They say that everything has been found in this world. They say that there isn’t a spot of land that has gone uncharted, unclaimed, and un-fornicated on. Well, this may be true. But that is why all the REAL explorers left Earth ages ago in favor of the increasingly creepy planet of the INTERNET!

But lately, even the internet is becoming well traveled territory. Each new advance in technology can certainly be viewed as a step backwards. Think about shortlinks.  Individuals can leave from the port of Twitter and zap their way over to a blog post about large breasts on celebrities without having to type in the potentially embarrassing “…/o-m-g-check-out-these-breastsicles/.” Own up to your desire to visit that webpage! Don’t mask your journey!

Well, some of us are still old fashioned when it comes to virtually traversing the internet. Some of us remember the days of old, where you had to click multiple links to find out information, rather than arrive at a yahoo! answers page after searching google for “how do u be com pregnart? i am 14 year an school.”

So, ladies and gents, I am on a mission to bring back some of the old mystique of internet traffic. I am on a mission to connect information without the use of a search engine. I am on a mission to leave one page and ultimately arrive at another entirely different page by only clicking links.

My port and my destination will change each time, but my method of travel will remain the same: the ever-debatable information giant known as WIKIPEDIA.

So I’m donning my best explorer’s hat and setting sail! I will connect any two pages on Wikipedia using 7 clicks or less. And I will document my travels in the vein of all the great explorers.

So, get ready. Here’s our first journey:

• Port: Ranger 9
• Destination: Nazareth discography

Today we sail from the page on Ranger 9 towards the discography of the Scottish hard rock band, Nazareth. Ranger 9’s page tells me that it apparently was an unmanned NASA spacecraft “designed to achieve a lunar impact trajectory and to transmit high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface during the final minutes of flight up to impact.”

I tell myself that this is not a journey for the faint of heart. Our dock, Ranger 9, is laden with extremely technical mumbo-jumbo. I must admit that terms such as “Atlas 204D” and “Agenda B 6007 boosters” add a definite amount of coolness to the page. I, for one, am scientifically inept, and therefore left imagining that both of those are death-ray lasers that can also turn into Rocket Boots. But cool or not, like rocky seas to a ship, they make me a bit worried about the journey. After my quick browse of the page, there was no mention of how “Out of This World” Nazareth’s guitar riffs are. So, it won’t be easy, but we’ll get there.

1 click on “High-gain antenna” brought me to a much more boring page about…well…antennas. Despite its bland, photo-less page, it gave me an opening I immediately shot towards: a link to the page on Earth.

Ahh, Earth. Just like the Earth that isn’t just confined to the internet, the Wikipedia page on the planet we’ve all come to love is filled with images. There are illustrations of the milky way, images from space, and this number:

Which is filled with circles and lines and words that no explorer has the time to read. I pressed on, waiting for my moment. Next to the first photograph ever taken of what is called “an Earthrise,” there was information about why we call it “Earth.” I spotted an opportunity. Apparently those Anglo-Saxons had a word called “erda” that meant ground or soil. That word became “eorthe” in Old English (aka the language with words that always look like someone just smacked a keyboard), and “erthe” in Middle English.

“Middle English.” Something was telling me to click that link. My guess is that it made me think of England, which is close to Scotland, which happens to be where the band Nazareth is from. Either that or it was the ghost of Chaucer trying to get more fans of his Canterbury Tales (AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN, CHAUCEY).

For better or worse, I took the bait and clicked Middle English. Lo and behold! In a sentence about how the Northumbrian dialect was developing into Scots language, there was a link to Scotland!

I felt as if I spotted land. But, it still could have just been mountain of garbage, or a fat guy in an inner tube or something. So, I tried to curb my excitement.

On the page for Scotland, there is a section on culture

Which has a lovely picture of a piper playing in what looks like a parking lot of a construction site (as is Scottish Custom, I assume). The piper pointed me towards a page on Music of Scotland. “YES,” I thought. “I have arrived!”

This is the sentence that proved it was, in fact, land I spotted back at the link to Scotland: “by the 1970s bands such as the Average White Band, Nazareth, and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band began to have international success.”

As much as I wanted to learn more about “the Sensational Alex Harvey Band,” I knew it was just a beautiful siren call. I knew I had to advance to the page on Nazareth, which, of course, pointed me towards the page on Nazareth’s discography – thus completing our journey. And in exactly 7 clicks too!

Epilogue:
I am going to attempt to do each journey in 7 clicks or less. Currently, I get the starting and ending pages by clicking on the “Random Article” link on Wikipedia and using the first two articles I come across that are in English and that have at least 1 link to another Wikipedia page.

If you would like to suggest two pages for me to forge a path between, feel free! I love a good challenge. Just make sure you follow the criteria listed above: it must be in English (since I’m not multi-lingual. Sorry), and it must have at least 1 link to another Wikipedia page (this is just to avoid the journey ending in a dead-end). I look forward to traveling with you again.

Happy Trails,

- Mike