[c7b]

It's in no way a meaningful solution. If you're settling for a resolution, you don't need a ball-rolling analogy. We already know the length of a given coastline at given resolutions (ignoring the constant changing of the coastline itself). What's practically not feasible is getting every country on earth to agree on the right resolutions. And that's for good reasons, because the desired accuracy depends on many factors, some situational and harder to quantify than just size of the enclosed land mass.

[jstanley]

You don't need anyone else to agree on the resolution.

You can just pick one when you are doing some work that requires knowing the length of the coastline.

I wasn't trying to say that we should all agree on a universal definition and use that for everything? That would be insane. I was just providing a way to get a stable answer for the length of the perimeter of a fractal area.

[c7b]

Why would it be insane? We have globally accepted answers for the area of each country (modulo territorial disputes, geological changes and similar). One would expect the same thing to be possible for the circumference. So to most people it will be a surprise that it is, in fact, impossible. It is mathematically impossible because the problem is underdetermined, and it is practically impossible because agreeing internationally on how to fully determine the mathematical problem seems unrealistic.