More Food For Thought

From Harper's Magazine

Harper's is well-known for its monthly index of fascinating statistics. The list below is not from the index, though: it is from an article about the scale of human experience in the twentieth century. The findings are both disturbing and awe-inspiring.

85,000,000,000	Number of people who have ever lived
79,200,000,000	Number of those who are now dead
5,800,000,000	Number of people still living
2030	Year in which the population of living Americans will equal that of dead Americans
138,000	Number of people drowned in Bangladesh on April 30, 1991
69	Number of suns in the Milky Way galaxy - for each living human
9	Number of galaxies for each living human
100,000,000,000	Number of suns in each of those galaxies
15,000,000,000	Minimum age of the universe
8,000	Breaking waves on any seashore - each day
North America	Equivalent size of the total area covered by foam on those waves at any given moment
Insects	A class of animals that outweighs the human species in aggregate
10,000	Number of human languages
500	Generations of humans since the beginning of civilization
7,500	Generations of humans since the emergence of Homo sapiens
125,000	Generations since the emergence of the first Homo species
110	Hours required for the human population to grow by one million
100,000,000	Street children in the world
23,000,000	Refugees
1,000,000	People who work on freeze trawlers
100,000,000	People who live in countries of which they are not citizens
2,000,000	Children who die of diarrhea, each year
800,000	Children who die of measles, each year
7,000,000	Ukranians killed by Stalin
1,000,000	Cambodians killed by Pol Pot
21,000,000	People killed by flu in 1918
25,000	Parking spaces at Los Angeles Airport
27,000	People killed by a seismic seawave in Japan on June 15, 1898
3,600,000	Age of earliest known human footprints, in years
1,400,000	U.S. airline passengers, each day

And, finally, these thoughts:

Ted Bundy, who could not understand the attention paid to his serial killings.

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."
Joseph Stalin

"Not so much as the weight of an ant in earth or heaven escapes from the Lord."
The Koran

Source: Dillard, Annie. 1998. The wreck of time: Taking our century's measure. Harper's Magazine 296(1772): 51-56.

More Food For Thought

Harper's is well-known for its monthly index of fascinating statistics. The list below is not from the index, though: it is from an article about the scale of human experience in the twentieth century. The findings are both disturbing and awe-inspiring.

And, finally, these thoughts:

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