Sixes are structural.

“The comb of the hive-bee, as far as we can see, is absolutely perfect in economizing labour and wax.” -Charles Darwin

Euclid recognized that the hexagon shape makes most efficient use of material in space.

The Pantheon dome is an Roman architectural wonder made possible by its interior honeycomb structural ribbing.

Modern man-made honeycomb materials are widely used in the aerospace industry because they offer high strength-to-weight ratios. Speaking of aerospace, the Cassini spacecraft photographed the north pole of Saturn in 2013 and humanity got a glimpse of an enormous persistent hexagonal pattern in this gas giant.

NASA/JPL/SSI

I have had a series of epiphanies recently regarding the structure of the Earth. It all started with my post Deep Challenges when I found patterns of sixes in the measures of the highest and largest mountains, the deepest place on Earth, and Easter Island.

Incidentally, a line from Easter Island to the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square incredibly bisects the whole Vatican complex. The name “Easter Island” was given by the island’s first recorded European visitor, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered it on Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722. WTF?

On the flipside, Urban Asplund discovered that Africa is 66.6° wide from its westernmost point in Dakar to the easternmost projection of Somalia. Africa is also 66.6° high from its southernmost point to the place where the line running due north hits the Mediterranean, near Benghazi.

The Earth’s axis is also tilted 66.6° (90 – 23.4 = 66.6) from the ecliptic and travels along it at 66600 miles/hour (99.9%).

South America is 66.6° long along a north-south path that passes through Mt. Aconcagua, its highest peak. Urban Asplund discovered this one too.

The distance between the tips of South America and Africa is ~6660 km.

North America is 66.66° wide from the tip of Florida at Key Largo to the farthest place the US reaches into the Bearing Straight, Yesterday Island. The adjacent island, Tomorrow Island, is owned by Russia and is only a stone’s throw away on the other side of the International Dateline. Strange but true! Sea level changes over time, the Earth’s continents move, land subsides and uplifts. All of these correlations are the situation right NOW.

Eurasia is also structured with sixes but this time the measurement is 6066 nautical miles from the southwesternmost point in Europe, the lighthouse at Cape St. Vincent, to the symbolic Haicang bridge in Xiamen China. The lines goes very close to, but not perfectly through Astana, Kazakhstan.

“Cape St. Vincent was already sacred ground in Neolithic times, as standing menhirs in the neighborhood attest. The ancient Greeks called it Ophiussa (Land of Serpents), inhabited by the Oestriminis and dedicated here a temple to Heracles. The Romans called it Promontorium Sacrum (or Holy Promontory). They considered it a magical place where the sunset was much larger than anywhere else. They believed the sun sank here hissing into the ocean, marking the edge of their world.” -Source

That’s apropos considering how I previously connected snakes and sixes in Serpent Wisdom.

In 1541, European traders (mainly Portuguese) first visited Xiamen, which was China’s main port in the nineteenth century for exporting tea. Funny that they were Portuguese, considering where the opposite endpoint is in this measure of the maximum width of Eurasia. The Portuguese really got around back then!

All these sixes remind me of something I noticed in the microcosm of matter itself. Every proton in the universe is made of 2 up quarks and 1 down quark. The charge on the up quark is +0.666666… and the charge on the down quark is -0.333333…, netting a charge of +0.999999…, polarized oppositely to the electron. The neutron has 1 up quark and 2 down quarks as you can see, netting a zero charge.

In the macrocosm, I noticed the equation that governs Earth’s gravitational sphere of influence is all threes. The Sun’s mass is 333000 times greater than Earth’s mass. AU stands for astronomical unit, the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun.

Repetitive sixes and threes suggest triangles. This leads me finally to another epiphany (e-π-Φ-ny) I had, that the infinitesimal gap in what would otherwise be a perfect Pythagorean triangle connecting e, π, and Φ suggests the question, “Why can’t we ever rationalize the transcendental?”

This mystery is drawn to scale

Logically, the answer is that it is an irreducible eternal mystery, and I’m down with that.