Will the project ever be completed? Considering it took 10 years to visit 25% of the points, a linear prediction would give a positive answer, but would also suggest a completion in the year 2036, which means another 30 years of hunting unvisited points. Well, some variables make this calculation unreliable. The last remaining unvisited point might be hard to conquer (e.g. imagine trying to visit a confl uence in a military compound in North Korea) or just unattractive to visit (as most of Antarctica seems to be with currently only 5 out of 1718 primary points visited). On the other hand, the project has gained publicity and attracted a rising number of active members. If the whole world population would participate, I guess that all points can be reached within in a couple of days. A realistic forecast can be made by looking at the past. Figure 4 shows how the project developed over the last 10 years. While the number of total visits is still increasing, there is a downward tendency for the number of first visits of confluence points over the last five years. If the downswing continues, a completion in 30 years is doubtful.

Here is my idea how one can break all records and visit 360 new confuences in one day (350 of them being secondary): circle the South Pole at the 89° latitude circle on a snowmobile. If you take the required pictures of the confluences (being 1.95 km apart) on-the-fly, the 700km journey can be done on an average speed of 30km per hour. But I guess that realisation face a lot of logistical challenges and also involve some costs.

In conclusion I can say that it is currently an open question whether the project goal will be met one day or not. May this article contribute to the awareness of confluences and help to answer this open question someday with: “project completed!”.

Womersley, R (2005), Distributing points on the sphere Homepage Articles School of Mathematics, UNSW,
http://www.maths.unsw.edu. au/school/articles/me100.html