Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of friends that has no more than five representatives. Most of us are familiar with the concept of six degrees of separation - the idea is that anyone in the planet can be connected to anyone else in just six steps. If you just take a look at the numbers, the six degrees of separation idea seems pretty reasonable. Assuming everyone knows at least 44 people, and that each of those people knows an entirely new 44 people, and so on, the maths shows that in just six steps everyone could be connected to 7.26 billion people.