A Sense of Scale
There are close to 8 billion people alive today. Just how many is that? It’s easy to write the number down but much harder to grasp its scale. One way to get a feel for this is to think about time. How long would it take for you to do something involving each one of these people? Well, what’s the simplest thing you could do relating to another person? If you had a list of everyone in the world, how long would it take to read and speak their names? Let’s suppose it would take about a second each. ...