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.
There are 3,600 seconds in an hour, 86,400 seconds in a day1, and 31,536,000 seconds in a year2.
I live in Canada, and there are around 37 million people here. At one name per second, it would take me over a year to name everyone in this country. An entire year of speaking names, with no breaks for anything else. Canada’s population is far from being the largest in the world.
If I did the same thing for the United States, with a population of around 333,000,000 it would take me over ten years.
China has a population of over 1.4 billion. How long would that take?
Forty-four years.
To speak the names of the nearly 8 billion people currently alive, it would take around 254 years of doing nothing but speaking names.
A name is one of the smallest things you can know about a person. How much more do you need to know about someone to say that you ‘know’ them? To call them a friend, to build a relationship, even just to get a sense of what they’re like? How long does it take to learn these things? How many people can you reasonably know and maintain relationships with within a lifetime?
I live in a region of around 600,000 people. Let’s say you can get a rough idea of someone in just an hour of conversation. If I spent just an hour talking to each person who lives near me, it would take 68 years of my life.
Whenever a disaster or atrocity occurs, you might take a moment to think beyond the written numbers to grasp the scale of the loss. How long would it take to name all of the victims, and how long would it take to get to know each one?
Realistically, you and I can’t ever know anything about most people, even those living nearest to us, without relying on coarse-grained statistics. Without collapsing most of the details of their lives into lists of simplifying numbers.
There isn’t enough time.