7 is a Big Number, when its in Billions

"The Population Reference Bureau predicts that the world's total population will double to 7,000,000,000 before the year 2000."
"I suppose they will all want dignity," I said.
"I suppose," said O'Hare.
-Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

For the record, the US Census Bureau currently (August 7, 2009) estimates the total world population is 6.776 billion, so Vonnegut's prediction (or the PRB's, rather) is off by 224 million people, which is, give or take a few hundred thousand, about the population of Indonesia.

I was watching a baseball game the other day on TV(the Nats have taken a sudden upswing in non-suckiness, though it would be short-sighted to attribute this to the removal of Acta as manager). Around the fourth inning, the camera starts panning around the stadium, zoomed out, and you could see the hundreds of fans, packed in close, eating hotdogs or ordering beers or waving those foam finger-thingys. Gripping their mitts, hoping to catch a foul ball.

And it struck me as strange, to see all those thousands of people, and to think that they all have souls.

Or, if you dislike the term 'souls', that they all have personalities, families, feelings, preferences. Each one has hopes and dreams and some mistake in their past they look back on with shame. A large portion of them have been in love, and it felt just as special and unique as it felt when you were in love, too.

Did it ever occur to you just how many people there are in the world? Not just human beings, I mean, but people. In my example above, for instance: Nationals Park has a maximum capacity of 41,888 (not that it'll ever be filled in the immediate future, considering how bad they still are...). That's more people than I've known in my entire life.

Don't believe that? How many new people do you meet each day? Today I met three, and that was more than usual. 3 people per day * 365 days per year * 20 years in my life so far = 21,900 people I've ever met. That's a little more than half the capacity of a midling-sized baseball stadium like Nationals Park.

In order to fit the entire population of the world into baseball stadiums the size of Nationals Park, you would need 161,765 of them. That is, incidentally, one for every person living in Sao Tome.

Maybe I'm the only one who's surprised by this? For some reason, it never struck me before just how vastly the human race exceeds my ability to appreciate it. I'll never be able to see even a small portion of these people's unique personality quirks. I'll never even be able see most of them.

Part of this probably goes back to Dunbar's Number. Remember, that refers to the couple-hundred-or-so humans that you are mentally capable of thinking of as actual people. Beyond those few hundred, people just become 'guy who delivers my mail', etc. I think it just bothered me that there's another, even larger group of people who I'll never even lay eyes on. And outside that group, there's a still larger group of people who don't even exist to me.

I'm not really sure where I was going with this, but it was bugging me.

Next Time (Philosophy): Yes, I skipped over "LHC & Cthulhu," get over it.
Next Time (40k): Space Wolves, or Space Marines Part III
Next Time (CopStuff): Been a while, eh? One week until Hostage Negotiations
________________________________
Also from Slaughterhouse-Five:

Our hero, Billy Pilgrim, watches a movie backwards:

"It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed."