This is my first task, so I thought I’d have a good old crack at it.

As a partially-practicing solipsist I feel duty bound to argue that nowhere, as a concept, cannot exist. My basis for this is simply that for there to be ‘nowhere’ there has to be a ‘somewhere’, and contrary to popular belief, that doesn’t exist either. For those unfamiliar with the works of Gorgias, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Berkeley and Wittgenstein, Solipsism is, in essence, a belief that only I exist. Everything else exists purely as a construct of my imagination. Descartes was the original brainbox to work out that, “Cogito Ergo Sum: I think, therefore I am”, stating that the only thing he could be sure of was that he, as a doubter, was a cognitive thinker. Beyond this, however, was all a bit fuzzy. Berkeley steps in here with “Esse est percipi: To be, is to be perceived.” Now, of course Berkeley is presuming that there is something else out there to perceive him, and even though we all know how terribly wrong he was about this, I’m gonna run with it. So, if all I can every really know is me, and if I can only ever be sure that what is (apparently) around me is real is through my perception (that is, what may be considered as primary experience of phenomena), then the only stuff that could possibly exist is what I can see. The comedian Bill Bailey sums it up better than I ever could:

“So, if I leave the room, you cease to exist, and if you leave the room, I cease to exist… But what if I bend over to do up my shoelace and my arse hangs out the door? Does my arse then cease to exist? Or do I cease to exist and my arse goes off to another bar on its own?”

Moving on from that little conundrum, I have so far established (I hope) that the only stuff that can exist, is the stuff that I can see. What I see are Things, but what I don’t see are noThings (like what I did there?!).



In the same way, places that I can see are somewhere, and everywhere else is the opposite… nowhere!
So now to find the middle of nowhere.
This picture, not to scale, illustrates my idea of the boundaries that nowhere inhabits.



The more eagle-eyed of you will by now have noticed that if everything other than what I see and experience in the immediate is nothing then that nothing would retain no dimension or temporal placement, and would in fact be infinite. But infinity is not a word I understand, so for the sake of this exercise I’m going to imagine that the earth retains its shape because of the obvious curvature extending from beneath my feet. So, as the above diagram shows, not to scale, we can easily work out where the middle of nowhere is by finding the mid point between the furthest I can see, and the back of my head via a straight line all the way round the globe.



To work out the maths of this little problem, first we work out how far the human eye can see along (for ease) sea level, taking into account the curvature of the earth. I had my friends over at Google help me out with this one, and apparently the radius of the earth is approximately 3947 miles or 20,840,000 feet. If we add this into our little equation using a tangent from the edge of a sphere to create a right angle triangle, you’ll see that if:

A = 20,840,000 feet
C = 20,840,004 feet
Then, B2 = 20,840,0042 – 20,840,0002 = 166,720,000
Making B = 12,912 feet or 2.44 miles.
(See http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2000-08/967050923.Es.r.html for more details)

The circumference of the earth at sea level is 24,480 miles (thanks to my other old pal, yahoo http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070828125741AAC08Sm) so all we need to do is take 2.44 miles from 24,480 and halve the result, giving 12,238.78.

To conclude:
I have hereby proven that to the average solipsist, who believes only in the certainty of himself and that of the planet he stands on (oh and looking out over the sea), the middle of nowhere lies exactly 12,238.78 miles in a straight line directly behind his head.

I now dare all to prove me wrong.
Of course, to do this you must first prove you, yourself exist. Good luck.

Neuromancer