A Tangent on Numbers
We are an empathic species. The story of one person’s struggles, pain, and suffering can shake us to our core. Yet the fact that for decades there have been, at any one time, between 800 million and a billion hungry people in the world may leave us cold. Large impressive numbers can easily lose meaning, and the story ostensibly told by a graph often eludes us. However, for our story, we must step back and employ numbers, losing the emotionalism of the personal, for we are not speaking of one person starving or one river dying: we are contemplating the end of a planet as we know it, of the suffering and untimely death of billions, and of the collapse of Civilization, again as we know it.
There are 100 squares to a side. There are therefore one million squares in this cube. That is, 100 x 100 x 100 = 1,000,000. http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/numbers/arab/intro.htm
Trying to conceptualize a million of anything—whether it is beads, trees, or people—strays into a cognitive province beyond our capacity. A billion actually defies imagination.[i] And seven point seven billion as the number of humans now traveling along with us on spaceship Earth can cause virtual vertigo. We can get some sense of at least the magnitude of these numbers, if not a true mental picture, by relating them to everyday experiences. Should one live 79 years—the average life span of an American—one will have lived for nearly 2.5 billion seconds.[ii] It would take Methuselah 244 years to experience as many seconds as there are people alive today. Seen another way, if the earth’s population marched by you, striding nine abreast every second for the rest of your life, having children at the current global rate of 2.5 per couple, you would never see the end of this line.[iii] By 2050, their ranks would have swollen so much that they would be marching at least eleven abreast.[iv]
If that doesn’t do it, look into a popular news magazine like Time or Newsweek. Remove all the headlines, pictures, captions, and advertisements (yes, there would be little left), replacing all this with text. Each character—each letter, period, parenthesis, etc.—in that text will now represent one human being. Calculate the number of characters per sheet of magazine (that is, two pages), and one arrives at just under 17,000 characters. To accommodate 7.7 billion characters, you will need more than 450,000 sheets of magazine. Stacked one on top of each other, the magazines would make a pile 150 feet high, which is a bit taller than a 12-story building.[v]
Or stack packs of copy paper, 500 sheets of 20-pound weight to a pack, each exactly two inches thick. The stack of 7.7 billion sheets would rise 486 miles high, about 88 Mt. Everests base to top, or the physical distance between San Diego and San Francisco. Metaphysically, they are much farther, of course.
When my daughter and I estimated the blades of grass in a thick suburban lawn, we counted fifty blades per square inch. Seven-point-seven billion blades of grass would fill a lawn three hundred forty-five yards to a side, or the area of about eighteen football fields, which equals about 24 acres, or 9.7 hectares, or five Manhattan blocks north-south by a Manhattan block east-west (an avenue), or the number of blades of grass in Central Park’s Great Lawn.[vi] There, now one of those is almost within our means to visualize. In 1950, that would have been six football fields of grass, each blade representing a human. And at the beginning of the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, it would have been the blades of grass contained in an area ten yards by ten yards, about a fifth portion of an end zone.
We can get a phenomenological sense of the essence and power of these numbers should we be able to simultaneously keep in mind the forest and the tree. Behind each integer lies a human, a story ready to be a told, a consciousness of such depth that nothing in all the billions of earth’s years has produced even one before our kind. And all these millions of progeny annually issued from their mothers’ wombs will then bring theirs into this world, until by 2050 there will be some nine-point-six billion of us walking about Mother Earth, eating off her lands and drinking from her waters.[vii] Perhaps then, we can contemplate, for instance, the physical and emotional suffering of hunger, the fear of the future, the anguish of watching a daughter withering, the helplessness of it all, and at the same time keep in mind that there are an unimaginable eight hundred and fifty million people in such conditions.
ENDNOTES
[i] One million equals 1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000 or 103 x 103 = 106. To imagine this many of something, mentally section off a large table into a grid of 10 boxes by 100 boxes. In each box, place 1000 beads. You now have one million beads. 1 billion equals 1,000 x 1,000,000 = 1,000,000,000 or 106 x 103 = 109. To see this billion, now do the same thing to 999 more tables. Of course, we lost sight of the individual beads long ago. In scientific notation 101 = 10, 102 = 100, 103 = 1000, etc., where each additional integer in the exponent denotes another power of ten. Because of the inaccuracy inherent in taking a census or measuring any of nature’s variables—like soil erosion rates, water use, oil reserves—we round off the numbers. Whether the 2050 population will be 9.3 billion or 9.9 billion is far less important, for our purposes, than whether it will be 8 billion or 12 billion. Whether soil erosion is 13 billion tonnes per acre or 17 billion tonnes per acre may be important for the academicians, but, for the health of our planet and our species, far more important is whether the numbers are closer to 1, 10, or 50. A tonne, by the way, is a metric tonne, which equals 1.1 English tons = 2,205 pounds, and, again, for our purposes is close enough to the 2000 pounds of the English ton.
[ii] 79 years x 365.25 days/year x 24 hr/day x 3600 sec/hr = 2.5 billion.
[iii] The average world’s total fertility rate (TFR)was 2.5 between the years 2010 and 2015, and is expected to continue dropping to 2.2 in 2050 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2017) World Population Prospects, the 2017 Revision).
[iv] The projected population of about 9.6 billion by 2050 (and therefore 14 people marching abreast) assumes that the “Total Fertility Rate” will drop from the present 2.5 to 2.0 by 2050. The “Total Fertility Rate” is defined as the number of children per woman.
[v] 430,000 sheets, at 436 sheets of ultra-thin “coated” magazine paper to the inch equals a stack 86 feet high, which at 12 feet a story, equals a seven story building.
[vi] Although Central Park’s Great Lawn in New York City comprises 55 acres, the grass is patchy enough to equal about 24 acres of carefully tended suburban acres. Just saying.
