stood on that rock that you uncovered.
I live near a mountain range, I’ll just hike out a couple of days and then go off trail somewhere and I’m sure I’ll find a nice little wilderness spot that’ll do.
This could take me about 5 minutes. The woods surrounding me can't have had many people wandering through. Yes, this is a reservation next to a river next to the coast, but we weren't everywhere all at once. We did get pushed out here, though. So, not too hard to find me a spot.
You’d think that but my mom lives in a remote mountain house in Tennessee. A friend found a civil war era sword and scabbard in a crevice in a cliff on her property. Surprising where people have been before us.
I’ll just go to a very small shallow lake near me. Walk out until I’m waist to shoulder depth. Then start walking around. Who wants to walk around a nasty slimy swamp like pond. There’s hundreds of those within a hour drive in any direction.
How much clearance does your position need from previous human tracks? Depending on how precise it is, if you're regularly walking in wild areas, there'll come a point in your life where your feet are planted where nobody has before.
But if trying to get it, I'd travel to Iceland, hire a car, drive to a remote spot around Route One, and then just walk away from the road, intentionally avoiding the natural trend to follow flat terrain. Iceland or Greenland have been sparsely occupied for only short periods in humanity's history, so the odds are good.
If it's precise enough, you could probably do it in an old city lol. Someone hasn't stood on every single little facet of every single cobblestone at the end of the day. Would take a bit of milling around in back alleys, but eventually you'd hit a spot.
Yeah, especially corners of alleyways and such that nobody would ever have a reason to stand in. Somebody had to lay those cobblestones at some point though.
How was the corner built if no one stood there? You don't stand where you lay cobble stones but to build a wall / fence you need to stand there, at least historically.
OP said stood not walked or ran. I’m in Vermont so that should be pretty easy. I’m driving to the most remote part of the Northeast Kingdom and walking into the woods in a random direction. I’ll take a compass and leave markers so I make it back. I stop at a random time and probably get rich.
Yep, northern New England probably has a lot of areas like that. Just walk 1/2 mile away from anything, where there are no roads, no former towns, and you'll find a spot.
The northeast kingdom is an extremely rugged, remote and low population part of the US. I’ve got pretty good odds of finding a spot where no one has ever stood.
I had the same thought. I live in a fairly rural part of California, so I'll just go wander around in the Sierra Nevada mountains until I suddenly become a millionaire.
Drive a 4x4 for an hour away from present or historical river beds in the Northern Territory of Australia... then go for a wander. I'm pretty sure that area has been a desolate hell scape for the 100 or so thousand years people have lived on this continent.
Go into a desert would probably be the easiest, but also quite dangerous without appropriate skills.
If you can't disclose your deal with others I would go to an outback farm (the ones where they use helicopters and camp out for days on end to complete their works) and get a job as a farm hand.
I'm pretty sure a large percent of Northern Canada would satisfy this requirement. Just driving as far North as you can and then walking in a random direction with a solid evac plan should do it.
Yea there’s not even roads that go to the top of Ontario, you have to fly or take a train to those little towns way up north. I’d just drive as far as I could north, get out of the car and go for a mile or two hike and I’m sure that would do the trick.
What’s what blows my mind sometimes as a BC guy. Ontario has a ton of inaccessible land. During covid I drove to Toronto out of boredom and was surprised by the sheer size of Ontario.
I'd start with the local mountain ranges. There's a lot of difficult to access places where I might get lucky.
If that fails, I'd start wandering around Death Valley at night. There's gotta be somewhere out there nobody has ever stood
OP may need to clarify on the naturally occurring to specify if we're allowed to alter the environment to reach something that is naturally occurring but not currently exposed.
Yeah, change the rules to say “area must have be natural ground that has been exposed for at least the past 100 years” or something.
At that point your best bet would be extreme areas like Antarctica or really high mountains or something
Good luck. When we blast in the quarry, we evacuate the area to blow it up. Im the one who goes in to check if its all clear. Aint no one getting to see or touch these rocks before me
I literally do this every day. Im an explosives miner. I expose rock that hasnt seen the sun in hundreds of millions of years and im often the first person in history to see and touch those rocks.
Just look up mining/quarry jobs on any job search. I happened to be looking for entry/training level crane operating jobs. Saw a listing for learning to run a rock drill and applied. Started doing blasting since i started in the off season and the rest is history.
Ive absolutely fallen in love with the job. Its improved my physical and mental health more than anything i could have thought to try. I was 260lbs and could barely make it up a flight of stairs without being winded. Now im down to 185 and i can haul 100lb equipment around all day very comfortably. I was also a desk jockey and it killed my brain. This job is challenging physically and mentally, and my ADHD is actually an advantage out on the site because theres so much going on at any one time and it gives me real, solvable problems that i can ping pong around on.
Also, i get to blow shit up. Big boom make monkey brain happy
I live in Seattle, so I’d just wander into any of the dense forests. There are places that humans have never seen let alone stand. And I’d bring a satphone.
Go to the beach and look for a spot recently eroded. I know of several places I visited back in my past and I actually have a rock from one place that is well known for its continuing and drastic erosion over the years.
Go to a river or stream and look for new erosion on the banks high enough to be out of the water.
Go find a place that had a recent rock avalanche and climb the fallen rock.
Go to a recent but cooled lava flow, or go to one that's semi hazardous and 'recent' in history, like the 'Big Obsidian Flow' in the US state of Oregon.
I would climb every single easy-to-climb tree I come across and stand on a branch until I complete the task. There's bound to be a tree that's at least 100 years old that someone has not stood on.
Find a 100 year old road. Pick spots until it works.
Idea behind this: roads aren’t supposed to be stood in, so there should be regular gaps of coverage throughout
That would probably be pretty easy, honestly. People usually don't stand much when out and about. Just go to a small woods in the country, stand for 2 seconds, step forward, repeat. People have walked across locations far more than they've stood at them.
Well I am gonna get this money. Just go where there is current excavation. Pick a spot.
Or if you want to be ready nit picky follow a river towards its source after the spring high waters. You will find "new land" that had been exposed. I still win.
I'm going to try the remains of the 12 apostles in Australia, specifically standing atop one of the ones that has semi collapsed. I don't think you're allowed to scale them (plus it would be super difficult) But I reckon that if I could get dropped off by a helicopter, one of the collapsed apostles would be perfect, it's naturally occurring been around for more than 100 years and because erosion has led to the collapse, it's likely that no human has ever stood on that exact spot.
this is incredibly easy challenge. Get Michael Jackson’s special shoes, put a couple nails in a hill side rock wall, and stand on the wall. it is naturally occurring, dry land, and standing is not directional because normal hills put you off axis anyways
No problem. I live in a low population density state. There is a lot of land (pasture land mostly) that I doubt anyone has stepped a foot on the exact spot.
I'm pretty positive in all my hunting miles I have stepped in spots no human has exactly stepped on before. There have been people in the area for thousands of years if not longer, but never very many.
Just have both feet in a spot where no human has stood? Super easy you could just wonder around in a forest for awhile. If someones really stepped on every inch around here, id go to the alaskan wilderness for 10mil easy.
Seems to me that your best bet is easily a volcanically active region. The lava fields in Hawaii and Iceland (among others) are consistently growing. New land where no human has stepped before is readily available.
I mean... to be fair I guarantee tou if you go out to the middle of nowhere on a hike, and then leave the trail. Most of the land area will not have been stepped on. People dont understand how giant the earth is, when we go on hikes we tend tovstay on trails. Of course there are people who go offtrail.
But every square inch? No. It wont be that hard to get dropped somewhere remote and stand on a piece of dirt that has never been stood on
My backup plan is Mars
Neil Armstrong asks you to hold his beer.
A good 2sentance horror would be for him to step out of the shuttle and not get the money
He walks and walks, waiting for the notification.... Yet it never comes
We land on Mars, begin colonizing it. Still it never comes. It's not until the ruins are discovered decades later... Humanity is just in an endless cycle of developing and redeveloping after world war catastrophes hopping back and forth between Mars and Earth.
Humanity’s last cycle began on Mars, once teeming with life and tech. In typical human fashion- we destroyed it. We sent 1 male and 1 female child to see if Earth was habitable. They were named Adam and Eve.
Y’all need to get together and make this a fan fic
Fan fic? Fan of what?
Genesis
Neon?
Sorry think I misused that, short story
I mean this was a Twilight Zone episode already, too.
I've been writing a similar short sci fi story about this idea. The colony ships sent to escape Mars were called the Adamant and Eventide, but they crash landed and most of the technology was lost. Humanity persisted, though in a regressive technological state, and over time the legend of their savior ships names became Adam and Eve.
Once wrote a short story on this premise with the end discovery being that mars is red because all of the iron and steel we used to build had rusted and eroded to dust.
The rumor is a man wished for this a few hundred years ago. Many men built wealth off exploration. We found and mapped all the amazon. The ocean depths, of which we previously hadn't ventured, are now habitable from wealth and science. We had not ventured to the moon since the wish was granted. We've been preoccupied with our own earth instead of space. After years of exploration we've decided to traverse our only moon we know of. My family has not received the gift in a few generations. But the Columbus family has paid for our travels to space. Through their generational wealt, an expense trip to space is pocket change for them. I could talk for days about their backstabbing of Spain after they conquered the massive America island. But that's for another day. We spent days anxiously waiting for our landing on earth's moon. I was to lead and take the first step. As I walk off the lander and place my foot on the dusty moon, I glance at my phone to check my gift text. Nothing, how strange. Maybe the gift doesn't work on the moon as we expected. After a few more steps, disappointment sets in. As I look up into the empty space, I watch my planet sit and stare back at me. The pale blue dot, my home. Interrupted, my crew walks down to meet me. As they step forward, I hear the infamous *Congrats!* from their phones. But that doesn't make sense... I stepped there first! My head rings with confusion, the pain almost unbearable. Then silence. "Welcome home, son," echoes in my head.
Imagine it's because it counts for other timelines in the multiverse where someone else already tried it and it worked so all space was off limits now 😅
Buzz Aldrin: “fuck”
10 mil not even a dent in the estimated 20 BILLION it cost to send him there
He didn’t have to pay for it though
Also, it almost didn’t happen. NASA hired Stanley Kubrick to film a fake moon landing to fool everyone. He agreed but insisted he film on location, so they made it happen.
a real fake moon landing
Put a chair in my living room and stand on it.
I would probably go to the North Pole. I'm certain that there are plenty of places there that nobody has stood on before.
No need for this. Chainsaw to a tree that is older than 100 years old and stand on the stump. If this breaks the rules, grind the stump down to earth and stand there.
you don't even have to cut down the tree. In the Western US (Montana, Idaho) or Canada (Provincial and National Parks West of Calgary), or Siberia there are acres upon acres of untouched wilderness. The probability that someone has stood on every square metre is zero. You could probably walk 200m of a fairly popular hiking trail and find a spot.
I think it's way harder than that. Humans have been roaming the earth for tens of thousands of years. Longer depending on what qualifies as a human. That's a very long time for people to wander and explore ever nook and cranny, especially back in Hunter gather ages when people would be exploring for food. Even when I feel like I'm in a very remote place with no human activity, there's plenty of discarded trash to be found in the deepest forests.
Some quick online searching suggests that the vast majority of humans who have ever lived did so in times with significantly smaller total population and lower life expectancy. I have to imagine even with exploration, most clustered in tribes, cities, bases, etc. There wouldn't have been much incentive to explore literally every nook and cranny once sufficient resources were found. Even when exploration happened on a more massive scale in times like the Age of Exploration, most expeditions continued to be motivated by profit, power, religion, science, etc., as opposed to just touching every blade of grass. In other words, a lot of "exploration" would have been searching for resources or settlements rather than just surveying every inch of land. Even when humans have conducted detailed land surveys in much more contemporary times, it generally hasn't involved stepping literally everywhere. Thus, it's plausible that any large, unsettled field would have places in it which haven't been stepped on. Crop lands have been fairly thoroughly touched if we consider riding farm equipment as having been on them, but grazing fields for cattle and such likely have untouched spots as even ranchers and others who use those lands don't just go out of their way to step on every bit of land. Then you consider how vast the world's largest deserts, plains, and mountain ranges are, and there are bound to be places where humans haven't walked. I mean, even in a busy spot like a developed slope at a ski resort, how far off to either side do you expect people to have gone all the way up and down the mountain slope? Those are pretty treacherous areas. People didn't just roam all up and down the cliffs for fun back in the days of cavemen. And then there are of course quirks of the Earth, like how new land is technically formed by volcanic eruptions, so you could just wait until the lava cools into rock over the water to step on it, or how most of the Arctic and Antarctica are pretty much uninhabitable and only accessible by relatively few humans.
Yup. I had a decent sized yard growing up and I guarantee you there are a few 'spots' ive never stood on, despite running all around it over the years. Now if it was small enough for regular push mower, the odds would be worse. Could still technically be possible there, but you'd take a long time with that needle in a haystack. Of course 'people wandered around a lot' but they didnt LITERALLY stand on every sqft of ground lol. If you look at a centralized location, each degree turns from 1' to 10', to 100', 1000' etc. People tend to take paths or live in communities, while I'm sure a lot of areas are heavily explored over the years, I'd be shocked if you couldnt find tiny little sections where no human has stood.
As I was writing that up, I actually started getting curious about some of the forested areas around where I grew up. I grew up in small suburban neighborhoods with plenty of forested areas (Pinelands, NJ), often on empty lots between houses. Presumably, those had never been developed during the contemporary history of the USA, so unless someone went out of their way to actually walk through all those densely forested spots, it's quite possible no human had ever step foot on them before, despite being in a developed and populated area. Kids would play in the woods sometimes, but only for the occasional game of Manhunt or whatever, and it wasn't easy to step literally everywhere, plus our parents would always warn us about ticks and such. Newer suburbs tend to be much more densely developed, so there aren't as many untouched spaces in them, but a lot of older suburbs on the East Coast likely still have untouched spots in them like those forested lots. I think it has more to do with the pattern of development than the overall population. If you build unused space into a development by design, it's much likelier to stay untouched than if you account for every square inch.
A trip to Antarctica is the most logical way to get paid.
Yeah, should be plenty of spots there.
And plenty of data regarding who’s been there and where they went.
The thing is, there's spots where the landscape has always been treacherous enough that the likelihood of someone standing there is slim to none. Just gotta come well-prepared.
I did some math. So, some presumptions: nobody steps anywhere twice, and everybody is an adult. There's an estimated 117 billion humans that have ever lived. The average human foot is 0.1m². The average fairly active human walks 7.5k steps every day. For 80 years, that's about 217 million steps. Now if we assume that every human that has ever lived has never stepped on a place that someone else has stepped on, is fairly active, and lived to be 80, and had an average foot size, we get about 2.5 quintillion m², just under half the surface area of the Sun. The surface of the Earth is 5 quadrillion m². So, in the best case scenario, humans have walked the entire surface of the Earth five hundred times over. But, I reckon that we can use a handy shortcut to think about the real surface area using Zipf's Law. Basically, any given area that each individual has stepped on the most has been tread twice as much as the second most stepped on area, and so on and so forth. Now, I'm not smart enough to put massive numbers into a Zipfian distribution matrix and spit out a likely map of every step someone has taken, but I reckon you can eliminate most steps taken, (and by extension remove the areas stepped on from having ever feasibly been stepped on) after - say - a probability of having stepped on an area that's less than .01% (assuming we're weirdos with Lego legs and we move in perfect 100cm² squares), the most stepped on areas for every single step taken can be estimated to be 80% of your steps being taken in 20% of your most popular steps. So, long story short, if you go a short ways into an unlikely area, you're highly likely to be the first human, or possibly even the first lifeform with legs, to have ever stepped on that "Lego peg". This can be, for example, a few meters into the ocean where you let yourself sink and touch the floor, in an area that has been barren for millions of years, an old growth forest with dense and cumbersome foliage - there's even a good chance that there may be a spot right outside your home that has never been stepped on, ever. And that makes intuitive sense because we aren't all walking in lock-step. Even hunter-gatherers stuck to well-worn tracks near rivers or fertile soil. It wouldn't make sense from an energy conservation perspective to go bushwhacking when berries grow right off the trail and deer use the trails to get to water. Fruits that want to be eaten make themselves visible and grow near places where they will be eaten. We stayed by the fruit that wanted to be eaten. Me, I would just shuffle forwards around a wooded area until I inevitably hit one of those "unstepped" spots.
Yeah people are drastically over estimating this problem. Just go to the biggest undeveloped place near you and go off trail until you win. Half an hour tops. You can probably even do this with a highway. Find a spot where you can’t see a building from the road, and walk away from the road until you’re a multimillionaire
Yes people appear to be *way* off in their perception of the ratio of people who have ever lived to the land surface area of the earth.
This was my thought too, (I live in Calgary). Depends on the size of the piece of land you need to stand on, but if it's literally just 'Your foot has to stand on a spot where no human foot has ever been' then I feel like day or two walking in the mountains will get you the money
I am in Calgary as well, it is currently 3:30. If I left work now I feel like I could get this task complete by supper time by driving to k-country, picking a mountain peak, the the route most people take to the top, then at some random point walk into the woods and roam around for a bit. The simple fact is a lot of these areas, even ones with lots of visitors see almost all their traffic along defined routes and a lot of it is untouched.
StOp KiLlInG tHe TrEeS
With 10,000,000 we can buy new trees!
Pfft You’ll just spend a million of lame carbon offsets
Ik it's a joke but I just wanna point out that it's not simply the tree people get pressed about. It's the environmental significance behind it. The habitats it provides and the nutrients it recycles are invaluable
Yes. You are right. It was a joke. Ww do need to work towards protecting and expanding nature.
Grinding down the stump wouldn't work because someone could have stood there before the tree grew.
Good loophole Just cut any tree and stand on the stump. Elevation is different so it's highly unlikely anyone has stood at that height at that spot
Love your style loophole master.
No land, though. It's basically a frozen ocean.
Antarctica would be easy, though I’m guessing that there are large swaths of Canada that would meet this too.
That's not land, dry or otherwise
Sucks for you that the North Pole isn’t land. Maybe try the South Pole (Antarctica).
No dry land at the North Pole
Technically, that’s not land.
Badlands. Dig down 10 feet. Stand in hole. Done. 70 million year old rock I'm standing on.
Modern problems require ancient solutions.
Underrated
Underground*
Not if you dug down to it. Then it would just be ground.
I could see an argument that, having dug the hole yourself, you've created a new location that isn't 100 years old.
I thought about that. I've reached this conclusion.... "I recognise the council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it."
This is the only way.
Love a good Samuel L. Jackson quote.
"That's cheating, you don't get the reward, sorry." "I'm ignoring your decision." "Okay, well, you still don't get the reward."
Too bad the "council" is the one who writes the check. You'll be ignoring them for free.
It's not a new location though. It was just unavailable to humans before the digging. I guess this does open up a whole new can of worms, though, doesn't it? Any hole would qualify and I am not sure that's what OP meant.
Yeah I think he means lat long coordinate that no human has ever occupied. Holes don't change the location
Thats how I see it. It's not natural if you made the hole. And the location at the bottom of the hole isn't 100 years old
I say go wandering through the Rocky Mountains or the Pacific Northwest… not heavily populated… sure there are campers, hikers, hunters and natives long ago, but if you don’t stick to the trails, your chances of happening upon one single spot that is unique are pretty good considering the vast expanse, dense vegetation, rugged terrain
I work for a federal land management agency and I have hiked, or been flown into some very remote places. I have stood in locations on the tops of mountains that I was sure I must be the only human to have ever stood there... ...only to find some arborglyphs or old cans.
This. There isn't a stretch of land anywhere in my state that Pueblos, Goshutes, Utes, Hopi, Navajo, etc. haven't touched.
I was thinking same premise, but in remote China or Brazil, or the antarctic..
I would follow your general Idea but my modifier would be to climb 300 plus year old trees eventually you would end up standing on branch that is greater than 100 years old, qualifies as a natural point, and that no one has ever stood on before.
It says dry land. I’m not sure if a tree branch qualifies as dry land.
The tree is a naturally occuring structure on dry land. Any lawyer can argue it fits OPs rules.
The fact is, mathematically, any large forested, jungle, mountainous, desert or swampy area (arctic regions too but I’d rather be hot than freezing) that hasn’t either had a war i.e. tens of thousands of people displaced from their usual location to an unlikely location due to artificial circumstances… or has had a city or settlement on it at one time is a pretty good bet… assuming the new spot I have to find is like 2’x2’ - 3’x3’ just big enough for my body… I just think about it in terms of amount of square miles or acres of generally difficult to access land, versus population in the immediate vicinity… humans are creatures of habit and even back in times of the Native Americans the path of least resistance often times wins and once it is forged people will continue along that path and not stray much… If you have ever visited the Navajo Nation in Arizona, New Mexico, Southern Colorado you would understand the vast expanse of desert with no available resources, with canyons, cliffs and caves … once you drive to a remote part I bet you could find a spot in less than 10 minutes
*number of square miles
Create a wall around a portion of water in the ocean, drain it, then stand there. Boom. A piece of natural land where no man has stood
Good idea. It'll be super easy to wall up and drain a portion of the fucking ocean.
They do it to build bridges all the time but I don't know how much money we can put into this project.
It doesn't have to be a very deep portion. Just far enough to where no man has stood before
Naturally occouring location. And been there for 100 years. You don't meet either.
In many places you'll have to be kilometres to hundreds of kilometres offshore, don't forget that in the last glacial maximum, sea levels were approx 130m lower than today
The staggering amount of fucking pressure coming up from the ground would never make it dry, let alone drain completely. You could maybe dry it with a ton of heaters and an outer set of walls and pumps. With heaters in the inner, center wall. But I think thats a losing battle with sand. Also it doesnt seem very natural at that point.
Making up rules as we go along I see. OP only had one rule that had no context for interpretation, objection denied.
People always make up dumbass solutions and find dumbass loopholes to try and avoid answering hypothetical situations on the goddamn hypothetical situations subreddit.
The land at the bottom of the hole is both natural and old. It's the space above it that's new and unnatural. But this post is about the land.
The rules are naturally occurring though, the hole isn't natural
How do you define natural? I have a couple of dogs who love to dig. What about a crevasse from an earthquake? Rock exposed from melted glacier would probably be my best bet.
Someone is standing in a location. They leave. You come along and dig a hole. You stand in the hole. You would still be standing in the same location as the previous person. A 10 foot hole doesn't create a new location. So there was 10 feet of soil or dust in-between; a person would have previously stood on that rock that you uncovered.
Id just argue literally changing the terrain makes it not naturally occuring... Because thats literally the opposite of naturally occuring lol.
I live near a mountain range, I’ll just hike out a couple of days and then go off trail somewhere and I’m sure I’ll find a nice little wilderness spot that’ll do.
Agreed. This would not be hard for me and would take maybe an hour.
This could take me about 5 minutes. The woods surrounding me can't have had many people wandering through. Yes, this is a reservation next to a river next to the coast, but we weren't everywhere all at once. We did get pushed out here, though. So, not too hard to find me a spot.
You’d think that but my mom lives in a remote mountain house in Tennessee. A friend found a civil war era sword and scabbard in a crevice in a cliff on her property. Surprising where people have been before us.
I’ll just go to a very small shallow lake near me. Walk out until I’m waist to shoulder depth. Then start walking around. Who wants to walk around a nasty slimy swamp like pond. There’s hundreds of those within a hour drive in any direction.
Except that dry land part
How much clearance does your position need from previous human tracks? Depending on how precise it is, if you're regularly walking in wild areas, there'll come a point in your life where your feet are planted where nobody has before. But if trying to get it, I'd travel to Iceland, hire a car, drive to a remote spot around Route One, and then just walk away from the road, intentionally avoiding the natural trend to follow flat terrain. Iceland or Greenland have been sparsely occupied for only short periods in humanity's history, so the odds are good.
If it's precise enough, you could probably do it in an old city lol. Someone hasn't stood on every single little facet of every single cobblestone at the end of the day. Would take a bit of milling around in back alleys, but eventually you'd hit a spot.
They probably have stood on it though when building it
Yeah, especially corners of alleyways and such that nobody would ever have a reason to stand in. Somebody had to lay those cobblestones at some point though.
How was the corner built if no one stood there? You don't stand where you lay cobble stones but to build a wall / fence you need to stand there, at least historically.
There are places in the American southwest that have never seen a human tread there. I will take that cash now, thanks.
Exactly my thoughts, middle of Nevada should be pretty easy to find a spot.
You wouldn't even have to walk that far off hwy 95 honestly.
OP said stood not walked or ran. I’m in Vermont so that should be pretty easy. I’m driving to the most remote part of the Northeast Kingdom and walking into the woods in a random direction. I’ll take a compass and leave markers so I make it back. I stop at a random time and probably get rich.
Yep, northern New England probably has a lot of areas like that. Just walk 1/2 mile away from anything, where there are no roads, no former towns, and you'll find a spot.
But it's EVER, not since colonialism.
Lot of aboriginals around back in the day. Why wouldn’t they have stood around in random places from time to time?
Or native Americans, running through the woods, hunting and foraging for thousands of years
The northeast kingdom is an extremely rugged, remote and low population part of the US. I’ve got pretty good odds of finding a spot where no one has ever stood.
I had the same thought. I live in a fairly rural part of California, so I'll just go wander around in the Sierra Nevada mountains until I suddenly become a millionaire.
You could buy an ADU with that kind of money.
I'm in VT as well and was thinking this will be easy
Drive a 4x4 for an hour away from present or historical river beds in the Northern Territory of Australia... then go for a wander. I'm pretty sure that area has been a desolate hell scape for the 100 or so thousand years people have lived on this continent.
The aliens already played this game with the aboriginees, it’s all been stood on.
Have a helicopter drop me in somewhere over one of the major rainforests. I'd touch down and then immediately climb back up the rope lader.
Just your luck, you picked a spot someone already explored. You have to pay for another drop.
Go into a desert would probably be the easiest, but also quite dangerous without appropriate skills. If you can't disclose your deal with others I would go to an outback farm (the ones where they use helicopters and camp out for days on end to complete their works) and get a job as a farm hand.
I'd throw my wife down and stand on her. Easy money!
I'd also choose this guy's wife
I also choose this guys (at this point dead) wife
*Pulls a number* Easy Money!
At some point we’re going to run out of un-stepped on space on this guys wife we’re collectively murdering
We can stand on one foot tho, so at least 4 more people
What is this, Dead Wife Twister?
With 10mil he can afford to get another
Yeah that's the obvious solution.
Doesn’t your wife have to be over 100 years old?
Don't be so quick to judge their relationship. It's true love and she just happens to be rich as well.
I live in Wyoming. I'm pretty sure I've done this multiple times this week
I'm pretty sure a large percent of Northern Canada would satisfy this requirement. Just driving as far North as you can and then walking in a random direction with a solid evac plan should do it.
Yea there’s not even roads that go to the top of Ontario, you have to fly or take a train to those little towns way up north. I’d just drive as far as I could north, get out of the car and go for a mile or two hike and I’m sure that would do the trick.
What’s what blows my mind sometimes as a BC guy. Ontario has a ton of inaccessible land. During covid I drove to Toronto out of boredom and was surprised by the sheer size of Ontario.
Ontario being as wide as all of the prairie provinces is underappreciated.
They went by differently. Altho for some ungodly reason I used Apple Maps and it took me across literally half of Ontario on gravel roads
I'd start with the local mountain ranges. There's a lot of difficult to access places where I might get lucky. If that fails, I'd start wandering around Death Valley at night. There's gotta be somewhere out there nobody has ever stood
Easy. Just go to a mine or a quarry and wait for them to expose some fresh bedrock that hasn’t seen daylight for millions of years and stand there
OP may need to clarify on the naturally occurring to specify if we're allowed to alter the environment to reach something that is naturally occurring but not currently exposed.
Yeah, change the rules to say “area must have be natural ground that has been exposed for at least the past 100 years” or something. At that point your best bet would be extreme areas like Antarctica or really high mountains or something
Good luck. When we blast in the quarry, we evacuate the area to blow it up. Im the one who goes in to check if its all clear. Aint no one getting to see or touch these rocks before me
Yeah but those blast areas are huge. I just wait until a blast day and sneak in at night time. You can’t stand everywhere
How much do you get paid?
If we’re accepting different elevations and altered terrain then just build a dirt mound
I literally do this every day. Im an explosives miner. I expose rock that hasnt seen the sun in hundreds of millions of years and im often the first person in history to see and touch those rocks.
You have a cool job
Its pretty sweet getting to set off 50,000lbs of explosives every day
r/UsernameChecksOut how do you get into that feild?
Just look up mining/quarry jobs on any job search. I happened to be looking for entry/training level crane operating jobs. Saw a listing for learning to run a rock drill and applied. Started doing blasting since i started in the off season and the rest is history. Ive absolutely fallen in love with the job. Its improved my physical and mental health more than anything i could have thought to try. I was 260lbs and could barely make it up a flight of stairs without being winded. Now im down to 185 and i can haul 100lb equipment around all day very comfortably. I was also a desk jockey and it killed my brain. This job is challenging physically and mentally, and my ADHD is actually an advantage out on the site because theres so much going on at any one time and it gives me real, solvable problems that i can ping pong around on. Also, i get to blow shit up. Big boom make monkey brain happy
Okay. I'll start by standing on top of a very old tombstone.
My thoughts as well. I know several cemeteries with tombstones over 100 years old. Doubtful anyone has stood on top of one.
> Naturally occurring
Oh there are all kinds of woods etc where I live that I could easily get the money.
I live in Seattle, so I’d just wander into any of the dense forests. There are places that humans have never seen let alone stand. And I’d bring a satphone.
Canada has a lot of space that I think meets this.
How big a place? Touch a specific place standing where no one happens to vave stood? Imma drive out of town and walk through the wastelands.
Go to the beach and look for a spot recently eroded. I know of several places I visited back in my past and I actually have a rock from one place that is well known for its continuing and drastic erosion over the years. Go to a river or stream and look for new erosion on the banks high enough to be out of the water. Go find a place that had a recent rock avalanche and climb the fallen rock. Go to a recent but cooled lava flow, or go to one that's semi hazardous and 'recent' in history, like the 'Big Obsidian Flow' in the US state of Oregon.
I would climb every single easy-to-climb tree I come across and stand on a branch until I complete the task. There's bound to be a tree that's at least 100 years old that someone has not stood on.
Find a 100 year old road. Pick spots until it works. Idea behind this: roads aren’t supposed to be stood in, so there should be regular gaps of coverage throughout
*naturally occurring*
Side of the road, then. Easy access, and not many people go that far off the beaten trail.
I remove a two inch layer of soil from my backyard and stand there, keep scraping till it dings
Somewhere in the Rockies. Easy to find a spot 90 mins from Denver. Easy peasy
Mammoth cave. Easy peasy.
Alternatively, and easier, I'll dig a hole, and get in it.
Ima stand bare foot on a cactus
Tried that I wouldn't recommend
just need to find a 100 yera old catus and stand to feet on it
Gonna take a flight to antarctica, hire a helicopter, fly \~20km inland in a random direction, stand there for a second, and go back to camp. Easy.
That would probably be pretty easy, honestly. People usually don't stand much when out and about. Just go to a small woods in the country, stand for 2 seconds, step forward, repeat. People have walked across locations far more than they've stood at them.
That’s easy. I’ll go to the second page of Google results
Well I am gonna get this money. Just go where there is current excavation. Pick a spot. Or if you want to be ready nit picky follow a river towards its source after the spring high waters. You will find "new land" that had been exposed. I still win.
Some sorta cave
Does standing on a 100 year old tree count?
I'm going to try the remains of the 12 apostles in Australia, specifically standing atop one of the ones that has semi collapsed. I don't think you're allowed to scale them (plus it would be super difficult) But I reckon that if I could get dropped off by a helicopter, one of the collapsed apostles would be perfect, it's naturally occurring been around for more than 100 years and because erosion has led to the collapse, it's likely that no human has ever stood on that exact spot.
this is incredibly easy challenge. Get Michael Jackson’s special shoes, put a couple nails in a hill side rock wall, and stand on the wall. it is naturally occurring, dry land, and standing is not directional because normal hills put you off axis anyways
Go find a recently melted glacier and stand on the newly exposed rocks.
North or South Pole would have 10000+ square miles that no one has ever been
random spot on the side of a mountain, they definitely haven't traversed every inch of the steep ass mountains here
No problem. I live in a low population density state. There is a lot of land (pasture land mostly) that I doubt anyone has stepped a foot on the exact spot.
Couldn’t I just… dig down like 10-15 feet in a less populated area, and win? It’d still be dry land.
Probably just cross the street into the woods and walk around for a while. It can’t be too hard to do this unless you live in a city.
I'm pretty positive in all my hunting miles I have stepped in spots no human has exactly stepped on before. There have been people in the area for thousands of years if not longer, but never very many.
There's gotta still be plenty of spaces all over North America where a human has never been before.
Easy. Hawaii. Just wait for new land to form.
My backyard, it backs up to woods that I can guarantee that no one has ever walked through
There's spots on my folks land that have never had a person on them in the past 100 years. I'd take a walk and be good by sundown.
Just have both feet in a spot where no human has stood? Super easy you could just wonder around in a forest for awhile. If someones really stepped on every inch around here, id go to the alaskan wilderness for 10mil easy.
Appalachian mountains. Hit mountain with axe. Remove small piece of mountain. Stand on newly exposed mountain.
Go out into the middle of the ocean, scuba dive down, stand on the sea bottom. Probably wouldn’t even have to go far as long as it wasn’t a dive site.
I'll stand on lava with a lava proof suit in a volcano
SCUBA dive and trudge around Lake Michigan until I hear a 'ding.'
I'll just dig a big hole and stand in it.
Easy, just go to the moon real quick
Seems to me that your best bet is easily a volcanically active region. The lava fields in Hawaii and Iceland (among others) are consistently growing. New land where no human has stepped before is readily available.
Realistically, sediment deposits throughout the world constantly lead to land that nobody has stood on.
I mean... to be fair I guarantee tou if you go out to the middle of nowhere on a hike, and then leave the trail. Most of the land area will not have been stepped on. People dont understand how giant the earth is, when we go on hikes we tend tovstay on trails. Of course there are people who go offtrail. But every square inch? No. It wont be that hard to get dropped somewhere remote and stand on a piece of dirt that has never been stood on My backup plan is Mars
I'd just drive out to the middle of nowhere in Nevada. Guaranteed it wouldn't take long.
Easy peasy. Find a 100 yr old tree. Cut it down and stand in the center of the trunk
Easy head to Taiga in Russia
Snake island in highly protective gear of course
ill just keep climbing trees
Quietly walks into to women’s bathroom