So I could contact the Nobel Prize in Literature." In this tale, the protagonist proposes a bet to his friends: he could relate to any of the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the planet (the population in 1930) using only five individuals.įriends were proposing characters to him, and the protagonist got to link everyone to reasoning such as "I know a friend who is a tennis fan, who meets a person who plays tennis with the director of an international tournament who meets the King of Sweden, a tennis fan, and who also knows the latest Nobel Prize in Literature because he has given him the prize. It was an unthinkable theory for a philosopher from Ancient Greece or a thinker from the Middle Ages because then it took months to travel the world, and contacts were very limited. That's why it didn't come until the 20th century when the train, ships, and planes, or the phone, already allowed people from all over the planet to be connected. The Six Degrees of Separation Theory could only be formulated in a globalized world. But because the theory reaches a billion people and on Earth lives far fewer people, even if we eliminate common friends we could still be within that figure.
In practice, this is impossible because family and friends have many acquaintances in common. Of course, you will soon have seen the first weakness of the theory: it assumes that each person knows 100 others who are completely different from those of other family and friends. The sixth and final grade would cover 1 billion people or a billion people.
If everyone knows another 100, we have 100 million, and on a fifth level, 10 billion people, more than 7.7 billion people on Earth. Those 10,000 people know another 100 each, so the next grade covers 1,000,000 people. Each of them knows 100 other people, so with only two degrees of contacts (your friends and friends of your friends), you can contact 100x100 x, 10,000 people.
Now with the Internet, this number has grown, but before social media, that was about the average. Part of the idea that each person knows on average about 50 or 100 people, counting family, friends, acquaintances, etc. That's why it's called Six Degrees of Separation. The Six Degrees of Separation Theory states that it is possible to contact anyone on the planet, using a maximum of five intermediaries.
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